The former site is now a park, but a model of the former city is on display (image by Terri Ding).

Google Maps, our obiquitous view of the world, uses the Mercator projection, which explains why Greenland appears roughly the same size as Africa when (as the video claims) it is actually 1/14 the size.   It’s not possible to view the standard Google Map in different projections with all its content, though an example of Gall-Peters projection has been implemented at very low res using the Google Maps API.

Of note for ridiculousness:

[Quakers Hill Inspector Brett Guyatt] said graffiti was often a ”gateway” offence but the new approach had diverted teens away from crime.

I’ve just created a little proof-of-concept video with a nice WebGL video shader, using a Kinect scanner “untethered” (mobile power-source and laptop in a shopping trolley, trundling around the streets).

It requires a browser that supports WebGL, and is here:  http://www.neonascent.net/path/path.htm

Something unexpected is growing on the exposed faces of the city. Irrational forms spreading beyond the rectilinear constructions it’s spores have found purchase on, outside the flattened space of the architectural drawing.

The Cigar

For a long while Dr Sigmund Freud sat in his study comfortably savouring his cigar.

…

Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan had built a system of semiotics rooted in a transcendental signifier: the Phallus. According to this system, the fulfilment of our desires is sharply broken by the realisation that the mother lacks and desires the phallus. The phallus is the absent thing that begins our attempt at communication; the need to signify something that is absent.

[...]The phallus [is] the first imagined absence. It is in perceiving the mother as not-having ‘all’ that the child turns to speech, so speech must have the power of that which the mother lacks.(1)

No longer the Kantian rational subject, our sense of the world and ourselves veiled from our conscious intentions and intangible, like the slowly wheeling tendrils of smoke around Freud’s head.

But they all lead back to the source: the cigar; the phallic signifier.  Psychoanalysis is based on deciphering the patient as Oedipal subject repressing desire for the mother and identifying with the phallic. Unconscious desires are interrogated through dream symbolism, and everything is eventually interpreted as part of a single system.

The structuralist system creates difference through a negation: this and not-this. The refinement of this system involves bifurcation, like the categorisation of life as a progressive distinction between one thing and another: Life (contrasted with not-life), Domain, Kingdom, …down to Family, Genus, Species, Race, and finally Individual.

The Explosion

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari hate this, they lambaste the intellectual contortions Freud makes to reduce a patient’s pack of dream-wolves to a singular wolf: the father(2):

No sooner does Freud discover the greatest art of the unconscious, this art of molecular multiplicities, than we find him tirelessly at work bringing back molar unities, reverting to his familiar themes of the father, the penis, the vagina… (On the verge of discovering a rhizome, Freud always returns to mere roots.)(3)

Deleuze’s interest in a richer account is motivated by a difficulty of explaining the 1968 protests from a Marxist political understanding: the structuralist narrative couldn’t articulate the heterogeneous identities of the protesters.(4)

Deleuze and Guattari talk of the rhizome/tap-root structure as oppose to the arboreal (hierarchical, bifurcating) model of meaning. A non-linear connectivity that is not broken by the realities of interspecies DNA transfer through such things as viral infection. Assemblages of concepts that can become deterritorialised and transform through lines-of-flight into other ideas. Desire no longer understood through a negative (the desire for something missing), but as a positive, generative relationship (such as the desire between a bee and a flower). i.e. “anti-oedipal” – not defined by an absent longing: the lost fulfilment of the mother.

They consider the job of Philosophy to be the making of Concepts.(5) Their writing deliberately attempts to sabotage a single meaning, and the reading of the text as Authoritative.

The rhizome “[has] neither beginning nor end, but always a middle from which it grows and which it overspills.”(6) Greater understanding is approached through schitzoanalysis rather than psychoanalysis, the splitting and multiplication of narratives, like Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities exploding Venice into hundreds of multiplicities.(7)

…

The cigar is blown into pieces: the action slowed to a near stand-still to capture – in a sweeping 360-degree orbit, Matrix-style – the fragments of Freud’s exploding cigar hanging in the air.

Inches from his bewildered face the transcendental phallic signifier has been violently blown apart, transformed into a multiplicity of vectors; lines-of-flight heading towards Latin America, mouth cancer, iconic comedians.

Slow-motion

We find ourselves in the midst of the slow-motion expanding blast. What are we to make of it? This is our world: in motion, but changing deceptively slowly.

The positivist, scientific view produces propositions; “provides a way of conceiving and constructing space on the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties”.(8) These form the basis of Bureaucratisation and Rationalisation, identified by Max Weber as the process of tracking and recording progressively smaller details of the world, to allow calculations and optimisation of the efficiency of tasks.(9)

Modernist architecture was thinking of buildings as static, reductive and rationalised “machines for living” right up to the moment it found itself blown apart in the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe.

