• Urban Drift • m-Learning with apps • Dennis Dollens

Ways of Seeing. I was reading Mark’s site and enjoying his post of Whaam!
Last week I was in Los Angeles and saw the Dennis Hopper retrospective at MoCA (Geffin), where Hopper’s 1961 photo struck me as an intense (windshield, mirror, signs) communicator of visual culture as mediated by analog technology. That set me remembering that Reyner Banham in his classic city text “Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies” discusses how the city of LA, is perceived as screen-shot views from the automobile’s windshield and rear-view mirrors.

Three related technologies magnifying (analog & virtual) our worlds and the antique views that I recently saw in an exhibition in Los Angeles have prompted me to think of the hybridized way we see and think using technologies of magnification — our mind mapping of large and small, infinite and proximate.
The jpeg shows cutting-edge research as of 1665. The book, “Micrographia” reports and reproduces Robert Hooke’s drawings and ideas as he worked with a microscope similar to the one pictured center and right (the insert magnification of a flea is from the reproduction microscope photographed with my iPhone). In the lower photo I am using a non-optical SEM (scanning electron microscope) last June for biomimetic research related to architectural performance and aesthetics. And yesterday Hamish began a visualization project that places places we know in relation to places our colleagues know/use/like — http://maps.google.co.uk/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=109818472753695816840.0004905e8d3ad5412e880&ll=55.947277,-3.178482&spn=0.039218,0.139217&t=h&z=13 — overmapping life style excerpts onto GoogleEarth’s telescoped virtual world. I’ve never considered the microscope or telescopes as visual prostheses, but now I wonder if they are.

I can imagine a Lifestream SF story where the subject (me) slowly morphs into the information flow becoming the living stream. Maybe that’s not SF; I am also thinking of containers, freezing, and mists for example, shaping, forming, and distributing water. The search to guide and shape the information fluidity here, in the Lifestream, is more difficult to understand–partly because they are not clear elemental, molecular groups electromagnetically bonded, as defined in the being of H20. While water is still mysterious to science it is much less so than life where links to the fluidity of thought and consciousness are painfully resistant to understanding. The fluid here is the massively molecular (and electromagnetic) chaos of my thinking: slowness in learning; monkey mind as per Buddhism; resistance and presence; here and now and then; as well as the genuineness of Derrida’s difference.
I’ve been relieved to conclude (I hope not wildly extrapolate) from our readings, particularly in Hand’s “Hardware to Everywhere,” that digital culture, in our class context, includes the physicality and perception of urbanisms (and thus by default architecture and nature’s nature). Then, by further extension, material flow.
In thinking about cyberspace and the digital prosthetics of being/presence (massive reliance on AI as per Google or weather forecasting, for example), but thinking of them now, like thinking about this Lifestream, as the liquidity of class presence and the manifestation of student to tutor and student to student being. Within this thoughtstream, the sequence of images posted here from Los Angeles, especially the FarmLAB and Rosslyn Hotel images, make the equivalent of molecular “weak bonds” in a context striving for eventual “strong bonds” of me saying, “Hello everyone, my thoughts are streaming in these directions”.

Dystopic, mysterious, biological, and beautiful animation as a double-bill for Benditio.

Run by Jenna Didier and Oliver Hess M&A has been a site for experimental design, permaculture, robotics, and structures. This image shows the final days of a collaboration with the design group Layer. Its inflated components shelter water misters creating a cloudlike interior section