We went to Montréal by VIA 1 - my favourite way to travel but I still think wi-fi should be included in the ticket price. First, we managed to catch the CCA between exhibitions, which was a bit of a drag but there were some really lovely photos by Naoya Hatakeyama of architectural models of New York City and Tokyo. The exhibition was supposed to be about scale, but I was more taken by how old, decaying models can so realistically convey a sense of contemporary urban decrepitude. It made me think about the beauty of lo-fi prototypes.

The 4S conference was not what I expected, or rather it was more conservative than I had hoped. For the first time in a long time I had the sinking feeling that sociology was lagging behind social change.

However, I did hear some good talks the first day: in a session on Web 2.0, I was impressed by how people were attempting to explain post-panoptic surveillance using phrases like "participatory-surveillance" and "lateral-surveillance." But the best question I heard on all this was "Now really, isn't this just phatic communication?" (Remembering that networked phatic communication is more than just "ambient intimacy" or "co-presence" because it always already involves speech acts, and thus does things.) In discussion, it was asserted that Web 2.0 is about assemblages and everyday life, so old skool cyberspace and cyberculture studies seem to miss the point. It's not about individual sites, but the relationships between different sites. We need to ask why del.icio.us? and why/not flickr? or why/not jaiku? Just like television is about the entire schedule - the flow of shows, commercials, teasers, etc. - and not just individual shows.

I met Ingrid Erickson (scroll down a bit to find her), who's interested in the implications of ubiquitous computing on social practices, space and place, and is currently studying "the use of geotags in Flickr and mobile presence indicators in Jaiku." If you do either of those things and would like to participate in her doctoral project, just send her an email. What I appreciated the most about her presentation was her insistence that (online) presentations of self be understood not just in terms of identities, but also in terms of activities, locations and connections. This doesn't sound like a big deal, but think of how often you hear about social networking sites as vehicles for identity-management? Or in terms of presentation of self (which at least considers identity and activity, if not also connections)? The locative aspect is really important - not because we're finally merging the physical and the digital, but because spatiality and temporality have always been crucial to social and cultural interaction.

Cynthia Schairer also gave an intriguing talk on prosthetics. Citing disability studies instead of cultural theory, she first cautioned against fetishising or romanticising prosthetics. I took this is an omen, as I had actually come to hear her talk because I like to imagine that I wouldn't mind being rebuilt like the Bionic Woman. But the important bit is that she argued against envisioning prosthetics as extensions of the self, and instead repositioned them as interfaces between the body/self and the world. By focussing on how a prosthesis can create a whole social body, we erase the physical body's work and pain. (Those sexy cheetah legs require gaining a huge amount of hip and thigh strength and relearning one's sense of balance because of differences in bipedal and quadripedal locomotion, and all prosthetics run the risk of chafing and infection.) Instead, she argued, we need to attend to the kinds of "tenuous and incomplete connections" at hand. Anyone interested in mobile, wearable or embedded technologies might learn something valuable from this position: a focus on prosthetic technologies as interfaces rather than extensions brings into high relief matters of infrastructure and issues of access and use, and highlights techno-social fragilities that challenge technologically deterministic perspectives.

On day 2, I made it to Peter-Paul Verbeek's presentation on bringing Don Idhe's postphenomenology and Latour's actor-network theory together, as he argued in his book What Things Do. I like his ideas about technological mediation, but can't quite manage to sign up for Idhe's perspective that holds it all together. I really do favour the kind of radical empiricism that Latour advocates, with its focus on (externalist) action and descriptive methods rather than (internalist) perception and normative interpretation.

Unfortunately, by the end of the 'Translating Latour' session I was starting to feel ill enough to go back to where I was staying and rest a bit. Unfortunately, I just kept feeling worse and worse and eventually decided to return to Ottawa. That means I missed the rest of the conference and spent the weekend in bed, which was definitely not what I had planned. (I also didn't expect to run into a student doing her observation assignment at the train station, but that's another story.) In any case, other highlights of my truncated trip included meeting Marguerite Bromley - who kindly took us through XS Lab's recent e-textile projects - and catching up with Joey and Chris Salter.

