Feeling your way through urban space

Erik Conrad's 'Palpable City' project allows you to 'feel' your way through space, by augmenting our optical sense with tactile stimulation:

"Palpable City is a site specific installation that transforms an everyday walk through the city into an exploration of a new tactile landscape. Participants wear a vest outfitted with a GPS, some custom hardware and software, and an array of vibrotactile actuators (vibrating pager motors) that are sewn into the vest. As they walk, they encounter varying vibrotactile patterns--changes in rhythm, location or intensity--dependent upon their location. The tactile 'textures' change in relation to the spatial form of their immediate environment. As they walk, and the shape of the 'empty' space around them changes, participants experience new rhythms of the city as tactile sensations generated by the vest."

Erik has designed a system that maps the tactile sensations produced as you walk through a space. His Palpable City page has a range of different maps that represent these sensations, including an interactive one which can be used to follow a particular walk through a cityscape, and to track the optical and tactile perspectives produced by this space. 

New lecture from Manuel DeLanda

The European Graduate School (EGS) posts a great range of lectures, seminars, and interviews on YouTube. I've just noticed that a new lecture from one of my favourite thinkers, Manuel DeLanda, has been posted. The talk is titled 'Materialism, Experience and Philosophy', and while I haven't had a chance to watch all of it yet, DeLanda is always worth listening to for his engaging discussions, and further development, of themes found in the work of Gilles Deleuze.

More lectures and seminars from the EGS (and the further 11 parts of this one) can be found here.

ALEA 2008 Presentation

The 2008 ALEA/ATEA National Conference was held in Adelaide last week. I was privileged to be invited to give a presentation on my work around digital literacies. I spoke mostly about research I've done on social networking sites and the kinds of practices with text associated with them.

Here are the slides

Alea2008

view presentation (tags: literacy digital text)

Mark Iwinski's photography is featured in the first volume of new the online journal inflexions. It offers an interesting perspective on changing urban landscapes.

"[Mark's] current work entitled This Was Now and the ghost buildings in Terrains of Absence use a photo-performative version of ana-photography. They reveal losses to the architectural fabric of our cites through urban renewal and create a spectral slippage between the past and our current sense of time and place."

More photos here.