Thirty years later, the violent destruction of another set of buildings (the Twin Towers) triggered a desire for the stability of an understandable and static world. Authorities redoubled efforts, trying to scope out the faint outlines of “unknown unknowns”(10), and attempting to engineering certainty through more and more refined technologies of surveillance, regulation, and simulation.(11)

Emerging technologies are producing new everyday practices that map the debris as a fixed territory. Using geographically located micro-blogging technologies for rationalising space is as much a problem as Modernist architecture. Multiplicities are reduced to a collection of propositions existing in an ubiquitous space of legible, abstracted, homogeneous points: all data-points documented within a unified whole. Cutting out movement by reducing to an Euclidean space. This attempt at certainty fails on a daily basis: at the whim of GPS systems, drivers barrel through rivers that were once fords, drive the wrong way down one-way streets, plant their 18-wheelers into the arches of low-clearance bridges.

As Latour explains:

No one, of course, lives in Euclidian space; it would be impossible, and adding the “fourth dimension,” as people say—that is, time—does not make this system of coordinates a better cradle for “housing,” [...] our own complex movements.”(12)

Flying debris

In spite of attempts to intricately map the exact positions of each ripped tobacco leaf, the fragments continue to move and interact. They collide and jostle, exhibiting emergent properties: a “fractal ontology” where a “finite
number of components produce an infinite number of combinations”.(13)

Within the debris, Bruno Latour begins a diagram of the cloud, building an Actor Network that does not privilege the human over the non-human “actants”.(14) Latour’s Actor Network is something like a momentary pinning down of this explosion; a reterritorialisation of the shifted blast wave-front, but the transformation is constant, so this model will have to change over time. Rather than a network of “fixed channels” the network is a “set of often tenuous fluid-like flows”, with the inherent potentiality to become something else: to “diverge, or fold onto others”(15).

Similarly, in Michel de Certeau’s conception of space, strategies and tactics form two distinct ways of thinking about and inhabiting space where the strategic maps space (the snapshot of the cloud of debris), and the tactical operates in time (chance interactions like those between motes; the eddies of motion). Tactical space is “best thought of not so much as enduring sites but as moments of encounter, not so much as ‘presents’, fixed in space and time, but as variable events; twists and fluxes of interrelation.”(16) De Certeau’s space is practised place i.e. not just place, but “taking place”.

From a rhizomic standpoint, art becomes a legitimate research tool in the pursuit of multiplicities. Strategic technologies produce monolithic, static models. Art blows them apart. Discovering rhizomes is about identifying generative relationships; multiplicities as n-1, not within an over-coding unity, and not general theories that exclude other possibilities. Through art, Deleuze explains, “instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply…”(17), like tracing alternative, speculative constellations between the points of suspended debris.

De Certeau speaks of the deterritorialising power of spatial practice: the potential for change comes from tactical spatial practices that jolt and seduce. In practices such as those of the Situationists International, art “can operate as a rupture in otherwise dominant regimes of signification and expression (the clichés of our being – and indeed of our consumer culture)”.(18) At any moment the walker can break from convention, can (for example) become a traceur taking a parkour line-of-flight across building roof-tops that is “neither foreign nor in conformity”(19) with strategic territory.

These unorthodox spatial “lines-of-flight” (described as tours rather than maps(20)) are their own form of schitzoanalysis, tracing heterodox “assemblages of enunciation”(21). Like experimental approaches to critique for Stephen Muecke, art has the potential to be a “[participation] in worlds rather than […] a report on realities seen from the other side of an illusory gap of representation [...variously called] ‘critical distance’, ‘omniscient overview’, ‘hindsight’ or ‘perspective’”(22).

Considered as generative practices, both art and philosophy can take inspiration from Michel Foucault’s call for a non-judgemental (generative) Critique:

I can’t help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgements but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes—all the better. All the better. […] I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms.(23)

‘Dragging from their sleep’ the recombinant possibilities laying beyond the cracked, fragmented, finally exploded attempts at concrete systems.

I’ve just finished the developing an idea I had a few months ago: the SkypeRobot.

SkypeRobot is a nice straightforward solution for telepresence robotics:  all of the point-to-point infrastructure is black-boxed and handled by someone else, as well as the specifics of the video connection.  At it’s heart is a custom Arduino shield that uses DTMF dial tones (that can be generated within Skype, for example) to control the robot platform.  You’re free to decide what you want to attach to it, and what software to use:  iPhone, Android, iPad, or generic tablet, connected via 3G, 4G, Wifi, etc. and running Skype, Google Video chat, or whatever.

If you are interested in getting your own SkypeRobot, I’m considering options and formats for sharing the hardware. Possibilities are unpopulated circuit boards, DIY kits with all the parts, or fully assembled. The circuit-board design and Arduino code are available below for use for free.

The current Arduino shield Schematics, Board Design, and Arduino code available for free.  Please consider donating a few dollars to support my research and improvements to the design and code:

The code and binaries (/binaries/Bin32/MoveBones.dll and /binaries/Bin64/MoveBones.dll) are available it’s own GitHub repository.

UDP listener and sender, with multicast variants too. Should come in useful, e.g. for getting OSCeleton data from the Kinect.

The code and binaries (/binaries/Bin32/Udp.dll and /binaries/Bin64/Udp.dll) are available it’s own GitHub repository.