Subtopia: The City in the Crosshairs: A Conversation with Human Geographer Stephen Graham (Pt. 1)

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Excerpt:

"The investigations of geographer and writer Stephen Graham show us a city not only caught in the crosshairs of a perpetual war between international military coalitions and their swarming counterparts, but a city that’s been reframed, re-imaged, as a strategic site in a larger geo-economic scheme for engineering the urban machinations of control that are necessary to secure the triumph of neoliberal capitalism across the globe.
Absolutely critical research, as far as I am concerned.
Back in April, just a few months after Subtopia launched and began to pick up steam, Steve and I quickly made contact at which time he told me he was working on a new book titled Cities Under Siege: the “new” military urbanism.
Needless to say, I was sold on the title alone, but as a prelude, I read a brilliant book he edited a couple of years ago – Cities, War, and Terrorism – and was blown away by its framework for observing modern conflict in the context of urbanization, and how frictions in global politics are turning cities into stages for warfare and geopolitical struggle – towards an urban geopolitics as he aptly subtitled the book. It’s a seminal read for anyone interested in conflict as a kind of spatial system.
Of a handful of people we might consider to be the true thinkers around a military urbanism Steve is certainly one of the most important. With a dual background in urban technology and city planning his range of research is diverse and daring, utterly contemporary, and he has a fierce list of publications deconstructing the hyper-landscape of this subject – a great inspiration for our endeavors here, to be sure.
So, continuing my conversation with bad-ass geographers and picking up perhaps where Neil Smith and I left off, Steve and I shared this exchange over the last few weeks. This is the first of two parts that explores a spectrum of militarization and the nature of urban space as a product of war and political violence. He also traces for us some of the evolution of this “new” military urbanism that he's developing further in his book Cities Under Siege due out sometime next year.
I have to say I am really psyched about this and want to thank Steve again for having taken such time and for all his continued support of Subtopia...."

read the long full post & Part 2 on

http://subtopia.blogspot.com/2007/08/city-in-crosshairs-conversation-with.html

Impressive! Live Data Viz: a world of tweets uses HTML5 & cloud computing

WHAT THE TWEET IS THIS?

Real-time visualization of geolocated tweets around the world

A World of Tweets is all about playing with geography and bits of information. Simply put, A World of Tweets shows you where people are tweeting at from the past hour. The more tweets there are from a specific region, the "hotter" or redder it becomes.

This continuous collection of Twitter statuses also allows for the presentation of other interesting visuals as well as statistical and historical data about the tweeting world we live in. Through the activity of Twitter users it is possible to tailor a new map of the world that evolves during the day according to the timezones and the spreading of mobile technologies.

From the site:

"HOW DOES IT WORK?

Technology and more...

A world of tweets takes full advantage of HTML5 and cloud computing. Geolocation is made possible by the continuous stream of information captured by the Twitter Streaming API, which provides a subset of the public status, and with the occasional aid of the Yahoo! Placemaker™ service. As a result, this cold data is transformed into something more meaningful.

A world of tweets is compatible with every browser supporting HTML5 and the tag, and degrades gracefully to Flash on older browsers...."

Vuvix Description: Clear Glasses to Augment Your Reality RT @tm_augmentedrea

Augmented Reality (AR), which overlays virtual information on top of the real world, is a tantalizing concept, but the technology is still a bit complicated. To see virtual directions float in front of you, you have to either look at the world through the screen of a smart phone, or don a pair of bulky, goofy video goggles. Many experts have questioned whether AR will ever catch on in the consumer market.

At the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas hardware company Vuzix has revealed the first clear AR glasses for consumers. The glasses, called Raptyr, use holographic optics instead of video screens to make digital objects appear in mid-air. The approach is challenging, not least the interface has to compensate for (or compete with) natural light. For this reason the lenses can electronically darken to compensate for brighter or darker environments.

The Raptyr glasses, which have won a CES Innovation Award, feature a 6-megapixel camera, a microphone, headphones and a motion tracking system. They could be plugged into a PC, smart phone, or gaming system.

They are much less bulky and conspicuous than traditional video headsets, which are used in niche fields such as architecture and design, animation, and military training. "It looks a lot like a pair of shutter glasses you'd buy from Sony," CEO Paul Travers toldTechnology Review.

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OK! Who's Up For Playing?? Shadow Cities | Your city is a game. MMORPG for iPhone RT @Jawbonetv

From the site:

"Step in. Take the role of a modern mage, learn magic and see your surroundings with new eyes. Hunt Shadow Spirits and use spells and strategy to battle for the control of your city with other players.

Shadow Cities is a new location based MMORPG for iPhone. Neighborhoods and familiar streets are part of the game world that is visible to you through your iPhone. Your city is a game."

Whoahh! Obvious? Disgusting?: Sega installs 'Toylets' game consoles in Japanese urinals (Wired UK)

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Excerpt:

"Sega has announced that it's testing consoles called "Toylets" in urinals around Tokyo, which asks the user to strategically vary the strength and location of his urine stream to play a series of games.

Each urinal is installed with a pressure sensor and an LCD screen is mounted on the wall above, which lets you select from and play four different minigames. There's "Mannekin Pis", which simply measures how hard you can pee, and "Graffiti Eraser", which lets you remove paint by pointing a hose in different directions.

There's the faintly misogynistic "The North Wind and Her", where you play as the wind trying to blow a girl's skirt up, and the harder you pee, the harder the wind blows. Finally, the bizarre "Milk from Nose" is a multiplayer game where you compete against the person who last used the urinal. The strength of your urine streams are compared, and translated into milk spraying out of your nose. If your stream is stronger, your milk-stream knocks your opponent out of the ring. If you do particularly well on any of the games, you can download and save your information to a USB stick..."

Brazil's Arte.Mov Festival Examines New Cartographies | The Creators Project

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Excerpt from the interview:

"Arte.Mov is an art and technology festival that focuses on mobile media and how it changes the way we live. This year, the panels and exhibitions investigated the development of “New Cartographies” based on the critical use of technological products that are designed to help us live and navigate more easily through the world. We talked to the festival’s curators, Lucas Bambozzi and Rodrigo Minelli (who have been in charge of putting debates and exhibits together since before Arte.Mov was what it is) about art, mobile media, the independent audiovisual production in Brazil and their favorite art pieces of this year.

The Creators Project: How did Arte.Mov come about?
Lucas Bambozzi and Rodrigo Minelli: Back in the late ’90s there was an electronic music festival in Belo Horizonte (MG) called Eletronika. We both had this idea of bringing video and visuals to a music festival, so, in 2002, we created a section of expanded media inside this festival and called it the Expanded Media Forum. It was a very unique festival because we worked under the sponsorship of a local mobile phone company called Telemix. With the privatization of the telecoms in Brazil, these big companies were kicking in, but Telemix was still there as the smallest company operating in the country. So they called us and asked us to come up with a festival exclusively dedicated to mobile media, which was something we were starting to discover and deal with at the time. So it all started with music and then passed to these VJ, live image and audiovisual performance procedures..."

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