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

This started with PacMan — learning strategies on the screen of my iPhone. PacMan’s game course that looks a lot like gridded cities. First I extrapolated it to a fractal, triangulated plan of the Barcelona Botanic Garden. Working with path tactics borrowed from PacMan, I outlined a game scenario for plant ID and research based in GPS mapping and QR plant tags and I tested them by pasting the QR tags in the garden. These basic game design decisions I then transferred to Barcelona streets where the game strategy was to use GPS tagging and mapping to locate and research urban street art and squats, build data bases for sharing with other classmates and create game trails others could follow. This later evolved with my own tracking of a graffiti project involving animal rights and beautiful chalked drawings all over the city. I never implemented a scoring system and only vaguely thought about one. I was thinking more of the game as a container for class activities — how to stimulate design research and prototyping from and on the street. How students could directly access urban information. As the end of the program comes into sight the work, more detailed in the blog posts below, is growing in significance as I begin to use aspects of mapping, tracking, tagging as movement strategies for development with smartphone design, e-learning programs. That’s where PacMan has delivered me and I’m still testing GPS tracking apps and Google Earth to eventually implement a university course. PacMan is a good friend now. Gee is a classic.

Jude Law uncontrollably gnaws cooked and sauced “mutant reptiles and amphibians.” Flesh chewed off, Law trapped in an osso buco-like rapture —Skeletal parts slightly dripping juices, shedding skin, pulled apart; sometimes pulled from his mouth. “I find this disgusting, but I can’t help myself” he says. A bionic pistol unassembled; it’s a prop. Pieces set on the table. Parts cooked in a Chinese restaurant’s special. Emergent, from an unknown logic (but who cares). Law intuits an assembly, snaps and clicks the organistic gun together. Decides who to kill. Not Allegra. • The pistol looks like its designer loved space invader sets/props a la 1950s TV and crossed them with submerged biosystems for a masterpiece of prop design and STL fabrication. But more — a reverie of product emergence through biological visualization — tactics of form from life systems. David Cronenberg 1999 theory. Frightening: sort of. Hysterical: sort of. Sublime (in a Burkian sense): totally. Uncanny: nth degree. A sublimely uncanny moment of biodesign witnessed in cinema consistent with neocyborgian embodiment and emergence. Could this be cognitively infectious? extended?

I was searching my notes in Barnett’s “A Will to Learn” and found I had highlighted this quote from Deleuze:

“A book of philosophy should be in part a very particular species of detective novel, in part a kind of science fiction.”
Difference and Repetition.

I’m catching on to the science fiction qualities of much of his writing (and A Thousand Plateaus) and liking the trails of thought they open, but it’s going to take me a while to get any perspective from detective novels — maybe I can switch in film noir since cinema was a deep source for him. Both aspects of SF and detective novels make clear exterior connections and extended cognition are part of the environment Deleuze placed his work in; I’m wondering if he had known the DIY and open-source movements, if his theories would today be more hybridized than cannonic.

Shatz, Adam. “Desire Was Everywhere.” The London Review of Books. 16 December 2010. 9-12. Review of: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives by François Dosse, translated by Deborah Glassman. Columbia, 651 pp. August 2010.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n24/adam-shatz/desire-was-everywhere

More and more I’m working through “A Thousand Plateaus,” reading it as a guide to DIY theory. The paragraph quoted below, form Adam Shatz in the December 2010 London Review of Books, has haunted me since first reading. It suggests an interesting view of how Deleuze and Guattari saw “A Thousand Plateaus” — I have finally ordered Dosse’s book but will continue to relay on this paragraph for a bit longer until it arrives. What I am thinking is that the free reading of American culture, the exuberance of pronouncement, the ‘hallucinatory experiences,’ its manifesto-like qualities, and in general its trippy nature (and trippy use of nature) situates it in a position ripe for hypertexting, overwriting, or more appealingly, as an open source thinking template — (clearly, not in the sense of publication rights.) I think the book, with a 2011 trippy bioscience/technology overlay ask for its embedded theory to be cognitively extended ☺. . . and I’m finding some good grafting candidates in neocyborgian work . . .

“Deleuze and Guattari had long envied American writers like Henry Miller and Allen Ginsberg, with their ‘gift for intensities, flows, machine-books, tool-books, schizo-books’: now it seemed as if the desiring revolution’s future was in America. ‘Everything important that has happened or is happening takes the route of the American rhizome: the beatniks, the underground, bands and gangs,’ they announced in A Thousand Plateaus, which appeared in 1980. An even stranger (and longer) work than Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus was a chaotic bricolage of anthropology, fractal geometry, music theory, psychoanalysis, literature, art history, physics and military history. It emerged, they said, from ‘hallucinatory experiences’ and read as if it had been written under the influence. They had signed their names, they said, ‘only out of habit’: ‘Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.’ Their celebration of ‘multiplicity’ generated a barrage of new concepts: rhizomes, war machines, striated and smooth space, nomadology, planes of immanence, faciality. Yet the book was recognisably a continuation of Anti-Oedipus, a hymn to the micro-political weapons of the weak, the ‘lines of flight’ and ‘nomadic’ resistance practised by subjugated groups in their struggles with state power. Once again they criticised psychoanalysis for reducing desire to the ‘family tree’ (the arborescent model), praising the rhizome’s ‘liberation of sexuality not only from reproduction but also from genitality’. Passages of fearsome theoretical density were punctuated with trippy slogans: ‘Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don’t sow, grow offshoots! Don’t be one or multiple, be multiplicities!’”