Tuesday, May 18, 2004 eski diagram: source

Tuesday, May 18, 2004 Gordon Pask "Gordon will perhaps be best remembered for his role as one of the 'founding fathers' of cybernetics, the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary intellectual movement that sprang up in the post war years." The Army Of Clerks have rediscovered his work on electo-chemical computers[aahhhh]. Here are some links: http://www.armyofclerks.net http://homepage.mac.com/cariani/CarianiWebsite/PaskPaper.html http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/complexity.html http://www.venus.co.uk/gordonpask/gpaskobit.htm http://artsci-ccwin.concordia.ca/edtech/ETEC606/paskboyd.html http://www.venus.co.uk/gordonpask/ http://www.isss.org/lumPask.html

Tuesday, May 18, 2004 The Poles dig up the Library of Alexandria: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3707641.stm oh & I believe the Albanians should have won the Eurovision Song Contest: but the ukrains deserved it as well: The Dutch were total crap: like always. Every year I think: I'm not gonna watch that idiocy & everything I have a great time doing it. The Albanians should have won[aaahhh] here are the first pictures of this years PsyGeoConFlux: http://www.fotolog.net/glowlab/ Ivan Pope has a new site: http://www.themanwhoinventedtheinternet.com/ also of interest: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mmmc/

Thursday, May 13, 2004 "To young people of the current generation the very idea of philology suggests something impossibly antiquarian and musty, but philology in fact is the most basic and creative of the interpretive arts. It is exemplified for me most admirably in Goethe's interest in Islam generally, and the 14th-century Persian Sufi poet Hafiz in particular, a consuming passion which led to the composition of the West-östlicher Diwan, and it inflected Goethe's later ideas about Weltliteratur, the study of all the literatures of the world as a symphonic whole which could be apprehended theoretically as having preserved the individuality of each work without losing sight of the whole." Edward Said http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1010417,00.html

Thursday, May 13, 2004 This book-give-away is pretty cool thing to do: its eski fun to post this huge evelopes with books. I have been sending out out stuff to Sweden, Latvia, Canada, Belgium, Germany. The one thing that is a bit strange, but which conforms a suspicion, is related to all people who responded from Amsterdam. All the others sent a polite mail asking for ONE title if still available, the Amsterdam emailers on the other hand all sent a list of at least 3 sometimes up to 7 titles: usually without politeness. Now I'm giving away these books for free & I don't really care where they end up, but you can problably relate to the fact that I would like to sent them out to as many people as I can. If you ever start giving your books make sure to say that it's one person per title, at least if you are from Amsterdam.

Wednesday, May 12, 2004 have a look at this baby

Wednesday, May 12, 2004 & this was what I have been talking about in Helsinki: Wilfried - software for landscapes - finding solutions to imaginary problems - landscape poetry - wordsworth - writes about every flowers - emotional reaction to daffodil - can be jealous of that - pyschogeographical - making us listen look smell - thinking about space - writing helps us think but first reading - walking helps us think - pacing back and forward - walk to be able to think - imperative for thinking - latest - artificial intelligence - deep blue - chess play - map brain cognitive structures on to a computer - software for landscape - deep walk - big as a sugar cube - location aware - wordsworth - long walks - generated walk - enriched - poetics John Hopkins, who I ran into both in Helsinki as In Riga, has got some problems with the locative media thingie. I actually shared some of the points he made during his talk of Riga: 'human intercation is the key to everything'. but then I would never use the word "praxis" (it's so frankfurter schule) & I would never ever get into his "everything has moved away into a representation" zhizlle we know from all these postmodernist wankers. Anyway John is a funny guy, who is from alaska originally(!) & all criticism is always welcome.