Joey also introduced me to Barry Sanders, Director of the Institute for Quantum Information Science at the University of Calgary, who was at the conference checking out what the social scientists were saying about the scientists. I thought his suggestion that there should be someone there studying the people who study people was wonderful, and we talked a lot about emerging technologies and how future-oriented technology visions are instrumental in positioning current research. I've taken up the connection between actual and imagined techno-social spaces in my dissertation, as well as in an article that's currently under review, so stay tuned for more on that! Barry also introduced me to all sorts of things about physics culture, including entire journals dedicated to the problem of instrumentation and the ability to formally appeal publication rejections. In return, all I could offer was the suggestion that he might enjoy classic lab studies like Sharon Traweek's Beamtimes and Lifetimes and Karin Knorr Cetina's Epistemic Cultures. But I can't wait to visit his lab the next time I'm out west!

So, good times - and if I were still in town this is where you'd find me over the next few days:

Tonight, STUDIO XX - Feminist art centre for technological exploration, creation, and critique - is celebrating their 10th anniversary with "the release of xxxboîte, a collection of critical writing and a DVD compilation of works celebrating the last 10 years of Montreal’s own new media and network arts centre for women." Bonne fête et félicitations!

Kick off the 2007 HTMlles festival with a toast to the community that made it all happen. New texts from one of the four founding mothers, Kim Sawchuk, as well as extraordinary artists, Anna Friz, J.R. Carpenter, Michelle Kasprzak, and Marie-Christine Mathieu, and a DVD compilation that is part humourous, part touching, and all guerilla girl action - a true portrait of Studio XX!

HTMlles8 - "The festival's eighth edition investigates social, political, territorial, personal, and conceptual mobility. Occurrences and exclusions, detours and thorough-fares, in as much as parameters and expansions define the movement of ideas and people. This year's artists explore this theme in the context of the body, the environment, urban and cultural landscapes, social-political ecologies and barriers, as well as measures and tools of both control and renewed autonomy in an increasingly advanced technological world."

Ayesha Hameed, one of this summer's BNMI Reference Check residents, has co-authored a paper with Leila Pourtavaf - Border Controls / Border Movements - and she'll have a video installation up as well.

And as if that's not enough...



Drawn & Quarterly is one of my favourite comics publishers, and their good-looking new store launch party is this Friday night. I'd go just to see if Julie Doucet is there. She's fucking brilliant. Oh, and to pick up some new comics of course.

À la prochaine...

PICK

1037 Flushing Avenue, 718-303-2047

Williamsburg / Greenpoint / Bushwick

97 Kenmare Street, 212-431-5795

Soho

535 West 22nd Street, 3rd Floor, 646-230-9610

Chelsea

[Image: White Noise/White Light, Athens, by Höweler + Yoon/MY Studio].

I stumbled on an old project from the summer of 2004 today, by Höweler + Yoon/MY Studio, called White Noise/White Light.
The project was on display in Athens during the 2004 Olympics:

Comprised of a 50' x 50' grid of fiber optics and speakers, "White Noise/White Light" is an interactive sound and light field that responds to the movement of people as they walk through it... As pedestrians enter into the fiber optic field their presence and movement are traced by each stalk unit, transmitting white light from LEDs and white noise from speakers below.

And though I wasn't in Athens to see the thing in person, it certainly did photograph well.

[Image: White Noise/White Light, Athens, by Höweler + Yoon/MY Studio].

Juxtaposed with the Parthenon in the background, the effect, in fact, looks quite mesmerizing.
Electrical practicalities and issues of light pollution aside, it'd be nice to install something like this for a few nights along the rim of the entire Grand Canyon... Then fly over it in a glider, at 3am, taking photographs.

