from 2004, this is culturemodding (love friendly celebrations that involve enabling pedestrian pathways).
Another temporally green bridge, this one in Budapest.
Paris Métro as a star map—“the wonderful design mind that goes by the name Clémentine Tantet decided to see it in space.”
“Water rose through its interior mysteriously and collected in a font, glazed over the top and down its sides and into the ground where the cycle began again.”
- David Licata, “His children came to him but his wife, bird-like and sad-looking, did not.” hitotoki.
Very taken with these “short narratives describing pivotal moments of elation, confusion, absurdity, love or grief — or anything in between — inseparably tied to a specific place.”
soft maps, using touch because her mother could no longer see, think these are beautiful (and another reason to go to the DUMBO Brooklyn Flea)…
via abangupjob:
Want one of these Haptic Labs Brooklyn neighborhood quilt maps.
(p.s. thanks for the tip, Kelsey!)
temporary, airlifted in, these are “canopy nets” and so full of possibility—
Let’s have a slumber party on top of a rainforest. (via startmeup)
“Psychogeographers probe patterns of behavior, often in collaborative terms, in urban environments, working over a period of time…individual actualities come to the fore; the artist/cartographer is the enabler, subverter, and documenter of experience.”
-from Katharine Harmon’s introduction to her The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography
Note: I’m not in total agreement with the definition, partly because I think we do some psychogeography here, and I’m unconvinced it is only in urban areas. Great new book, though.
lightpainting as a flow map. I’m into flow maps this week.
via lightpaint:
Tokyo at Night, Japan (via Amarjeet Rai)
I took part in yesterday’s Yes Men fake New York Post heist (an entire special edition full of real facts about climate change).
More images here, The Yes Men Fix the World movie information here, and you can play their Fix The World Challenge game now.
This is culture jamming, but relevant to the culturemodding thoughts here (and participating helped me think more about how culturemodders are and aren’t agents).
via kenyatta:
Overall, Jacobs argued that the very concept of “ideology” is fundamentally flawed and detrimental to both individuals and societies, no matter what side of the political spectrum an ideology comes from. By relying on ideals, she claimed people become unable to think and evaluate problems and solutions by themselves, but simply fall back on their beliefs for “pre-fabricated answers” to any problem they encounter.
As a poignant example, she cited the Chicago Heat Wave, which killed hundreds of mostly elderly Chicagoans in 1995. The “official” reason, according to the United States Department of Health (following a multi-million dollar study), was that the victims simply did not take precautions such as maintaining a steady water supply, finding air conditioning, or circulating air in their buildings.
Jacobs argued that the study, in addition to spending millions of dollars to state the obvious, was flawed because of its inherent ideology, which was individualism. She noted that a sociology graduate student, Eric Klinenberg, wrote his thesis on the disaster, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, which proved much more enlightening.
By examining the social atmosphere of different Chicago neighborhoods, Klinenberg discovered that many deaths were not dependent on individual factors, such as wealth, but rather on the cohesiveness of the neighborhood. Within tightly-knit and older neighborhoods, he found, elderly people at risk of heat stroke were more likely to be checked on by neighbors, less afraid to leave their homes to get help, and more likely to find sympathetic people and businesses that would allow them to relax in an air-conditioned environment (for example, dropping into a neighborhood grocery or barbershop, and having a proprietor willing to simply let them sit). In contrast, within neighborhoods where neighbors rarely socialized, the elderly were isolated and unable to get help.
Jacobs, citing the two studies, argued that the federal study was unconsciously biased by the prevailing political and economic ideology (that is, neoliberalism), which promoted individualism to the point of becoming completely oblivious to community and social factors, even though, as Klinenberg found, these were the factors that ultimately caused the deaths.
Using this and other examples, Jacobs argued that modern political and economic ideologies were in effect no different than those dominant in Western civilization’s past Dark Ages, such as Middle Age Roman Catholicism. In both cases, she claimed, the dominant ideology prevented and discouraged people from finding rational and scientifically-verifiable explanations and solutions.
This is culturemodding.
What’s so interesting about Park(ing) Day is the use of sod that is rolled out in parking spots and parking lots, grass seemingly a necessary component of parks.
The crew in Soho also had a ball pit, and I like this image from Eugene (Oregon) of them set up on a busy street.
