Archive for the Category » Spaces «

The written language, made of letters, words and phrases, is how we mostly do internet search. It doesn’t have be that way though. It is very possible, for example, to search a photograph by drawing its approximation. This is shown by ‘retrievr’, the graphic search engine of System One Labs. In retrievr, you can do exactly this type of non-textual searches. You can also search by uploading an image. ‘Retrievr’ searches for results in the flicr database.

‘Retrievr’ is a python implementation of an image search algorithm originally developed by Chuck Jacobs, Adam Finkelstein and David Salesin at the University of Washington. This algorithm is also implemented in imgSeek is a standalone image management application for UNIX systems (such as Linux or Mac OS/X).

It is interesting to put search engines such as retrievr in context with other non-textual search applications : Shazam, for example, the song recognition service on iPhone and Android. For what we face today is only a biginning of the development of search engines of this type. Projects like these will most probably contribute to the ongloing decline of the importance of text in favour of images and sounds, which has been on its way ever since the advent of television.  Step by step, we are entering, perhaps, a post-textual era.

After a long choice process, my best picks go to the following podcasts:

1. The classic tales podcast:  Delivers professional performances of unabridged classics.  Enjoy classic short fiction from Poe, Dickens, Hardy, and others. Performed by character actor B.J. Harrison.
2. Das philosophische radio im WDR 5-Radio zum Mitnehmen: Um dem Bedürfnis nach Austausch mit anderen nachdenklichen Menschen zu entsprechen, hat WDR 5 mit der Sendung “Das philosophische Radio” ein einzigartiges, regelmäßiges Forum für die öffentliche philosophische Diskussion geschaffen: Immer am Freitagabend von 20.05 bis 21.00 Uhr werden ein Philosoph oder eine Philosophin über ein Thema, ein Buchautor oder eine Autorin über eine interessante und anregende These mit den Hörerinnen und Hörern von WDR 5 philosophieren. Moderator der Sendung ist Jürgen Wiebicke.
3. France Culture – Les nouveaux chemins de la connaissance: L’un des rares podcast de philosophie centré davantage sur les thèmes philosophiques que sur les philosophes.
4. RSR – Histoire Vivante: Le meilleur podcast historique, tirant tout l’avantage des archives audio.
5. utopod: Podcast francophone des littératures de l’imaginaire
6. Hörspiel Pool – Bayern 2:  Das Beste aus der Deutschsprachigen Litteratur. Ein Download-Angebot des Bayerischen Rundfunks.

As my podcast aggreagator, I currently use Google listen on my Samsung Android device (Galaxy Spica). All above mentioned podcasts synchronize and render perfectly well with this software.

And what if consumption has superseded itself with the advent of Internet advertisement?

Since commercials are now possible on global scale, while being contextually aimed at specific audiences, it becomes less and less interesting to mass-produce for crowds subjugated by manufactured desire for standardized objects. Manufacturing myth, like cars, TV’s or CD players, is no more necessary to reach a sufficient audience for your business. For you are no more limited to sell your stuff to the guy next door and you don’t need to sell at million-scale either. With little investment, you can propose your Aberdeen-made blueberry and minth liqueur to a car mechanic in the suburbs of Beijing, who, just by chance, happens to like that sort of thing. If he’s in a hurry, you can even ship it with FedEx. All you have to do is to have your ad placed on spetialized sites (say “weirdliqueurs.com”): something youknowwho contextual ads and co. can take care of for you in no time.

What you can do, anyone can. Any product can be distrubuted and sold on global scale. You no more need to find yourself an optimal client nest beyond hills, seas and roadway crossings. You don’t need to spend thousands on commercials in general magazines that’ll only bring something if you sell millions of products. Small things can survive – many of them, in fact. And with the small things, the small desires for them. Many small desires that haven’t been manufactured for you by dinosaur brandmakers but that just happened to you, on last-year’s Seoul trip, say, where, looking at the Han river, you began to like that blueberry liqueur.

What this possibly means for our World is the end of mass production, mass labour, mass consumption, mass braindeath. Some time soon, you’ll make money by being creative again.  And at this very moment, we’ll enter into the new age of diversified consumption.

As for the new pathologies of the eight billions of singularities to come, that is another story to be told by science-fiction.

A couple of days ago, we’ve climbed on top of the Duomo of Milano. One of the most amazing features of Gothic structures like this are really is the way it treats rain water flow.The water, which falls on the vast surface of the roof, is first led to the sides, and then collected in such a way as to flow along the top of the magnificently decorated arc-boutants (flying buttresses), down to the pinnacles. It then flows though each pinnacle and is spat out, on the other side, by a gargoyle, upon the top of a smaller side-roof, and so on, by the mouths of other gargoyles down to the Piazza del Duomo.

Now this is a way to build meaning out of an everyday phenomena: here, rain water is made to participate to the dynamic structure of the gargoyles, which symbolically protect the church (i.e. the christian community) by spitting out God’s wrath on everything evil (doing so, they also accomplish something that the Greeks have called “catharsis“). At the same time, they participate to the simple sheltering function of the cathedral, by limiting the abrasive effect of rain water on its mineral structure.

And there is another thing: the roof of this cathedral is accessible and it obviously has been since it was build. It is difficult to prove this assertion from medieval written sources but the very comfortable stone stairway leading way up to there speaks for itself. Walking on the roof, you can see these gargoyles, and many other things that inspire a bodily sense of meaning, like the statues of many catholic saints, which, from the Piazza del Duomo, seem floating in the sky, but which, from the roof, can be seen as floating over the city of Milan, keeping a caring eye on its inhabitants. Looking at them from way up there, you experience a vertigo which could not be transmitted by written text.

The Duomo, to anyone who has access to its roof, thus works pretty much like a Zen garden: it is a factory of meaning whose every structural detail allows you to make a bodily experience of a transcendental reality. In this, it accomplishes a role similar to that of its interior, of which Yi Fu Tuan (Topophilia, 1974) has said:

“It involves sight, sound, touch and smell. Each sense reinforces the other so that together they clarify the structure and substance of the entire building, revealing its essential character.”

And by letting you experience this, helps you to produce meaning which you can inject into society by your spoken word. And this is precisely how we can imagine medieval priests used structures like these.

But the Duomo (and from here comes its factory status) does not have to be reserved to priests. It is so huge that hundreds of people can climb on the top of it or stroll inside. And while the interior allows for rituals and introspection, its roof allows for reflection on society and its relation with a transcendental meaning (notwithstanding the this-worldedness or other-worldedness of this transcendentality).

The Duomo isn’t the only example of this. The Sagrada Familia in Barcelona produces a much similar effect, only that here, the pervasive element is air, which howls and whistles as you turn round and crawl through corridors and stairways which lead you from tower to tower.

But there is a new element out of which you can build and that Aristotle has somehow omitted from his list: information.  If you have ever read Uberto Eco’s “Name of the Rose” or Borgès’ “La biblioteca de Babel” (in Ficciones), chances ares you’ve lived a similar exaltation of knowledge only while walking through the described constructs.

But information isn’t confined to text since twenty years. So now, what about you building such a factory of meaning in cyberspace?