Tuesday, March 01. 2011
Via dpr-barcelona
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“Observing the radiowave behaviour becomes a means to understand the present and anticipating the future of urban environments. In my observation the dimension unit for public space is not meter, kilometer or decibel anymore, it’s milliwatt, hertz and gigabyte.” This is Peter Jellitsch statement on his project Electronic Topographies.
This statement inevitably makes us go back in time to 1971 and think on Ugo La Pietra‘s project Sistema disequilibrante: Casa Telematica [The Domicile Cell: A Microstructure: within the Information and Communications Systems], where he aimed to create a living environment which postulates the development of information and communications systems with respect to their technical, mechanical and electronic characteristics; using them in a way that will overcome the “barrier” that they create between us and reality. Felicity Scott pointed on her article for Grey Room Architecture or Techno-Utopia:
La Pietra’s “Domicile Cell”, for instance, operated precisely through situating itself within this system. As La Pietra [optimistically] explained the strategic intimacy of his domicile unit, “it becomes a center for gathering, processing and communicating information; a microstructure that can intervene in the information system by enlarging and multiplying exchanges among people, with everyone participating in the dynamics of communication.”
The “unbalancing systems” proposed by La Pietra were based on a serie of physical and mediatic interventions within the urban landscape. In that sense, we can consider his project as a predecessor of the Electronic Topographies.
Casa Telematica by Ugo La Pietra. Pic by dpr-barcelona
After this look into the past, we can clearly talk about the interest of architects in new communication technologies and what now is called the Sentient City. Jellitsch points that cities are slightly transforming due to several phenomenas. Radio wave and the resulting ubiquitous communication possibilities is one of the very contemporary factors with which a city has to deal with. Since the beginning of the 90s a high effort was taken on the distribution of mobile communication aerials. His research is based in Austria, and he points that now, 20 years later, Austria is one of the densest covered regions in the world with 20% more mobile phone subscribers than inhabitants. Jellitsch argues that the city center of Vienna was used as testing laboratory wich stands exemplarily for the extremly dense Austrian network coverage.
The electronic topographie drawing series is trying to simulate the actual situation on electromagnetic cones which are coating the physical space. Focusing on transmitter heads for mobile communication, the drawing series allows to have a alternate view on public areas which are now qualified through it’s connecting possibilities. And he adds:
In June 1881 the commercial ministry of the K&K monarchy gave the Viennese private telegraph society a concession for the cablephone arrangement in a radius of 7,5km around the “Stephansturm”. Literally said, the communication spreading in austria has started in a small area around the Stephansdom nearly 130 years ago. Since 1993 the 1st viennese district has a 100% mobile network coverage that startet with basic technologies like GSM, followed by UMTS and now has 100% connection in 3G technologie. Due to several reasons, the inner city of Vienna has the highest connecting qualities compared to the other districts, as well as the densest transmitter pattern.
The current sentient city is subdivided, carved, segregated and coated by electromagnetic oscillation.
Complete map of Vienna’s communication network
Based on the previous data, Jellitsch worked on a “rastogram“, which basically describes how we inhabit and coexists with urban spaces where our body gets coated from electronic waves.
We can also mention here Fabien Girardin‘s research for his PhD thesis on human interactions with ubiquitous geographic information. Girardin focus his research on the increasing use of mobile devices, wireless infrastructures, and the Internet that, according to him, is changing our daily lives, not only in the way we communicate with each other or share information but also how we relate to the environment. And he adds:
Through our interactions with these technologies we access and generate an informational membrane, hovering over the spaces we live in and visit. However, this information layer only imperfectly models the reality due to coarse digitization and technological limitations, challenging the human interaction. On the other hand, the presence of this user-generated ubiquitous geographic information opens novel perspectives in understanding human activities over space and time.
The common link between Girardin and Jellitsch projects are the aspects of human interactions with ubiquitous geographic information.
Measuring connections. Peter Jellitsch
Connectivity Figure. Peter Jellitsch
The operator topographies drawn by Jellitsch shows the valency of public areas related to the amount of mobile communication users. The mobile operator firms have to install the right amount of transmitter heads, to ensure a maximum of quality. Through reading, drawing, simulating and translating the construction plans, one is able to reflect the quality of transmitter heads back to intensive public areas.
The electronic topographies’ drawing series is trying to simulate the actual situation on electromagnetic cones which are coating the physical space. Focusing on transmitter heads for mobile communication, the drawing series allows to have a alternate view on public areas which are now qualified through it’s connecting possibilities, that are reflected on the complete set of the Electronic Topographie maps.
Electronic Topographie map. Peter Jellitsch
Electronic Topographie map. Detail. Peter Jellitsch
As a final point of his research, Peter Jellitsch worked on two specific issues of the project:
[1] The roentgenograms. These are two models made with acetate sheet, plexiglas, lightconstruction, aluminium sticks and a tripod. Roentgenograms shows an alternative top-view on two public spaces in the 1st Viennese district. Cutted through an invisible electromagnetic cone, the viewer is looking through a 54m thick electronic data-cloud that is coating the city of Vienna.
Roentgenogram. Model 1. Peter Jellitsch
[2] Coated Environment [animation, 1:20min]. The general technical progress has led to an estrangement and perceptual change of a person in the relation to his/her environment. The coated environment animation could be seen as recording and notional grading of our surrounding through crossing hidden audiovisual signals. The intent of the animation is the concentrated and conscious perception of an existing physical realm, and attempts to extend the pure seeing into an alternate cognition.
Coated Environment. Filmstill 02. Peter Jellitsch
The “hybridization” of space is only an expression of wider radical changes between analytical systems [order and spacing] to synthetic [complexity, connectivity, permeability] ones. In a system characterized by its high capacity for communication, if space becomes a mix between reality and virtual presence, the separation between private and public space becomes obsolete. According to this theory of urban permeability, the concept of “filter” is important as a new indispensable device. Filter as a mean of connection with the capacity of handling private/public, real/virtual, inside a system where the channels are not separated anymore. Now these channels are communicating -APERTURE-.
From the paper Aperture, Urban Hybridization
Now we’re facing a renewal of the urban experience. With the growing complexity of cities and the fragmentation of urban space, the experience of the city ceases to be static-reflected by city maps and grows as dynamic flows. And the importance of the Electronic Topographies project lies in the way it shows how public spaces become the sum of the built environment and our virtual interactions.
Are we already leaving inside Ugo La Pietra’s “Domicile Cell”?
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Thanks to Peter Jellitsch for sharing his project with us!