UPDATE: How strange: I came home from work today to find two copies of Architect magazine waiting for me in the doorway – and lo! On p. 49 of their September 2007 issue there's nothing else but "White Noise/White Light" by Höweler + Yoon... Architect says: "The experience and publicity that Höweler + Yoon gained from the Olympics project have led to new commissions and further explorations in up-to-the-nanosecond lighting technologies." Interesting overlap.

(Earlier: Archidose blogged it).

A visual history of giant spheres.

1850: Baron Haussmann and engineer Eugene Belgrand design the modern Paris sewer system.The sewers are regularly cleaned using large wooden spheres just smaller than the system's tubular tunnels. The buildup of water pressure behind the balls forces them through the tunnel network until they emerge somewhere downstream pushing a mass of filthy sludge.

(via i like)

(link)

Last week's saga of MTA workers seizing bicycles locked to a subway stair railing in Brooklyn illustrated, yet again, just how far New York City has to go towards making bicycles an integral part of the city's transportation system. As Larry Littlefield aptly commented, "The MTA doesn't see bikes as an extension of the transit system. It's a new concept here."

Indeed, it is a new concept for New York City. And if one has never seen a city where it's done well, the idea of bicycles functioning as an extension of a transit system may be somewhat unimaginable.

I saw some great examples of a bike-oriented transit system just a few weeks ago during a trip to Bogotá, Colombia. I was there with StreetFilms' Clarence Eckerson, Transportation Alternatives' Karla Quintero and Project for Public Spaces' Ethan Kent. The New York City Streets Renaissance team was taken around the city by Gil Peñalosa, Bogotá's former Parks Commissioner and brother of former Mayor (and current mayoral candidate) Enrique Peñalosa and Eduardo Plata of the Fundación Por el País Que Queremos, otherwise known as The Foundation for the Country That We Want.

(Update: Enrique lost the election to a far-left candidate promising an impossibly expensive subway system for Bogotá).

As a part of our tour, Gil took us to the Portal de las Américas, a major terminal of the TransMilenio bus system in the southwestern corner of the city. There, in the ground floor of the bus terminal, Gil showed us a bike parking facility unlike anything we have in New York and easily as nice as anything one might find in the most bike-friendly cities of Northern Europe.

With a ticket-taker, security guard and space for somewhere around 700 bikes it was, without question, the finest Cicloparqueadero any of us had ever seen (Granted, it was also the only Cicloparqueadero we'd ever seen).

New York City transportation advocates, I think, are accustomed to being told in contradictory fashion, that our various transportation agencies are either too focused on mega-projects to pay attention to something this small or too cash-strapped to do something this big. So, we immediately wanted to know how this project came about and how much it cost to build and run. Gil didn't have the numbers at his fingertips, but as a part of the mayoral administration that conceived and launched TransMilenio, he was able to explain the thinking behind it.

"For every 25 people who ride bikes to the terminal," Gil said, "That is one less 'feeder bus' we need to run through the neighborhoods. You do the math and pretty quickly you see it makes financial sense to set aside some space and hire a security guard to help people to ride their bikes."

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(Read the story on the MAKE blog)

An artist has been sentenced to probation for setting up a secret apartment inside a shopping mall's parking garage as part of a project on mall life. abc / pics

The President of the United States is hellbent on being able to order the torture of other human beings. This despite an overwhelming amount of evidence that torture is not the most effective means of eliciting accurate information from suspects. One can only conclude that indeed, for this man, the point of torture is simply torture.

Despite attempting to fool his nation into believing he doesn't approve of torture, his administration was exposed today in The New York Times as saying one thing in public, but secretly orchestrating legal cover for doing the opposite:

When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush’s second term and Mr. Gonzales’s tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.

Congress and the Supreme Court have intervened repeatedly in the last two years to impose limits on interrogations, and the administration has responded as a policy matter by dropping the most extreme techniques. But the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums, officials said. They show how the White House has succeeded in preserving the broadest possible legal latitude for harsh tactics.

