This has nothing really to do with technology and culture, just an image I love from my recent trip to Sicily.  It’s the duomo in the Ortygia island part of the city of Siracuse.  It was built in the 7th century, on top of, and incorporating, the much earlier Temple of Athena (5th c BCE).  Such a meditative, spare, space, after all the fabulosity of the Sicilian baroque architecture throughout the south of the island.

What I love about Philip’s work is the way he’s breaking down the hard line between the built and the natural environment, creating spaces that are permeable, changeable, and, well, responsive.  As we humans start to generate more data about where we are, and how we are using the space around us (for example, with our GPS-enabled phones, we ‘check in’ at locations) will we be able to provide buildings with more information about us, and how we want to use the space?  You can imagine a future in which architecture, the environment, and us, are all in a loop of information and response to that information.

Anyhoo, if you’re curious about Beesley’s thoughts, my interview with him on Spark is here

I actually had to spend a fair bit of time looking at it to figure out whether it was ironic, an art project, or a serious social networking cum messaging service.  Such is the nature of our time-shifting existence that I find it increasingly difficult, really and truly, to tell whether something is A/completely absurd or B/ a great idea.  Is this of a piece, say, leaving a letter with a lawyer to be read after you’re dead? Or is a difference in kind….a sort of proto-time travel?

Foxnews.com says that:

“According to the blog i-hacked.com, some commercial road signs, including those manufactured by IMAGO’s ADDCO division, can be easily altered because their instrument panels are frequently left unlocked and their default passwords are not changed.”

The speculation is that it was the work of university students, which is the digital equivalent of drunkenly stealing a street sign for the dorm room.

In addition to reminding me to watch L.A. Story and Land of the Dead again, it made me think about what happens when digital information is more widely dispersed among our real, physical environment. Will it take the ‘true-for-now’ tendency of the web out into the wild?

What I noticed about it, though, was the clever sign (sorry, didn’t have my camera) which combined the generic “Coffee Shop” name in a generic white font, with a white silhouette image of a squirrel. Trinity Bellwoods Park is locally famous for its population of white squirrels–I imagine they have a form of albinism. So, the uber-generic name was matched with a kind of hyper-local signifier of local neighbourhood pride.

It’s not the first time I’ve seen the image. Fleurtje had a purse with one on for a while; one of the neighbourhood shops had t-shirts with a white squirrel logo. I’m intrigued by this hyper-localism. Is it just a reflection of the fact that we’re a bigger city now, and so the population base supports it? Is it because so many people in this city were born somewhere else that it’s feeding a desire for place, for settlement? Or perhaps it’s a reaction to a broader sense of rootlessness. I talked about it on the podcast with Cathi a while ago. Any thoughts?

We’re always looking at technological change in its immediate technical impacts, but with very little sense of all the social organization that surrounds it. The way the social changes with new technology always seems to catch us by surprise. Reminds me of another great bit of McLuhanism: “As long as we adopt the Narcissus attitude of regarding the extensions of our own bodies as really out there and really independent of us, we will meet all technological challenges with the same sort of banana-skin pirouette and collapse.”

What would it mean to look at our technologies, those ‘extensions of our own bodies’ as imbued with culture, and embedded within culture?

I wonder whether it’s actually that we now live in a time of perpetual almostfuture. In the way that we have ennui about technological innovation, and lack surprise, hope and delight about the future. We seem perpetually not in the present, always in the almost tomorrow.

It’s amazing how much more exciting it is when you actually hear it as audio, rather than as a bunch of scripts. A kind of alchemy, really. Now only another 41 to make!

An interesting spin on this is the work of Paris-based street artist Ludo, who has been making a series called Nature’s Revenge. He creates images of plants appended with weapons or electronics, a symbol, I guess, of the other side of our war on nature. (via Design Boom) If there is such a thing as cyborg chic, what is it telling us about our relationship to nature?