Recommended readings:
- The video Coated Environment by Peter Jellitsch can be visited at vimeo
- Fabian Girardin PhD Thesis Aspects of implicit and explicit human interactions with ubiquitous geographic information
- El espacio público como catalizador de colectividades locales by Domenico di Siena [SPANISH]
- To this date, Ecosistema Urbano is working on Smart Streets: a research proposing “a public space equivalent to the innovative self-organizing and exchange processes occurring on the web”
Personal comment:
To my knowledge, Dunne & Raby are among the first who brought (back --as communication was a quite proheminent theme in the architecture of the late 60ies and early 70ies--) this theme of electromagnetism into design and architecture during the late 90ies and early 00oes and study the effect of these invisible landscapes. A lot of work has been done since around this theme then.
More recently, the research of Timo Arnall about elastic space can be mentioned (he just recently published this video about wifi territories, that has been rebloged a lot since).
Wednesday, February 23. 2011
Via Mammoth
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by Stephen
Bridging the gap between mammoth’s interest in infrastructure, global logistics, economies, and really, really big things is this announcement from Moller-Maersk:
Danish shipper Moller-Maersk, the biggest container carrier, confirmed Monday it has signed a contract for a South Korean shipyard to build it 10 giant container ships over the next three years… The new container vessels, at 400 metres long, 59 metres wide and 73 metres tall, will be “the largest vessel of any type known to be in operation,” but emit half as much carbon dioxide as the industry average for Asia/Europe trade, the statement added.
Purchasing your own fleet of carriers will set you back $2bn.
[The Georg Maersk - 9074 TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units - typical shipping containers are forty feet long, meaning each count for 2 TEU). The new ships will be approximately 18,000 TEU.]
[Photos via Maersk, h/t to Telstar Logistic]
Monday, February 21. 2011
Via ArchDaily
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by Andrew Rosenberg
© R.Kuper
Architects: Yoav Meiri Architects
Location: Tel Aviv, Israel
Client: Arteam – Interdisciplinary Art Team
Project area: 50 sqm
Project year: 2010
Photographs: Y.Meiri, R. Kuper, T. Rogovski
© Y.Meiri
The Garden Library for Refugees and Migrant Workers was founded in 2010 as a social-artistic urban community project. The project sees the right to a book as a fundamental human right and a possibility of both escape and shelter from daily misfortunes.
The library is located in the Levinski Park, by the Tel Aviv central bus station. The park is the place migrant workers congregate on weekends. It was important for us that the library come to the people, that those who maintain illegal immigrant status will come without fear, that the library would not have a closed door or a guard at the entrance who would check and ask questions.
diagram 01
The library has no walls or door. It is comprised of two bookcases, which are supported by the walls of a public shelter located in the heart of the park. The taller structure contains books for the adult readers. It is transparent and illuminated from within so that, at night, the books glow in the park. Across from it is a shorter – children’s height – cabinet. The doors to the small cabinet swing down to form a parquet floor for the children to sit on and review the books.
© T.Rogovski
The door of the tall cabinet, open to form a canopy that stretches above the two structures, and provides shelter from the sun and rain, protects the books and the visitors, and establishes a space for browsing, reading and social meetings.
The library contains approximately 3,500 books in Mandarin Chinese, Amharic, Thai, Tagalog, Arabic, French, Spanish, Nepalese, Bengali, Hindi, Turkish, Romanian, and English. The children’s cabinet also holds books in Hebrew.
© Y.Meiri
The books are not catalogued according to conventions of genre or author name, but according to the feeling they arouse. Every detail in the sorting and categorization system reflects the spirit of the library: The library is a small and parallel world: the books wander between the shelves as their readers have wandered/are wandering the world. They carry with them their emotional history. The placement of the book is not decided by popular vote, but by the last reader. Even if ten readers thought a book was amusing and the eleventh thought it was dull, the book will move to the Boring shelf – at least until the next reader weighs in.
Personal comment:
Beside the fact that we can enjoy to see a constructive project regarding migration and migrant people (so to say: not some stupid propaganda and populism), I also find interesting on a more trivial or spatial aspect the mashup between two public programs: the parc and the library.
Thursday, February 17. 2011
Via Shrapnel Contemporary
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by pedrogadanho
A stranger in a strange place, you land on a snow-covered city and this suddenly feels as refreshing as being slapped without warning. Like sleep deprivation, you remember you need these abrupt changes to take you out of a lukewarm, pleasing state of hibernation. You feel privileged. You are part of an apparently disappearing sect: travelers of rare bliss, exchangers of precisely located, yet homeless knowledges – the yesteryear voyagers who have been slowly, but surely, substituted by passive tourists and predatory traders.
Anri Sala, Long Sorrow, 2005. Via Mousse Magazine.
Like if entering a proper nuit blanche, as soon as you arrive to the core of this city you find yourself visiting a contemporary art museum at 1.00 am – this hour still being your unquestionable biological time. And this museum is full of people, and you enjoyably rediscover the powerful work of Anri Sala, or come across artists like Young & Giroux. Mostly, you take in pieces that you’ve never seen before, and yet feel pleasantly close to home. A satisfying cultural acclimation, as it would be.
A few hours later, you will remember being in Tokyo on a reverse timetable. You will remember assaulting the streets for food at around 4.00 am, a harmless vampire looking out for the nearest 24/7. You will recall feeling sleepy at 7.00 pm and abandoning yourself to the same chronological cycle, over and over again. As it were, in this unexpected enclave of French language in America you find yourself reading Barthes between 4.00 and 8.00 am. You register the light coming in. Then you write. Just another way of getting lost – and found – in the delights of translation.
© Pedro Gadanho, “5.00 am (Hotel room with a view, #12)”, 2011
This one time you refuse to change the hour in you mobile phone. You stubbornly stick with your time zone. You will experience four days of a slightly dislocated timetable. As such, your panel conversation takes place at 11.00 pm, and by 1.30 am you are still discussing if and why architectural writing is undergoing a fictional turn. (A member of the audience suggests that maybe we are no longer interested in the truth. You counter that we may solely be bored or, even worse, giving in to the perverse logic that entertainment must take the lead in even pedagogical and disciplinary matters.) Dinner finishes at 5.00 am.
Two days after, you are still waking up at 4.00 am, local time. It is Saturday and four hours until breakfast. You make the usual morning skype call to your family. Then you head for Stereo, like a 12 year-old who skips Sunday school to join the after hours crowd. It turns out that Montreal has an interesting electronic scene and is twinned to your own city by a legendary sound system. And as they used to say, M.A.N.D.Y and Troy Pierce are in the house.