Now I should warn you. I have absolutely no tolerance for the morally and intellectually bankrupt idiots who'll engage in sophomoric hypotheticals of ticking bomb scenarios to justify their support for legal torture. The probability of judicial leniency in the face of a true emergency is all the reassurance a decent human being should need to act as they feel necessary should some "24"-style fantasy ever materialize (and even if that probability wasn't reassuring, does anyone really believe a decent person would just sit there and think, "Uh, I might go to jail, I guess I have to let thousand of people die"?).

Therefore, there is no need whatsoever for the government of the United States to authorize under any conditions the same types of abuse of suspects we had consistently condemned in other countries up until this current resident of the White House moved in. The fact that he feels compelled to issue secret workarounds of the law suggests he has some idea why it's wrong, but just not enough to fulfill the oath he took at his inauguration. If he's incapable of protecting the nation within the law he should say so (and seek changes in the legislation, openly, so the public knows what he is) or resign. Finally it's utterly unacceptable that our President should lie to us about something so fundamental to our collective humanity.

Boy in court on terror charges

A British teenager who is accused of possessing material for terrorist purposes has appeared in court.

The 17-year-old, who was arrested in the Dewsbury area of West Yorkshire on Monday, was given bail after a hearing at Westminster Magistrates’ Court.

It is alleged he had a copy of the “Anarchists’ Cookbook”, containing instructions on how to make home-made explosives.

His next court hearing has been set for 25 October.

The teenager faces two charges under the Terrorism Act 2000.

The first charge relates to the possession of material for terrorist purposes in October last year.

The second relates to the collection or possession of information useful in the preparation of an act of terrorism.

He stood in the dock wearing a baggy, blue hooded top and only spoke to confirm his name and date of birth.

After the 40-minute hearing, the teenager was released on bail under several conditions.

A second 17-year-old who is facing similar charges has already been remanded in custody and will also appear at the Crown Court on 25 October.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7030096.stm

So, there is a young man in court for posessing a book that people have read for over three decades:

This is a book that you can get from many places on the internets, for example:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/89607/Anarchists-Cookbook-IV-4-14

And I guarantee you that once news of this case becomes widespread the number of places where you can get it will triple.

It is absurd on several levels that this book should be illegal. Firstly, you have been able to get it for thirty years. Two, it is your right to read any book that you like. Three, you can get it anywhere via the internets.

Are they now going to say that sites on the internets cannot store and serve this book? Pathetically and predictably, ‘yes’ is the answer.

They will never succeed, firstly because america’s first amendment rights protect books like this, and there is no way that you can block the internets….but you know this.

What is so appalling is that this poor chap is being hauled over the coals over a book, over his right to posses and read a book.

And leave it to BBQ to give the story a misleading title. It should have read, “Boy in court for possessing thirty year old book”.

…The Dark Times!

Want a wearable Big Daddy helmet? Do you have $250? Also available via eBay for you BioShock lovers is a copy of the limited edition game signed by the LE cover artist Adam Meyer. Check out the highlights for today:

Joystiquery
Joystiq interview: Elebits and Dewy's Adventure producer Shingo Mukaitouge
Joystiq interviews Polyphony Digital's Kazunori Yamauchi
Metareview: Clive Barker's Jericho (Xbox 360, PS3, PC)
Metareview: Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction
Metareview: Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure (Wii)
Today's most casual video: EA's Skate bail into sit down
Today's most time-traveling video: GTA: Vice City Back to the Future mod
Wii Fanboy Weekly: October 17th, 2007 - October 24th, 2007

News
Famitsu gives Super Mario Galaxy 38/40
Schafer: No new Psychonauts on the way
Gran Turismo TV to feature BBC's Top Gear
Demo for Need For Speed: ProStreet is on Live
Will Wright says Spore around six months out
Harmonix looks beyond Rock Band
Anderson says Castlevania film moving quickly
Man. Cathedral accepts Sony's Resistance apology, sort of
Toshiba says 'no comment' to HD DVD Xbox 360
First screens show Street Fighter 2 HD in action, looking good
GameStop's world takeover continues with 5,000th store
Xbox Live India launches Nov. 5
New details on Ninja Gaiden 2's violent tendencies
Codemasters boards the Steam train
THQ brings SpongeBob and three others to XBLA
Reminder: This Wario pumpkin could win Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles
Uncharted completed, demo expected mid-November
Elder Scrolls IV: Shivering Isles headed to PS3 on Nov. 20
Wildfires prompt Midway to evacuate San Diego office