Wednesday, May 12, 2004 Spent half a week in Riga last week for the Ram5 workshop that was amazing as in eski! Met loads of great people, met up with people I already knew & found out that Latvia is the Baltic jamaica. That place rocks: here is some links: http://mlab.uiah.fi/~apaterso http://www.undertheumbrella.net http://www.evolutionzone.com/ http://www.armyofclerks.net http://space.frot.org/ram/ http://www.aether.hu http://www.haque.co.uk/

Monday, May 10, 2004 FREE BOOKS? In need of some shelve space; I'm giving away these books: * The angry Brigade 67-84 * Dead Certainties - Simon Schama * We Always treat our Woman to well - Raymond Queneau * Culture Jam - Kalle Lash * Empire of the senseless - Kathy Acker * The Druids - T.D. Kendrick * Looking for the perfect beat, the art and culture of the DJ - Kurt Reighley * Demo - Richard Allen * Adventure sin te skin trade - Dylan Thomas * Neuromancer - William Gibson * When the Music Stops - Norman Lebrecht * Rebel radio - Lopez Vigil * Prometheus rising - Robert Anton Wilson * Needle in te Groove - Jeff Noon * SCHWA operation Manual * Music and your Emotions - Emil Gutheil * Spies & Spymasters * The outlaws - Alex R Stuart * The Voidod - Richard Hell * X-Texts - Derek Pell * Logic Bomb - Steve Beard * Virtual geography - McKenzie Wark * Heidegger Habermas & the mobile Phone - George Myerson * Tropic of Capricorn - Henry Miller - Dutch Books- * Steden van de Rode Nacht - William Burroughs * Eenrichtingstraat - walter Benjamin * Welcome to the Future - Gert van veen * De logologische ruimte - Rudy Kousenbroek * Walden - Henry David Thoreau * Gezelschap - samuel Beckett books in grey are already gone If you want to receive one of these books, email me at: info at socialfiction dot org They are all in good/excellent condition & I will sent them free of any charge. Trades are welcome of course: for underground hiphop/jungle/uk garage/grime [mix] cds, or bookwise: I'm looking for a book on LISP, don't even ask why.

Tuesday, May 4, 2004 The savages of Groningen are building the "Toorn van Meerstad", I'm not sure what's all about but you help them built the tower of babylon.

Thursday, April 29, 2004 Chalk Interfaces By Pete Gomez: http://www.eventnetwork.org.uk

Thursday, April 29, 2004 headmap is still the bomb after these many years: Recently headmap produced a movabletype plugin, reached the point where it needed two extra fields: longitude and latitude, and found that short of getting users to hack the Perl (which didn't feel like an option) it wasn't possible (at the time) [In defense one of the reasons for the success of blogging tools is the simplicity of the interface]. It wouldn't be so hard to create a specialised authoring tool for 'place' feeds or to find a blogging tool that allowed extra fields. But really the problem is not just adding extra fields, its more general, how can ordinary users work with open frameworks like RDF without flexible agnostic authoring tools. Tinderbox is such a tool, RDF no problem as long as you create the right set of attributes and build a template, the output can be anything and is very much a side effect (its form agnostic). and It has been said that 80 percent of human knowledge has a spatial aspect - yet at the same time the Internet has largely ignored this. We are human beings; embedded in and subservient to the spatial and temporal limitations of a physical reality. The Internet should soon be able to reflect these realities better. http://www.headmap.org/index/blogs/thoughts.html funny thing is that, having met Ben several times in the mean while, I can hear him talk when I read this.

Thursday, April 29, 2004 An Autonomous Wheelchair at an Art Gallery http://www.tech.plym.ac.uk/soc/research/neural/research/wheelc.htm this idea came back in architecture here: http://www.arch-os.com/projects/slothbots.html

Thursday, April 29, 2004 http://glowlab.blogs.com/psygeocon

Wednesday, April 28, 2004 PML wiki's some general notes: what do you think?