It’s a long time since you’ve been clubbing on your own. In this dance floor sunglasses after dark are obviously fashionable. A guy wears a T-shirt that says: “Egypt woke me up.” Did it really? Fortunately, at this stage social interaction is no longer required. As ever in the past, you are here exclusively for the acoustic engineering. As the sound involves you, your mind fills with words you will eventually write down. You reflect that bad techno is like any other form of porn, too lastingly engaged in some basic arrangement. Then again, the most layered electronica of post-Reich crop is the be-bop of our era.
Music is probably the clearest way to understand the fundamental play of novelty and obsolescence in our mental life. Novelty is an addiction. Even if it would be repetition that, as Barthes put it, “engendrerait elle-même la jouissance.” As architects like to believe in durability, they mostly reject novelty as a motor of their own doings. Nonetheless, architecture too is subject to rules of cultural consumption. And those dictate that we want our brain cells constantly rearranged by new arrangements of old and new fragments.
Three hours listening to music that you had never heard before and you are ready for the last, long day you will spend in town. The hypnotic beats have made you strangely apt to appreciate Buckminster Fuller’s Biosphere and Moshe Safdie’s still surprising Habitat 67 – even if you are walking from one to the other alone under a severe snow blizzard. The trance-like quality of those “rythmes obsessionels” have opened your mind to the Mile End’s graphic novel stores and the weird and wonderful ephemera shops of Boulevard St. Laurent – even if you are long past your regular dinnertime.
© Pedro Gadanho, “Ruins of the Future (Habitat 67)”, 2011
The morning you leave town you are woken up by the alarm clock at 5.30 am. Local time is catching up with your body. It is forcing you to conform. You timely escape into the airport. By 10.00 am you are in New York. One of those places, if not the place, which crisply illuminates how precious it is to breathe the air of the city. A few hours are enough.
Just before you definitely head home, five hours is what it takes to once again verify how a city can remain itself and yet retain an ever-unbelievable degree of new stimuli. Indeed, what Georg Simmel has once dubbed the mental life of the metropolis here translates in the peculiar feeling that the spur of the new it too can be enduringly inscribed into the flesh of stones.
Tuesday, February 15. 2011
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©Arcspace
Architect Kisho Kurokawa was very innovative in his creation of the Nakagin Capsule Tower in 1972, which was the first capsule architecture design. The module was created with the intention of housing traveling businessmen that worked in central Tokyo during the week. It is a prototype for architecture of sustainability and recycleability, as each module can be plugged in to the central core and replaced or exchanged when necessary.
More on the Nakagin Capsule Tower after the break.
©Arcspace
Built in the Ginza area of Tokyo, a total of 140 capsules are stacked and rotated at varying angles around a central core, standing 14-stories high. The technology developed by Kurokawa allowed each unit to be installed to the concrete core with only 4 high-tension bolts, which keeps the units replaceable. Each capsule measures 4 x 2.5 meters, permitting enough room for one person to live comfortably. The interior space of each module can be manipulated by connecting the capsule to other capsules.
©Arcspace
All pieces of the pods were manufactured in a factory in Shiga Prefecture then transported to the site by truck. The pre-assembled interior features a circular window, built-in bed and bathroom, and is furnished with a TV, radio and alarm clock. Hoisted by a crane, the capsules were inserted in the shipping containers by use of a crane, and then fastened to the concrete core shaft.
©Arcspace
This unique take on apartments and high-rises in Tokyo is a prime example of the Metabolism architecture movement of Kisho, known for it’s focus on adaptable, growing and interchangeable building designs. These ideas first surfaced in 1960 at the “World Design Conference.” Hidaka once stated that the Metabolist ideas of the 1960s “were very new, the saw cities as ‘moving’ and dynamic, that concept is real. Metabolism wanted to collaborate with engineers, they invited scientists, designers, and industrial designers. THey wanted transcultural collaborations. It’s still relevant because of the ‘dynamic city’ and trans-cultural aspects.”
©Arcspace
Another theme of the temporality of the Nakagin Capsule Tower is grounded in what Kurokawa observed throughout Japanese history; that Japanese cities built from natural materials had temporary and unpredictable lifespans. This hasn’t withstood the test of time, and the limits can be seen in the Nakagin Tower. “The tower had a design period of only four months- shorter than usual, and it was rushed. The designing went on even after construction had already started.”
©Arcspace
Residents of the tiny pods are now plotting its demolition; although the capsules were built to be replacable, the building has not been maintained in over 33 years which has led to drainage and damaged water pipes. Architects from around the world are trying to work together to preserve the towers, considering all ideas and options.
©Arcspace
Architect: Kisho Kurokawa
Location: Tokyo, Japan
Project Year: 1972
Photographs: Arcspace
References: Kisho Kurokawa
Thursday, January 27. 2011
Via Change Observer via Dan Hill
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By John Thackara
Gram junkies are those fanatical hikers and climbers who fret about every gram of weight that might be carried — in everything from titanium cook pans to toothbrush covers. Excess weight is not just an objective performance issue for these guys; they take it personally. In the matter of mobility and modern transportation, we all need to become gram junkies. We need to obsess not about speed, or about exotic power sources, but about the weight of every step taken, every vehicle used, every infrastructure investment contemplated.
Why? Because modern mobility not only damages the biosphere, our only home, but also global systems of air. Rail and road travel are also greedy in their use of space, matter, energy, biodiversity and land. Designers around the world are busily developing a dazzling array of solutions to deal with these complex challenges. The website Newmobility.org, for example, has identified 177 different projects and approaches to sustainable mobility. These include bus rapid transit (BRT), car free days, demand-responsive transport (DRT), hitch-hiking, pedestrianization, smart parking strategies and van-pooling.
The trouble is that every solution that assumes our current or increased levels of transport intensity, once whole system costs are calculated, turns out not to be viable. Many transport strategies help solve one or two problems — but exacerbate others. The best-known example is the way that the expansion of highways reduces congestion for a time, but tends to increase total vehicle traffic. Another rebound effect: increased vehicle fuel efficiency conserves energy; but, because it reduces vehicle operating costs, it tends to increase total vehicle travel. The growth of the US Interstate Highway System changed fundamental relationships between time, cost and space. These, in turn, enabled forms of economic development that have proved devastating to the biosphere.
Todd Litman, who runs the Victoria Transport Policy Institute in Canada, points out that depreciation, insurance, registration and residential parking are not directly affected by how much a vehicle is driven. Motorists maximize their vehicle travel to get their money’s worth from such expenditures and receive no incentives to drive less. Litman describes these market distortions as "economic traps" in which competition for resources creates conflicts between individual interests and the common good.