Rumors & Speculation
Rumor: Animal Crossing going the MMO route

Culture & Community
BAFTA: BioShock game of the year, Wii Sports wins most awards
Zero Punctuation irons out Super Paper Mario

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SPIRAL ROLLERS DRIVE ODD SPEED BOAT
CLEAVING the water at express-train speed, a propellerless power boat of new design may shatter existing speed marks if it fulfills the hopes of its West Easton, Pa., inventor. Its slim hull rides upon three buoyant, barrel-shaped rollers, of which the forward two are connected to the power plant and revolve at high speed.

An octopus with nine tentacles was spotted at the Marusan Seafood Shop in Marugame, Japan (Kagawa prefecture) on October 26, one day after it was caught in the Seto Inland Sea. Masa Koita, the 60-year-old shop manager, noticed the abnormal Common Octopus (Octopus vulgaris) after he had boiled it in preparation for market. “In 40 years of handling seafood, I’ve never seen an octopus like this,” he said.

A spokesperson for the Akashi Seafood Council in nearby Hyogo prefecture confirmed the unusual nature of the extra-tentacled creature: “In Akashi, we might see one every 20 years or so. They are extremely rare.”

Koita says he will show off the octopus for a few days before selling it to a lucky customer.

[Source: Asahi]

1600m up the mountain Colletto Fava in Piemonte, Italy we find a quite unusal sight - a giant 60m tall pink rabbit. But before you go “Aww, that’s cute” notice that his woolen guts are spilling out onto the mountainside.

Then giant wool bunny is the work of Gelitin, a group of artists from Vienna, who explain “It’s supposed to make you feel small, like Gulliver. You walk around it and you can’t help but smile.”. The rabbit is expected to stay there until 2025 and hikers are invited to climb atop the “belly-summit” for a view over the village of Artesina below.

Thanks: MrPumpernickel

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My recent work has been influenced a great deal by the work of Cybernetican Gordon Pask (1928-1996)  from his interactive installations to his work with Architects Cedric Price, John Fazer and Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte. Its always interesting to see how Pask’s work continues to inspire a range of contemporary art work so I was inteersted to find out from Network Performance about Roots (2005-06) by Roman Kirschner. Roots is a world with a fluid atmosphere in a glass tank. Dark crystals grow trying to make connections. Constellations develop. They generate sound. And after some time they dissolve into clouds.The installation is based on the model of a chemical computers devloped by Pask.

Electricity is pulsed through the whole Sculpture. It is the key to the constant transformation. Growth changes the flow of the current. The modified flow changes the growth. Software and Hardware leave the next step to the material. The voltages at each wire are put through a resonance filter and thus transformed into sound. The 4/4 pulse results in a sublime rhythm. Movie of Roots (QT 10,73MB) This piece will be presented as part of Nature [of Man] exhibition.

a collection of visually stunning maps of the geological composition of the lunar surface, based on data from lunar missions in the 1960’s and 1970’s. the contrasting colors & seemingly random shapes of the clusters of craters transform normally boring looking informational maps in objects of visual art.

[link: astrogeology.usgs.gov|via generatorx.no & 30gms.com]

Come check out this workshop tomorrow at Eyebeam, 12.oo:

The Edible Excess Machine is a device designed to purify and remove harmful bacteria from waste. In order to face our planetary emergency, we want to take advantage of New York City’s precious but wasted resources, to explore new age forms of nutrition free of bacteria and turn our city into the first truly sustaintable city in the world. The more you waste, the more you eat. Waste it and taste it! we say.

The EEM functions using a rescued vintage TV as an X-Ray emitter to irradiate waste and sterlize it. Once the waste is safe, we will produce fresh local products that you can obtain for free in your nearest organic green market.

