Villa Shodhan - preliminary model

not finished yet

Eye opener

(ok, so this was just off google, but my mind remembers it like this..)

Just went for a run, for the 2nd day in a row! Nothing ridiculous, just trying to keep going, a plodding pace for anything over half an hour to get back into it. ("Back into it" sounds a bit too professional... but I did do some last year, and need to do more for my physio.)

Anyway, after training for the marathon last year, I found that 45 minutes or so thumping round the streets with my ipod on was a brilliant way to clear out the brain, or a good way to think. Something to do with the rhythm.

But what I hadn't remembered was how much I'd enjoyed just meandering around streets I didn't know, connecting up areas of the city overland that maybe I'd never travelled, never knew anyone who lived there, never had any reason to go there. Uncluttered back streets, away from the heavy diesel bus clag of the main streets that catches the back of your throat when you're running.

I'd done a lot of it last year, but now, with the first year architecture theory swimming around my head, I was a lot more conscious of WHY I was enjoying it, rather than just a vague voyeuristic feeling of catching a glimpse into a front room as you flash (plod) past.

A new park I never knew existed, a pristine square of Victorian-terraces, absolutely immaculate, surrounded on all sides by looming council blocks. A row of shops. The realisation a station with a distant vague name is actually JUST round the corner. The city opens up for you.

So here I am, endorphins kicking in after 20 minutes (helped by a good downhill stretch) with the Chemical Brothers giving me a booming beat to set my feet down, then, hoody up like some errant scallyway, scrambling over the locked fence of Brockwell Park and into the unlit interior.

Away from all the streets, people, houses and traffic, barely able to see where you put your feet on the dark paths, I got to the top of the hill in the centre. Suddenly, the stars burst into sight above me, blue moon light finally managing to push back the orange halo of the street lights below. Like being at the centre of your own personal black hole, looking out over the galaxy of the cities lights... amazing.

Checked my ipod... track 9... Life is Sweet.

i want one of those dot com

http://www.mareines-patalano.com.br/index.php#projeto&idProjeto=casafolha

http://www.arplus.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/paraty7.jpg

http://www.arplus.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/paraty2.jpg

http://www.ibsgroup.it/public/newsimg_big/481.jpg

http://www.wally.com/templates/popUpImgCenter.asp?ProdId=99&idImg=1100&idType=2&idChannel=201&attivo=8

Public Space Private Ownership

still having small panic attacks about people looking over my shoulder with their iPhone...

and generally thinking about this encroachment on the city, the next layers of control being gradually placed and accepted by the population. In order to pay for developments of unused or under-utilised land, governments and local authorities have sold up rights on land so developers who have cash can revitalise areas. sounds great, especially when valuable riverfront land can be pulled back from dereliction, as we've seen a lot in the Docklands and south bank of the Thames.

but there's always a cost isn't there? nothing comes for free. In the case of the new City Hall and the surrounding plaza, the land has been leased back from the developers. But this isn't public land - the seat of government in London is actually private land, and you are only allowed near it because the developers allow you... it is NOT your right. Amongst the prohibited activities on this private land, other than skate-boarding and littering gum, are activities like Demonstrations and taking photos! If you break these prohibitions, the police can (and will) be called, and you can be arrested for trespass.

Government, by choosing to site the building there, has blocked your basic right to protest against policies you disagree with - hand in hand with private interests. Government's role in this modern society of market driven interests is to apply an ethical conscience where the system will not take account of such issues, and with these commercial controls of "public space" increasing they have failed.

Death of a flaneur 2

I'm STILL banging on about this. For years there has been encroachment on "public space" by commercial entities. A very good example of this is the highly successful regeneration of the South Bank, consulted by Space Syntax, who advised on shops, bars and restaurants (or "magnets") placed within the space to draw people in.

It works - cardboard city is no more, now there's a thriving social place to get your cafe frappacino with an extra shot for £4 while going to look at something in the Hayward and then go and get pissed in the BFI bar. Brilliant. Let them eat cake, give 'em what they want and the masses want COAL-CHA with a latte.

So these little steps, these encroachments, keep happening, and they seem to offer us benefits. A relaxed cafe to get a drink when you are thirsty after sitting on a bench by the river. A convenient mobile phone shop when you upgrade your handset for the second time that day.