The effects of these economic traps are "cumulative and synergistic" in Litman's words: total impact is greater than the sum of individual effects and these distortions skew countless travel decisions and contribute to a long-term cycle of automobile dependency.
Modern mobility kills people too — but without fuss. The total number of people killed on 9/11 was 2,819. And yes, that was a tragedy. But consider this: An average of 3,242 people die worldwide on the roads each day of the year, year after year. Children are especially vulnerable; traffic accident deaths account for 41 percent of all child deaths by injury.
Even if it doesn't kill you outright, modern mobility contributes to poor health. The highest rates of obesity correlate 1:1 with the proportion of journeys children take by car — and the costs of obesity are heading for 10 percent of US GDP. Increased auto dependency and air pollution also contribute to respiratory illnesses, cardiovascular disease and hospital admissions.
We squander time on mobility. We spend the same amount of time traveling today as we did 50 years ago — but we use that time to travel longer distances. The average German citizen today drives 15,000 km (9,320 miles) a year; in 1950, she covered just 2,000 km (1,242 miles). A lot of our travel time is commuting time and work-related travel that we believe we cannot avoid. We also spend a lot of time traveling in order to shop and to take the kids to distant schools.
Even if modern mobility were not a climate change or social problem, the fact that global mobility depends on a finite energy source — oil — means it is fundamentally not resilient. Whether oil and gas are at a peak, or on a plateau, increasing consumption means that the 9 million gallons of gasoline people currently use in the U.S. each day simply will not be availabl in the future. Ninety-five percent of all transportation depends on oil — and with that, food systems in all developed countries are vulnerable to any disruption in the prevailing logistical system.
To a car company, replacing the chrome wing mirror on an SUV with one made of carbon fiber is a step toward sustainable transportation. To a radical ecologist, all motorized movement is unsustainable. So when is transportation sustainable, and when is it not?
Motorized horse cart featured on the French website Traits en Savoie.
Meterus Horse Power, in France, is modernizing animal traction with an approach that combines technology, ecology, profitability and horse wellness. From Equishop website (Switzerland).
Chris Bradshaw, a transport economist, emphasizes that “light” transport systems are not, per se, sustainable — only less unsustainable than commuting by car. “Light rail supports far-flung suburbs; street cars support, well, street-car suburbs,” Bradshaw says. “A smaller, more efficient, or alternative-fuel vehicle is only less unsustainable than another private vehicle. It will still take up space on the road and in parking lots, it will still threaten the life and limb of others, it will still create noise, and it still will require lots of energy and resources to manufacture, transport to a dealer and dispose of when its life ends.”
Bradshaw wants planners and designers to respect what he calls “the scalar hierarchy.” This is when trips taken most frequently are short enough to be made by walking (even if pulling a small cart), while the next more frequent trips require a bike or street car and so on. “If one adheres to this, then there are so few trips to be made by car, that owning one is foolish.”
Investments in high-speed trains such as they are, is another non-solution. Europeans believe that high-speed trains are environmentally far friendlier than aircraft — but they're not. When researchers at Martin Luther University studied the construction, use and disposal of the high-speed rail infrastructure in Germany, they found that 48 kilograms (about a hundred pounds) of solid primary resources is needed for one passenger to travel 100 kilometers.
China's proposed "straddling" bus would use existing infrastructure to greatly increase capacity along arterial routes.
Is one answer to go by banana boat? Not really. The world's merchant fleet contributes nearly 4.5 percent of all global emissions — a huge amount, up there with cars, housing, agriculture and industry. (Like aviation, shipping emissions are omitted from European targets for cutting global warming.)
Electric cars are the biggest distraction of all. The assumption in European and U.S. policy is that renewable energy-powered smart grids will power millions of electric or hybrid vehicles. Unfortunately, these technology-driven solutions are not viable once the economics of electrical grid modernization are factored in. The German branch of the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) published a study in May 2009 (conducted with IZES, a German institute for future energy systems). Electric cars only reduce greenhouse gases marginally, they found. The manufacturing processes of both the hybrid and the fully electric car require more energy than those of any conventional petrol-powered car. A worst-case (and frankly most likely) scenario is that most electric cars will be run on electricity from coal instead of from renewable sources.
The least talked about obstacle to electric transportation concerns the raw materials needed to manufacture the vehicles. Rare earth metals are key to global efforts to switch to cleaner energy and therefore transportation. But mining and processing the metals causes immense environmental damage. China’s rare earth industry each year produces more than five times the amount of waste gas, including deadly fluorine and sulfur dioxide, than the total flared annually by all miners and oil refiners in the U.S. Alongside that 13 billion cubic meters of gas is 25 million tons of wastewater laced with cancer-causing heavy metals such as cadmium. And, just as we already have a problem with peak oil, a shortfall looks likely in the world’s capacity to produce lithium. One rare metals expert, William Tahil, claims the production of hybrid and electric cars will soon tax the world’s production of lithium carbonate.
Think More, Move Less
Politicians tend to dissemble or lie, or both, whenever the subject of transportation strategy crops up. Despite proof that transportation damages the biosphere, costs a fortune and kills people, the policy establishment is in thrall to the belief that transportation-enabled economic growth takes priority over all else. This false belief is based on inadequate ecological accounting, and the power of the myriad industries involved. Every aspect of the aviation industry, for example — airplane manufacturers, airlines, airports — is subsidized by direct grants and tax breaks. Remove these hidden subsidies and also charge aviation the true costs of its environmental impact and the whole enterprise becomes un-economic even on its own terms.
Politicians are also scared that no voter will tolerate a curtailment of air travel. The better way to put it is that no rich voter will do so. Only 5 percent of the world’s population has ever flown. Aviation is overwhelmingly an activity of the rich, and strong measures to combat the environmental impact of aviation would not adversely effect poor people.
We once hoped that the internet would replace trips to the mall; that air travel would give way to teleconferencing; and that digital transmission would replace the physical delivery of books and videos. In the event, technology has indeed enabled some of these new kinds of mobility — but in addition to, not as replacements for, the old kinds. The internet has increased transport intensity in the economy as a whole. Rhetoric of a “weightless” economy, the “death of distance” and the “displacement of “matter by mind” sound ridiculous in retrospect.
Rather than tinker with symptoms — such as inventing hydrogen-powered vehicles, or turning gas stations into battery stations — the more interesting and pertinent design task is to re-think the way we use time and space and to reduce the movement of matter — whether goods or people — by changing the word "faster" to "closer."