Spacecraft Fleeting Architecture and Hideouts, edited by Robert Klanten and Lukas Feireiss (Amazon USA and UK.)

Publisher Die Gestalten Verlag says: Spacecraft presents projects that meet the changing spatial needs of our modern lifestyles and that are simultaneously expanding our current understanding of architecture. On the one hand, the book features flexible, fleeting structures that only exist for a limited time. On the other hand, Spacecraft focuses on spaces that are used temporarily. Whether vacation homes, urban hideouts, art projects, pavilions or studios, all of the included work is distinguished by a playful, unconventional use of space.

The casting is rather impressive. You'll find the big names and the emerging talents but what really hits a cord with me is that along with the architecture studios whom you expect to find in such book (Diller Scofidio + Renfro, LAB[au], Atelier Bow-Wow, the Hyperbolic Research Group, realities.united, etc.) there is a fantastic blend of designers (Troika, Quinze and Milan), media artists (etoy.corporation, Husman Hacque, the Graffiti Research Lab, etc) and other contemporary artists (such as Andrea Zittel, Olafur Eliasson, Tom Sachs, Atelier van Lieshout, the Chapuisat Brothers, etc.)

Lukas Feireiss who "curated" the book justifies the choice of engaging with the subject from a multi-disciplinary perspective by writing that the discipline of space creation has long ceased to be a domain reserved to the sole architects which in turn reveals that the standard definitions of space in art, architecture and design have been somewhat extended. The creative crafting of space gives thus rise to very experimental and surprising buildings reflecting the new parameters that most of us have to face nowadays: increased mobility, new working conditions, ubiquitous computing, etc.

Las Palmas Parasite by Korteknie Stuhlmacher Architecten

The titles of the chapters are quite appealing:

Off Track presents dwellings that are beyond the beaten track of architecture and usual locations. Most of the ideas proposed are meant for those who dream of living a flexible, free and nomadic life.

Among the dozens of examples, i liked Campinski, the result of a 4 day workshop led by osa - office for subversive architecture at the Darmstadt University of Technology. The brief asked students to transform a predominantly industrial harbour into a place for living by hacking the existing building structure with simple igloo tents.

Campinksi by osa

The zitronenscheibe (shown above and below) combines 6 tents, keeping a segment open to enable the dweller to fix it to bars or any other kind of structure.

Campinksi by osa

Modular explores building elements made of containers, boxes and other flexible room modules.

Moonrider

Favourite in the lot is Moonrider, by Dutch group OpTrek, a commentary on the extensive urban development in the Transvaal district of The Hague. In 2002, the municipality was planning to demolish and radically restructure this neighbourhood as part of an urban development plan. OpTrek was concerned about the many social and spatial changes and their consequences for the neighbourhood and its residents. OpTrek invited artists and architects to visualize the social and urban-development transformation in Transvaal through works of art designed to reach a wider public. Moonrider, created by Japanese artist Tatsurou Bashi (alias Tazro Niscino), was a suspended cafe part of the OpTrek programme. Customers could grab a pair of binoculars and have a better look at the surrounding area.

Moonrider

Over the Top is about "parasitic" structures added on to existing buildings. My fav is Under Heaven. For an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Leonard van Munster place a 9 meter high tree on top of the building. Nested in the tree was a little dwelling made of fruit crates and other found materials.

Shanty Town takes its cue from the informal buildings and settlements formats often found in developing countries.

My pick is Hyperespace by Gregory and Cyril Chapuisat. The artists created a labyrinthic burrow in the main hall of the Neue Kunst Halle, St. Gallen, Swizerland. Visitor were invited to enter the space and wriggle, slide and crawl through it, mostly in the dark and going through various level of difficulty.

Showtime is dedicated to performative spaces within the art world.

Example: The very Pasta&Vinegar-esque Parasite Architecture, by Shahram Entekhabi, is an extension of the Bunkier Museum (Cracow, Poland). The structure, made of 4000m of caution tape, feeds off the existing space and also offers another perspective on the notion of mass migration and the perceived existence of migrants.

