Justin Pickard

Street as Platform

This from Dan Hill, over at City of Sound;

“We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic.  This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street.

Such data emerges from the feet of three friends, grimly jogging past, whose Nike+ shoes track the frequency and duration of every step, comparing against pre-set targets for each individual runner. This is cross-referenced with playlist data emerging from their three iPods. Similar performance data is being captured in the engine control systems of a stationary BMW waiting at a traffic light, beaming information back to the BMW service centre associated with the car’s owner.

The traffic light system itself is capturing and collating data about traffic and pedestrian flow, based on real-time patterns surrounding the light, and conveying the state of congestion in the neighbourhood to the traffic planning authority for that region, which alters the lights’ behaviour accordingly. (That same traffic data is subsequently scraped by an information visualisation system that maps average travel times on to house price data, overlaid onto a collaboratively produced and open map of the city.)”

Go to the original post, and read it all.  Now.

F3: ‘Silver Eagle’

For me, it’s been a fairly odd few days, and I thought I’d try something different. As such, this week’s F3 is rooted firmly in truth.  Behold!  Friday Flash Non-fiction:

SILVER EAGLE

It’s dusk and I’m outside the library, watching the skies. A temporary reprieve from tales of the American Empire, urban ghosts, and sweatshop cyborgs unable to wash the blood from their hands. She said it’d be soon, but I still don’t know what I’m looking for.

Even now, the bald-headed Frenchman stalks the corridors of my mind, filling the air with his musings on life and death. Slumped against a wall with needles in my feet, I can but scream.

Trying to shake the image, I stretch my limbs and continue the sweep. Will I even see it? Through last night’s cider-fuelled haze, I should have thought to ask for more details. Instead, I left with the name of a Slovakian sociologist. Brilliant.

After a couple of minutes, I’m joined by L – a friendly face from a class I took last term. We chat about essays. Thoughts of my unwritten tale. Of pirates, terrorists and criminals – hiding in a shell they forged from the discarded fragments of a dying nation-state. She smiles. I tell her how, yesterday, a seagull stole my lunch – plucked from my hands with a flapping of wings. She seems suitably outraged. It’s cold, and I worry that I’m talking too much.

Then we see it. A light out to the west, where the twilight fades to sapphire. We watch in silence, L and I, as – wings outstretched – it cuts an arc across the heavens.

__________

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Fiction Pyongyang

Short film visualizing a capitalist North Korea. Well, probably – apart from cool, I’m not quite sure what it is.