Our transportation challenge can be compared to distributed computing. The speed-obsessed computer world, in which network designers rail against delays measured in milliseconds, is years ahead of the rest of us in rethinking space-time issues. It can teach us how to rethink relationships between place and time in the real world, too. Embedded on microchips, computer operations entail careful accounting for the speed of light. The problem geeks struggle constantly with is called latency — the delay caused by the time it takes for a remote request to be serviced, or for a message to travel between two processing nodes. Another key word, attenuation, describes the loss of transmitted signal strength as a result of interference — a weakening of the signal as it travels farther from its source — much as the taste of strawberries grown in Spain weakens as they are trucked to faraway places. The brick walls of latency and attenuation prompt computer designers to talk of a “light-speed crisis” in microprocessor design. The clever design solution to the light-speed crisis is to move processors closer to the data — in ecological terms, to re-localize the economy.
Network designers are good localizers. Striving to reduce geodesic distance, they have developed the so-called store-width paradigm or “cache and carry.” They focus on copying, replicating and storing web pages as close as possible to their final destination, at content access points. Thus, if you go online to retrieve a large software update from an online file library, you are often given a choice of countries from which to download it. This technique is called “load balancing” — even though the loads in question, packets of information, don’t actually weigh anything in real-world terms. Cache-and-carry companies maintain tens of thousand of such caches around the world.
By monitoring demand for each item downloaded and making more copies available in its caches when demand rises and fewer when demand falls, operators help to smooth out huge fluctuations in traffic. Other companies combine the cache-and-carry approach with smart file sharing, or "portable shared memory parallel programming." Users’ own computers, anywhere on the internet, are used as shared memory systems so that recently accessed content can be delivered quickly when needed to other users nearby on the network.
The Law of Locality
My favorite example of decentralized production concerns drinks. The weight of beer and other beverages, especially mineral water, trucked from one rich nation to another is a large component of the freight flood that threatens to overwhelm us. But first Coca-Cola and now a boom in microbreweries demonstrate a radically lighter approach: Export the recipe and sometimes the production equipment, but source raw material and distribute locally.
People and information want to be closer. When planning where to put capacity, network designers are guided by the law of locality; this law states that network traffic is at least 80 percent local, 95 percent continental and only 5 percent intercontinental. Communication network designers use another rule that we can learn from in the analogue world: “The less the space, the more the room.” In silicon, the trade-off between speed and heat generated improves dramatically as size diminishes: Small transistors run faster, cooler and cheaper. Hence the development of the so-called processor-in-memory (PIM) — an integrated circuit that contains both memory and logic on the same chip.
So, too, in the analogue world: radically decentralized architectures of production and distribution can radically reduce the material costs of production. We need to build systems that take advantage of the power of networks — but that do so in ways that optimize local-ness.
This design principle — “the less the space, the more the room” — is nowhere better demonstrated than in the human brain. The brain, in Edward O. Wilson's words, is “like one hundred billion squids linked together... an intricately-wired system of nerve cells, each a few millionths of a meter wide, that are connected to other nerve cells by hundreds of thousands of endings. Information transfer in brains is improved when neuron circuits, filling specialized functions, are placed together in clusters.”
Neurobiologists have discovered an extraordinary array of such functions: sensory relay stations, integrative centers, memory modules, emotional control centers, among others. The ideal brain case is spherical or close to it, Wilson observes, because a sphere has the smallest surface relative to volume of any geometric form. A sphere also allows more circuits to be placed close together; the average length of circuits can thus be minimized, which raises the speed of transmission while lowering the energy cost for their construction and maintenance.
Like gram junkies, the mobility dilemma is not as hard to solve as it looks once one replaces the word “speed” with the word “weight.” By changing the success measurement from faster to closer, it becomes possible to borrow from other domains, such as microprocessor design, network topography and the geodesy of the human brain. The biosphere itself is the result of 3.8 billion years of iterative, trial-and-error design — so we can safely assume it’s an optimized solution. As Janine Benyus explains in her wonderful book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, biological communities, by and large, are localized or relatively closely connected in time and space. Their energy flux is low, distances covered are proximate. With the exception of a few high-flying species, in other words, “nature does not commute to work.”
Personal comment:
A documented essay from John Thackara about the different forms of mobility and their footprints. With some consideration on the "immobile mobility" or rather "mediated mobility" and an interesting proposal about the "law of locality" taking its inspiration in network computing.
Monday, January 24. 2011
Via Networked Performance
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Tracing Mobility – Cartography and Migration in Networked Space @ transmediale, Neu Bar, Greifswalder Str. 218, Berlin :: January 30 — Call for Ideas.
Following events in the UK, Warsaw and the Croatian coast in 2010, Trampoline will present the exhibition, Tracing Mobility – Cartography and Migration in Networked Space, at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in November 2011, alongside an open platform of ideas. The opportunity starts now. On January 30th, during Transmediale’s ‘DAS Weekend’, we invite you to pitch your idea in an informal manner over a drink at Neu Bar. The ‘pitch’ can take the form of a presentation, performance or simply a chat with us. Get in touch with us asap to book a slot or to request further information.
Tracing Mobility is a project that sets out to examine the shifting terrain of global versus individual mobility and how the hand in hand development with networked infrastructure is transforming our conceptions of time, space and distance.
In the expectation that many interesting projects and speakers on the theme exist already, we intend to provide a space to encourage spontaneous, ad hoc input from the floor from cultural sectors that are outside our usual scrutiny. Towards this, the curators are inviting artists, cultural practitioners, researchers, NGO’s and the interested public to contribute to the Tracing Mobility Open Platform in the form of presentations, interventions, performances, workshops, or any other activity responding to the theme.
Contact info [at] trampoline-berlin.de
Venue: Neu Bar, Greifswalder Str. 218, Berlin, link to map
Project website http://www.trampoline.org.uk/tracingmobility/
Trampoline Berlin website http://www.trampoline-berlin.de
Monday, December 20. 2010
Via MIT Technology Review
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A visit to FedEx's SuperHub, where technology powers the global economy while you sleep.
By Jeffrey F. Rayport
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Move it: At the FedEx SuperHub in Memphis, chutes and conveyor belts carry more than 1.2 million packages each night. |
The retail season is in full swing for the holidays, and it couldn't happen without two giants of logistics, UPS and FedEx. As those brown UPS trucks remind us, the global economy thrives on "synchronizing the world of commerce."
Not long ago, I talked with FedEx founder Fred Smith at a World 50 meeting of executives in Memphis, Tennessee. More recently I visited the company's operations in the midst of holiday-season madness.
Here is some of what I learned:
Make no little plans. The great architect Daniel Burnham once said, "Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will not themselves be realized."