There are loads of images, big ones. And a little bit of text. It feels like visiting an architecture biennale rather than reading a book. It's eclectic, full of ideas so stimulating that you wonder whether you haven't swallowed a prozac pill with your coffee without noticing it, there's always a good surprise at the corner, sometimes the explanatory notices hanged close to the model or the pictures gives you the information you are looking for, sometimes you get no detail at all and that's frustrating.

Flying into Vegas last night to speak at a conference hosted somewhere inside the Venetian Hotel by the Urban Land Institute, I read Cormac McCarthy's recent novel, The Road. It's a book I'd long wanted to read but kept putting off for some reason, and I'm glad I finally read it.

[Image: By Trevor Manternach, found during a Flickr search].

If you don't know the book, the basic gist is that the United States – and, we infer, everything else in the world – has been annihilated in what sounds like nuclear war. But all of that is just background for the real meat of the book.
The Road follows a father and son as they walk south, starving, toward an unidentified coast. They cross mountains and prairies and forests; everything is burned, turned to ash, or obliterated. The father is coughing up blood and the skies are permanently grey.
Briefly, I'd be interested to hear, out of sheer curiosity, where other people think the book is "set" – because it sounds, at times, like the hills of New York state or even western Massachusetts; at other times it sounds like Missouri, Tennessee, parts of Mississippi, and the Gulf Coast; at other times like the Sierra Nevadas, hiking down toward the rocky shorelines just north of, say, Santa Barbara. Sometimes it sounds like Oregon.
In any case, the only glimpse we get of the war itself is this – and all spelling and punctuation in these quotations is McCarthy's own:

The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions. He got up and went to the window. What is it? she said. He didnt answer. He went into the bathroom and threw the lightswitch but the power was already gone. A dull rose glow in the windowglass. He dropped to one knee and raised the lever to stop the tub and the turned on both taps as far as they would go. She was standing in the doorway in her nightwear, clutching the jamb, cradling her belly in one hand. What is it? she said. What is happening?
I dont know.
Why are you taking a bath?
I'm not.

After this, the landscape outside is described as "scabbed" and "cauterized," heavily covered in ash.
McCarthy memorably writes: "They sat at the window and ate in their robes by candlelight a midnight supper and watched distant cities burn."
The wife soon gone – indeed, she's only ever present through flashbacks – the father and son stumble south pushing their food supplies, a few toys, and some "stinking robes and blankets" in an old grocery cart. They come across Texas Chainsaw Massacre-like houses, as some bands of bearded survivors have taken to cannibalism.
Interestingly, every house seems vaguely terrifying to the young boy in a way that the dead forests and dried riverbeds simply do not. Empty houses on hills with their doors left open.
So their journey down the road continues:

By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. (...) Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.

And then they approach what appears to have been a place actually struck by those distant concussions of sound and light, the perhaps atomic bombs of an unexplained war:

Beyond a crossroads in that wilderness they began to come upon the possessions of travelers abandoned in the road years ago. Boxes and bags. Everything melted and black. Old plastic suitcases curled shapeless in the heat. Here and there the imprint of things wrested out of the tar by scavengers. A mile on and they began to come upon the dead. Figures half mired in the blacktop, clutching themselves, mouths howling. He put his hand on the boy's shoulder. Take my hand, he said. I dont think you should see this.

It's a good book. It's not perfect; a friend of mine quipped that it ends with "a failure of nerve," and yet the nostalgic tone of the book's final paragraph suited me just fine.
Which just leaves us, readers of things like this, preparing in whatever small ways we can to survive some undefined possible apocalypse of our own time here, the future politicized, the reservoirs drying, the religions hording arms and the oceans full of plastic. It'll be interesting to see what happens next.

Cormac McCarthy: The Road

Reuters - A teenager speeding through a German town in a go-kart with seven squad cars in hot pursuit managed to give the frustrated officers the slip, police said on Friday.