Wednesday, April 28, 2004 Saul Alberts has written a few 'rants' on locative media which are to be published in Mute magazine. Here is a bit from that about socialfiction: "Locative media is: Psychogeography without the critique. Algorithmic psychogeography, the term used by http://socialfiction.org to describe their rule-based derives through the city, is not just a development, but actually a fundamental reversal of the critical use of this Situationist tool. Wandering the city, allowing its flows and vectors to push the walker along and through it reveals, in outline, the spatial imperatives of the urban planners. Imposing an arbitrary rule set on decisions to turn left or right removes the critical/analytical basis for this practice leaving behind a randomly predetermined tour. Not that this is a problem in itself; spaces of intensity and ambiguity are still accessible to 'dot.walkers', whichever methodology they use to get there, and the sharp, deadpan humour of socialfiction's discourse does re-introduce a kind of meta-critique of their own practices, but always focused inwards to a critique of the software, the location becomes peripheral. " Here are 2 interesting observations that are close to my heart. First: Because of all this algorithmic shizzle the critical/analytical parts of psychogeography do tend to look less important. They are always there though, but implicit, hardly ever acknowledged. This outlook will change; I have been rambling about 'bottom-up urban planning' for a while know & I am working to get this into shape. Second: the suggestion that 'location becomes peripheral'. The same thing really: algorithmic concerns prevailed over the hardcore psychogeography. This is definitly something I'm working on: see http://twenteenthcentury.com/uo/index.php/ObjectOrientedPsychogeography for a preview. You should make a division between generative psychogeography & .walk, the latter being a totally different thing.

Tuesday, April 27, 2004 links:: http://www.quadrantcrossing.org/blog/C277523597/E1540987349/index.html http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/situationist/presitu/twoaccounts.html http://dsonline.computer.org/0404/d/w2fldp.htm http://de-ondergrondse.5u.com/ http://hci.stanford.edu/~winograd/shrdlu/ http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1201348,00.html http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1201339,00.html http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1188969,00.html http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,929528,00.html http://mentifex.virtualentity.com/aisteps.html

Thursday, April 22, 2004 "On the Turner Pitoresque" By John Ruskin http://www.j-m-w-turner.co.uk/artist/turner-ruskin2.htm

Tuesday, April 20, 2004 "...The man was Alan Turing, one of the greatest mathematicians who ever lived. Turing led the project group that broke the German "Enigma" code and so helped decide the outcome of the Second World War. He was very interested in chess, but in spite of having a brilliant intellect and putting a lot of effort into learning the game he remained a fairly weak player. Soon after the war he wrote the instructions that would enable a machine to play chess. Since there was as yet no machine that could execute the instructions he did so himself, acting as a human CPU and requiring more than half an hour per move. One game is recorded, which Turing's "paper machine" lost to one of his colleagues. Here's the historic game: Turing's paper machine – Alick Glennie, Manchester 1952: 1.e4 e5 2.Nc3 Nf6 3.d4 Bb4 4.Nf3 d6 5.Bd2 Nc6 6.d5 Nd4 7.h4 Bg4 8.a4 Nxf3+ 9.gxf3 Bh5 10.Bb5+ c6 11.dxc6 0-0 12.cxb7 Rb8 13.Ba6 Qa5 14.Qe2 Nd7 15.Rg1 Nc5 16.Rg5 Bg6 17.Bb5 Nxb7 18.0-0-0 Nc5 19.Bc6 Rfc8 20.Bd5 Bxc3 21.Bxc3 Qxa4 22.Kd2? [22.h5 would have trapped the bishop] 22...Ne6 23.Rg4 Nd4? [23...Rxb2! 24.Bxb2 Rxc2+] 24.Qd3 Nb5 25.Bb3 Qa6 26.Bc4 Bh5 27.Rg3 Qa4 28.Bxb5 Qxb5 29.Qxd6 Rd8 0-1." http://www.x3dchess.com/press/historyofcomputerchess.htm

Tuesday, April 20, 2004 STAR WARS FASCISTS source via these people

Monday, April 19, 2004 "There cannot be a doubt that in tracts of country where images of danger, melancholy, grandeur, or loveliness, softness, and ease prevail, that they will make themselves felt powerfully in forming the characters of the people, so as to produce a uniformity of national character, where the nation is small and is not made up of man who, inhabiting different soils, climates, etc by their civil usages, and relations materially interfere with each other. It was so formerly, no doubt, in the Highlands of Scotland but we cannot perhaps observe much of it in our island at the present day, because, even in the most sequestered places, by manufactures, traffic, religion, Law, interchange of inhabitants etc distinctions are done away which would otherwise have been strong and obvious" William Wordsworth 1802

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