Fred Smith's inspiration for FedEx involved no little plans. The result is the largest air-cargo company in the world: it employs 290,000 people, maintains a fleet of 75,000 trucks, and owns and operates 684 jets. It has more wide-body jets than any airline, including Boeing 777s that can fly from Shanghai to Memphis nonstop. The SuperHub, the heart of FedEx's operations, measures four by four miles and occupies 900 acres. Some 30,000 people are needed to run it.
In many ways, the SuperHub dwarfs its "big brother," Memphis International Airport. The SuperHub is a world unto itself, with a hospital, a fire station, a meteorology unit, and a private security force; it has branches of U.S. Customs and Homeland Security, plus anti-terror operations no one will talk about. It has 20 electric power generators as backup to keep it running if the power grid goes down.
Every weekday night at the SuperHub, FedEx lands, unloads (in just half an hour, even for a super-jumbo 777), reloads, and flies out 150 to 200 jets. Its aircraft take off and land every 90 seconds. This all happens between 11 p.m. and 4 a.m. Central Time. The SuperHub processes between 1.2 million and 1.6 million packages a night.
From Thanksgiving to Christmas, FedEx will ship 223 million packages worldwide. Last Monday, its busiest night ever, it moved 16 million packages.
Be a speed demon and a control freak. Walking the SuperHub, you can feel the need for speed. Planes land continually and disgorge oversized aluminum containers; parcels of all shapes and sizes zoom into processing centers on hyper-kinetic conveyor belts; and no fewer than 2,000 drivers of light trucks, forklifts, and small industrial vehicles swarm throughout the facility. To control it all, everything and everyone is UPC-tagged; everyone and everything is tracked.
Nothing illustrates the point better than the Small Package Sortation System, a vast, FedEx-designed machine that sits in its own warehouse. It cost $175 million to build and sorts an average of 1.2 million packages a night. It scans the bar code on every package at least 30 times. Any delays in the process can get detected in minutes. That's why the U.S. Postal Service has become one of FedEx's major accounts. FedEx's SmartPost operation delivers the "last mile" for much of the United States' daily mail.
Because FedEx is as disciplined and reliable as it is, standard items it ships include chemotherapy drugs, human hearts and other live human organs, artificial joints, contact lenses, surgical scalpels, fresh blood, heart monitors, circuit boards, auto bumpers, tractor parts, Swiss watch elements, rare manuscripts, aviation components, Maine lobsters, crickets, whales, snakes, Japanese cherries, Hawaiian flowers, tennis shoes, and European fragrances. Oh, and FedEx also transports the occasional Arabian race horse and antique automobile. Any large cargo, from 150 pounds to 2,000 pounds, is fair game.
It's about the information, stupid. IT both created demand for FedEx's services (Dell was one of FedEx's first tech customers) and enabled FedEx to thrive. Smith realized that tracking packages—knowing points of origin, movement through the system, and estimated times of arrival—was nearly as valuable as the packages themselves. Today's FedEx has made innovative uses of new data-tracking technologies, such as QR codes and RFID tags. The latter report on temperature and moisture conditions of individual packages as they move from origination point to destination.
If there were "Seven Wonders of the Industrial World," FedEx's SuperHub would easily rank among them, right up there with Toyota's production centers, Google's data centers, and NASA's Mission Control.
Jeffrey F. Rayport is a former faculty member at Harvard Business School and the author of several books about electronic commerce. He is the founder of Marketspace LLC, a strategic advisory company. Currently, he is an operating partner at Castanea Partners, a Boston-based private equity firm.
Copyright Technology Review 2010.
Thursday, December 09. 2010
Via Creative Review
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by Mark Sinclair
Detail from In Transit 4 by Diego Kuffer
Brazilian photographer Diego Kuffer takes the concept of photomontage to another level in his series, In Transit...
Recently posted to his website (and noted on BoingBoing), Kuffer's pixellated-looking work presents several images of the same thing – be it a merry-go-round or traffic on an underpass – chopped up into a composite image.
In Transit 12
Unlike the traditional 'photomontage' technique of overlaying printed images to form a unified picture – which everyone from me to David Hockney has had a go at (why not just use a wide angle lens?) – Kuffer's creations suggest what is and isn't there in any given stretch of time. Almost like a still image of a whole film, if that were possible.
After experimenting with the medium, Kuffer explains on his website, he became frustrated at only being able to capture "instants".
"So, I decided to hack photography," he writes, "[taking] the technique behind movie making and applying it to my photos. Photographing the same instant several times, slicing and dicing the results and mixing it all together chronologically. This way I was able to capture a moment, not showing what exactly happened, but at least showing that a moment happened."
In Transit 18
While some of the images perhaps don't record the most interesting of subjects and are more concerned with capturing the 'movement' of a street scene, for example, some of the more abstract pieces are really rather beautiful.
The whole series can be viewed at diegokuffer.com.br.
In Transit 14
In Transit 2
In Transit 4 (detail show, top)
Wednesday, December 01. 2010
Via Networked Performance
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by Jo
Distance versus Desire* by Eric Kluitenberg:
Clearing the ElectroSmog
The desire to transcend distance and separation has accompanied the history of media technology for many centuries. Various attempts to realise the demand for a presence from a distance have produced beautiful imaginaries such as those of telepresence and ubiquity, the electronic cottage and the reinvigoration of the oikos, and certainly not least among them the reduction of physical mobility in favour of an ecologically more sustainable connected life style. As current systems of hyper-mobility are confronted with an unfolding energy crisis and collide with severe ecological limits — most prominently in the intense debate on global warming — citizens and organisations in advanced and emerging economies alike are forced to reconsider one of the most daring projects of the information age: that a radical reduction of physical mobility is possible through the use of advanced telepresence technologies.
ElectroSmog and the quest for a sustainable immobility
The ElectroSmog festival for ‘sustainable immobility’, staged in March 2010 [1], was both an exploration of this grand promise of telepresence and a radical attempt to create a new form of public meeting across the globe in real-time. ElectroSmog tried to break with traditional conventions of staging international public festivals and conferences through a set of simple rules: No presenter was allowed to travel across their own regional boundaries to join in any of the public events of the festival, while each event should always be organised in two or more locations at the same time. To enable the traditional functions of a public festival, conversation, encounter, and performance, physical meetings across geographical divides therefore had to be replaced by mediated encounters.
The festival was organised at a moment when internet-based techniques of tele-connection, video-telephony, visual multi-user on-line environments, live streams, and various forms of real-time text interfaces had become available for the general public, virtually around the globe. No longer an object of futurology ElectroSmog tried to establish the new critical uses that could be developed with these every day life technologies, especially the new breeds of real-time technologies. The main question here was if a new form of public assembly could emerge from the new distributed space-time configurations that had been the object of heated debates already for so many years?
