Photographing for the desktop

On holiday this summer, I often found myself taking photos specifically for the purpose of having something nice to put on my desktop. And I realized that they all had certain common characteristics – large blocks of colour, no complicated patterns. They’re simple images to rest the eye when all programs are minimized.

I put up a collection of them here.

They’re images to make me happy in the morning, before the world intrudes on the stillness of my desktop.

Filed under: Images

City Session

“Haunted places are the only ones that people can live in” writes Michel De Certeau.

This week, I’ll be leading a seminar to a few choice locations in London. Inspired by Certeau’s essay “Walking in the City”, we’ll be doing a bit of philosophy with our feet. These sessions are about the space into which contemporary database-driven, networked “new media” fit. It is not so much a series of seminars about technologies of new media, as an invitation to think about the relationship between media and space.

Of course, the privileged medium of this section will be the walk. Walking is a “mapping” exercise, an experience of a place which connects the “Concept-city” of the map, the plan, the architect to the everyday practice of lived space. The narrative space of a formal walk, with storytelling and an itinerary to match, fits somewhere in between Certeau’s categories, belonging neither to the map or plan nor to the flow of everyday experience.

Therefore, for a few days we will treat selected bits of London as a story-space, an environment which simultaneously stores memories of the past, serves as a source of raw material for new stories, and provides a backdrop to imagined ones.

Some online resources to get us started:

Digital Urban blog – interesting resources on mapping and urban planning:
http://www.digitalurban.blogspot.com/

London Google Earth Streaming and splicing landmarks – lovely example of what Certeau calls the concept-city:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ij4Pwg4RqjY

Cities in Games video: The Getaway (a video game set among London locations)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8huO9KihVZ0

Hackney Boys video (driving). This is a very “Certeauian” video of two guys driving around, capturing a bit of the experience of navigating around the city, with all its incidental sights and sounds:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfUbApIHUk0

Filed under: Education, Media Theory

Touristing

The thing about living in London is that there aren’t any great extremes of weather. Yes, it gets hot for a few weeks, the occasional whisper of ice frosts the ground, and sometimes there’s rainfall of tropical intensity.

But I sometimes long for the intensity of weather that I grew up with in Iceland, and got used to in Minneapolis – drastic swings from hot to bitter cold, high winds blasting off the North Atlantic…

The reason Icelanders talk endlessly about the weather is that we have so much of it. And we love to complain about it. But after living abroad all these years I’ve begun to miss spending the day out in the cold and rain, and the feeling of slipping into a hot pool afterwards. That, and the very good protective clothing I wore to survive my summer vacation.

Filed under: Uncategorized , Pleasures