But you are left without something that is truely free - in terms of both liberty and price. The ability to be left alone seems crucial to me, I don't want someone marketing to me, AIMING, TARGETING me indescriminately. The city is a decision to engage in social life, or to deliberately disengage, and to remain anonymous, to observe and not be observed and this could be coming to an end.

Death of a flaneur

I'm still going on about the Augmented Reality / Face Recognition stuff... (seriously though, "Augmented Reality"?? isn't the NAME enough to scare people?)

As someone wrote about AR with Face Recognition "in a perfect world, anyone could use the application to identify anyone else..."

If that's your perfect world then please fuck right off.

This could change so much. I'm not a criminal, not a thief, mugger, embezzler, murderer (I have had a couple of speeding tickets a few years back though) and I don't intend to be. But the thing is, I could be. Imagine a world where you knew - 100% knew - that if you did something wrong, you would be caught. No possibility of escape. How BORING would life be?

But i'm not just talking about policing and surveillance... imagine if every automated shop window you walked past identified you and screamed out adverts specifically directed at you? Downloaded your Amazon/Itunes/Ebay history and yelled "Nick Humphreys! Look at my SALE!" It would drive you insane.

The city is a haven of anonymity and this will end very shortly. Being lost in a crowd is not possible anymore. Tracked, downloaded and assessed at every step on your internet profile, you will not be able to avoid being caught in the Net (ha ha) because internet transactions (i don't just mean financial, i mean everything, social etc etc) will be in everything that you do. Hiding in the dark ages of cash in your pocket and handwritten notes will not create a refuge for your anonymity, they've got your online gas bill.

I wonder what Einstein's opinion of Google would be?

Maybe Einstein's the wrong guy to ask. Maybe Werner Braun would be a better candidate. Either way, someone with a real feel for having been involved in creating an idea, a technology, that was possible and feasible but maybe just wasn't a good idea. Just because we can do something doesn't mean we should.

Problem is, these days, if something will have a buyer, then it will get done, regardless of whether its good for people in general. The people with the real money for R&D into new technology are the big multi-nationals, not the governments... and the capital markets don't like being stopped by a few moral objections. Profit motive pushes them on.

Governments used to be the ones with all the hi-tech secret stuff - and maybe they still do get it a few years ahead of the mass market - but now they're buying it from arms, pharmaceutical and tech companies at a high price - not developing themselves. So they get this hi-tech stuff a bit before us, but we'll still get a watered down, free downloadable version in a couple of years. Governments can't afford to randomly research new technology when they're bailing out banks - they'll leave all this research to the market.

What's my point? Good question. None of the above is new, but I was genuinely scared last night by something which could be seen as a bit innocuous. The new iPhone. Not that scary. But what it incorporates is a fairly new bit of kit which is a... wait for it... "natural step" on from having GPS and an internet connection on your phone. You also need a camera. Its called Augmented Reality. Hiroshima was a natural step or two on from E=MC2, doesn't mean we should do it.

"AR" basically allows the iPhone user to walk down the street looking at the screen which is displaying what the camera sees, augmented by internet searches of whatever the user wants. So if you typed "pubs" into the search, it would allow you to "see through" buildings on the screen to display a tag of the pubs in that direction, with name, distance, reviews, blah blah... anything you can get off an internet search. Cool huh? Very useful no doubt. Bit like TomTom so far. The bit that got me was that this could be so easily linked to face recognition technology.

Take a quick look at www.readwriteweb.com/archives/augmented_id_augmented_reality_facial_recognition.php

Picasa - Google's free photo programme - contains a face recognition thingy which will scan your computer for photos and group pictures of the same person regardless of if that was taken as a baby or as a full grown adult. Apparently there's a bunch of ways this can be done, from retina scans to 3D face profiling. Again very clever.

I am getting to the point, slowly. As you can see from the link above, a really obvious natural step is to link the GPS/AR stuff to face recognition. Say you walk down a street, holding your iPhone, it could recognise people's faces, internet search images, and present information on them - on EVERYONE - to you. Facebook would be a pretty good starting database I'm guessing. This technology is available now, and by free download to everyone - can you imagine what the hi-tech, paid for surveillance version would be like?

I wonder why the government gave up its incredibly expensive and cumbersome national identity card scheme? Maybe because every police office and cctv camera could be used to identify every person continuously. This is 1984, this is Terminator identifying Sarah Connor at her front door, this is... me ranting.

Just because we can identify everyone around us, all the time, with this technology, should we do it? Apart from the policing implications this could be the end of privacy.