There was a sense of unease when looking back at the bold promises of remoter life and work in the ‘electronic cottage’ that futurologists such as Alvin Toffler spelled out for us in the early 1980s, in books such as “The Third Wave” (the ‘coming information age’ as the third wave, after agricultural and industrial society) [2]. As part of his near-future explorations conducted well before the rise of widespread internet use, Toffler enthusiastically embraced the suggestion that a radical reduction of (physical) mobility would become possible by the rise of ever more sophisticated communication and information technologies and the integration of home and workplace in the electronic cottage. Not only would this transformation, in Toffler’s vision, reap great ecological benefits, it would also initiate a grand revitalisation of the ‘oikos’, the household and the family unit.
The electronic cottage should ideally be a real-time connected living and working space, allowing a new kind of digital artisan / entrepreneur to emerge who would be absolved from rush hour-traffic while being ultimately flexible in making his or her own work and private arrangements. The main advantage of the new work/life unit was its inherent efficiency, where meetings would be arranged solely when strictly necessary and flexible according to need and availability of everyone involved in the process. The main element won back from the congested systems of collective work and travel was time. Time that could instead be invested in the ‘oikos‘, the home, family life, and local social relations, that could help to restore the psychic fabric of society, which had become unravelled through the brutal forces of ‘second wave’ grand scale industrial modernisation. Work and life at home could now be brought into unison again.
Today, however, more than 25 years after these all bold claims, we can observe exactly the reverse trend: Never before have wo/men travelled more and farther. Not least because of their improved capabilities to keep in touch with the ‘home base’ from afar. With advanced communication techniques work has entered the sphere of private life and mostly diminished the space and time for the oikos. The simultaneous exponential innovation of transport technologies and logistics, in particular in the automobile and aviation industry, have had a cataclysmic effect on this ‘fatal’ trajectory. The system of hyper-mobility has quite literally overheated itself, and seems unstoppably heading for a crash. Even more so, it seems to exhaust itself at an exponential rate.
While most people do enjoy living in a global village, few appreciate a forced life in the local village. Rather than moving towards a sustainable immobility, we seem to be heading towards a global ecological disaster scenario. The crucial question for ElectroSmog was whether a critical reconsideration of this idea of a sustainable immobility was possible, both in theoretical and practical terms.
Necessity and failure
The urgency of the search for alternatives for the current crisis of hyper-mobility was illustrated graphically by the opening conversation of the festival “Global perspectives on the crisis of mobility”. In our first video chat with the crew of Sasahivi media in Nairobi we talked about the daily commute in Kenya’s capital. The city has seen a sharp increase in motorised travel in recent years, leading to over-congested roads and unbearably intense rush hour traffic. To avoid the worst the people at Sasaivi traditionally would leave their homes early in the morning, before rush hour, and return only late, often very late at night. During the day roads were simply too busy.
So, how long would a daily commute take? - “about two to three hours”, and what distance would they have to cover? - “about 2,5 to 3 kilometres” (!).
Next we connected with Dutch architect Daan Roggeveen who is conducting the research project Go West together with journalist Michiel Hulshof about the development of new metropolises in Central and Western China [3]. They had just come back from a field trip in Wuhan, and Roggeveen explained that they had found that about 500 new cars were entering the streets of Wuhan every day. We then asked him how many cities of similar size were currently present in China, and he replied about 30, not counting Shanghai and Beijing. In short, by a (very) moderate count some 15.000 new cars were entering Chinese roads daily as we spoke.
We then listened to a short video message by Partha Pratim Sarker from Dhaka, Bangladesh relating similar experiences and being hopeful that new communication technologies could do something to alleviate the stress of the streets. Next up film maker Aarti Sethi from Delhi told us that by her estimate some 1000 new cars entered Delhi roads every day, especially intensified by the introduction of the Tata, the low cost automobile that obviously replaces many polluting motor-ricksha’s, but still.
In a nutshell we received a chilling summary of a global exponential rise of motorised mobility through these first hand reports. With car use, air travel and motorised transportation not diminishing in the developed economies this system of hyper-mobility out of control seems to approach its limits rather sooner than later, and virtually all counter-strategies so far seem entirely ineffective.
The Spectre of Imaginary Media
Imaginary Media are machines that mediate impossible desires. Imaginary media typically emerge in situations where the living environment imposes inherent limitations that one cannot transcend. The desire to exceed these limitations produces beautiful phantasies, and in the case of imaginary media they are projected onto technological systems — both existent and inexistent — that are supposed to realise what an ordinary human existence is unable to deliver. Imaginary media are the techno-imaginary constructs that populate the domain of impossibility.
One manifestation of this desire to transcend the limitations of living experience is the longing for immediate contact across any distance or divide. And it is this desire for a ubiquitous telepresence, replacing the actual presence here and now, more than anything else, that has fuelled the development of new media and communication technologies. This desire is in fact so strong that even in lowest bandwidth environments tremendous investments of mental and emotional energy can be observed, across different technological and historical settings (recent examples are for instance the IRC text chat or SMS text messaging). ‘Signal’ in these case is interpreted as ‘contact’, and a phantasmatic projection of connection and interaction is projected onto the faintest of signals, aided further by the curious emergence of synaesthetic perceptions where minute changes in tone, rhythm or even wording can produce intense bodily sensations and responses.
This intermingling of imaginary and actual qualities of connection-media has obscured the discussions about the benefits and limits of telepresence technologies thoroughly. Regardless if one is talking about mobile phone use, deep technological experimentation in telepresence labs, on-line virtual environments of the Second Life type, high powered tele-work centres, or more regular real-time web applications and video chat systems, it seems very difficult to escape this aspect of the phantasmatic. Critical scrutiny, however, needs to cleanse itself from these phantasmatic distortions if it is to get anywhere with its task of establishing clear boundaries and areas of possibility.
For ElectroSmog the central question was, can we convene a public event, a festival, with everything you might expect from it, where audiences and presenters from a host of different countries and regions of the earth can meet, interact, encounter, exchange without having to travel outside of their locale? Or in even more mundane terms, can an international festival be staged without anybody travelling and still be a viable public event? And while the technologies used worked fine most of the time, the answer to this central question was clearly “No”. However, this ‘failure’ became clear in a rather surprising way.
What the festival showed through its radical approach to this question is that remote connection works excellent in an active network. In situations where connections were established between active contributors to a discussion or project, exchange was often very productive and the experience rewarding for all participants. But when attempts were made to integrate a public of relatively passive observers, the traditional ‘audience’, the experience broke down.
Remote connection also did not bring people together locally. The overwhelming sense of all festival events was that in the (remote) communicative process all nodes of the network must be active ‘throughout’. No real sense of co-presence between local audiences in different sites (even though they were often visible and audible to each other) came about, while locally audiences seemed little inspired to physically show up at the networks nodes to witness a process they could also follow from the comfort of their home via the webcast.
The interesting question here is why?
Could playful interfaces, allowing audiences to interact across different localities have helped to create this sense of co-presence? Certainly it would have helped to create this sense in situations where audiences were actually present in different connected spaces. However, curiously, exactly those programs were generally well visited that showed strong local participation and a minimum (the ‘at least one’ rule) of connected localities. Much can be done to improve the experience, but even in the deliriously transmediated environment of the ElectroSmog central connection node, the theatre space of De Balie in Amsterdam, the energy never entirely seemed to materialise.
The rather inevitable conclusion that must be drawn from this is that the idea of a replacement of physical encounters by mediated encounters is simply an illusion. First of all, this mediated encounter denies the unspoken subtle bodily cues that shape actual conversation.The experience of co-presence in the same space is determined by so many perceptible and sub-liminal incentives that digital electronic media do not capture, that the idea of an immersive experience relies more on the phantasmatic cover of these absent cues and the curious human capacity for synaesthetic perception, than on the performative capabilities of the medium. A digital video-link certainly does not replace these subliminal cues.
Still, more important for the ultimate failure of the telepresence ideology is that it denies the libidinal drive for encounter, belonging, and identification that is so important for a successful staging of a public event such as an arts and culture festival.There is also a sobering lesson for curators that excellent content and contributors as such do not translate into public success. The desire for sharing the space with others and with the influential in a particular social circle or figuration, is a much stronger motor it seems for public appeal. Remoteness, one of the themes in the festival, cannot be so easily transcended in the telepresence scenario as hoped for.
It is this libidinal drive for connection, identification and belonging that propels the development of new media and communication technologies. These technologies are greeted with great enthusiasm as long as they are able to conjure up a phantasmatic image of connectedness that is able to cover (u)p the lack of actual presence and (physical) contact. However, this phantasmatic projection is never able to displace the feeling of a lack entirely, and thus a surplus desire remains that needs to be satisfied by other means. The consequence is that an intensified use of communication technology does not lead to less, but instead to an increased desire for physical encounter.
This observation is also remarkably concurrent with what mobility researchers have concluded about the actual behaviour of people in environments deeply saturated with advanced communication technologies. While some effects can be observed that can lead to a moderation of certain forms of travel and transport (tele work, on-line and phone conferences and so on), the indirect generative effects of these communication media tend to create intensified mobility patterns in these same regions (i.e. not necessarily work of profession related).
Communication media serve all kinds of practical purposes, obviously, and also those that can replace the necessity of physical encounter, movement, travel and its associated hassles. There is, however, a point at which the lack presence and contact brings the phantasmatic projection of the technologically enabled communication process to a point of crisis. And this is the moment when people start up the engine of their cars - the moment when the imaginary medium and the libidinal drive meet in a frontal crash.
Dilemmas after the crash of media and before the crash of hyper-mobility
In all this the urgency of our quest for a sustainable immobility is not lessened. The apparent failure of telepresence technologies leaves us stranded with a huge dilemma. Not to act is really not an option given the intensified pressures of a mobility system out of control. But are there any solutions?
Unfortunately there are as yet not too many reasons to be hopeful. The first step forward towards a new more sustainable regime of mobility and connectivity, and a new balance between mobility and immobility, would be not to believe in linear narratives, neither positivistic nor fatalistic. More communication technology does not automatically lead to less physical mobility. But equally, the current systems of hyper-mobility cannot grow at an exponential rate indefinitely. They will encounter new energetic, ecological, and with that also increasingly economic limits. The other observation that mobility researchers generally point to (next to the failure of communication technology) is that price is about the only mechanism that does seem to have a discernible effect on actual (mobility) behaviour.
As currently widely used energy systems (fossil fuels) become increasingly scarce, their price will inevitably go up. This will transform mobility from a right (or a perceived right) into a privilege, constructed along the traditional lines of socio-economic segregation (income, profession, class). The struggle over the privileges of mobility and movement will create a new consciousness about their spatial deployment (who is allowed to travel where and by which means?). This new consciousness of segregation will undoubtedly spark conflict and critical debate.
The second step would be to accept the need for hybrid and therefore ‘messy’ solutions. The economics of mobility will undoubtedly play an important role in shaping future mobility regimes. The exploration of alternative sources of energy and alternative transportation systems and technologies provide another avenue to look for viable escape routes. The on-going refinement of communication tools, media environments, tele-work arrangements and 21st century electronic cottages and other models of sustainable immobility will also play a role in those situations where practical advantages take priority over the libidinal drive for encounter. (Tele-)Presence researcher Caroline Nevejan emphasises that the new communication technologies do not offer us ideal solutions at all, but they will in the future become increasingly indispensable. [4]
The least desirable scenario is that of the crash, the ‘accident-catastrophe’ preprogrammed in current systems of hyper-nobility. Given the tidings from a confused planet rushing at high-speed into a global traffic jam, reported at ElectroSmog, this scenario cannot be excluded from our considerations for now.
Eric Kluitenberg
Amsterdam, November 2010
Notes:
1 - An overview of documentation resources from the festival can be found at:
www.electrosmogfestival.net/documentation
2 - Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave, Bantam Books, New York, 1980.
3 - www.gowestproject.com
4 - See for Nevejan’s research on Witnessed Presence: www.systemsdesign.tbm.tudelft.nl/witness
* This text was written for the upcoming issue in the Acoustic Space series (No.8), co-published by RIXC centre for new media culture in Riga and the Art Research Lab of Liepaja University: “Following the theme of ENERGY this issue will look at different social and cultural aspects of energy in the contemporary human society. It will also investigate the notion of ’sustainability’ from various perspectives - artistic, scientific, technological, architectural, environmental.” (More info soon at the RIXC on-line store: http://rixc.lv/kiosks/)
The text is an extended version of a talk given at Impakt Festival 2010 “Matrix City”, in Utrecht as part of the Superstructural Dependencies Conference, October 15, 2010.
(www.impakt.nl/index.php/festival/Conferentie_superstructuraldependen)
Personal comment:
We already published around this question of "mediated mobility" or "immobile mobilities" within the frame of the sustainable approach on | rblg. John Thackara is on this question too and it interests us quite a lot in the context of future projects. We published on this particular event some time ago and this is an interesting, yet nuanced follow-up by Eric Kluitenberg about the "ubiquity" and/or "tele-" concepts.
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