Just found out that one of my CC-licenced photos on Flickr was used in a WWF report on the Baltic Sea, namely concerning its overfertilisation countermeasures. Download the document here (beware, Finnish) check out the photo in its original crop.
Above photo was the closest thing to a making-of and was taken by Lasse K on the brink of a high water situation at Otsolahti.
Artist’s vision of life in 1984 / Pecha Kucha Nights Berlin
Last week I had a chance to check out CityWall – a public, interactive screen at Helsinki’s Lasipalatsi. It’s a multi-touch installation very much along the lines popularised by the film Minority Report and pioneered by Jeff Han. However, it is not based on FTIR, but “designed from the ground up to work outside in daylight”, said John Evans, member of the UIx project group of the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT.
Their project website explains the principles, so I won’t get into that. Another blogpost at Playpen is also good read. What cuts it for me, is the social and public aspect of their work. The content is drawn from Flickr, namely what’s labeled under tag “Helsinki”, will be fetched onto the CityWall to be accessed by the crowds, on-site in the city centre. This is the approach I love about it – tapping into the “user-generated content”, bringing it into a relevant context and having an advanced physical interface to play with
Of course CityWall is a work of such a nature, that it can hardly be without glitches at this point. It’s truly enjoyable only in the nighttime, so go now, the summer’s white nights take over as we speak.
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Update 29.5.2007
Somehow missed it on the first sweep, but lewism.org has also blogged about CityWall. Check out the comments below. Thanks to him I just found an interesting service Tagzania. O-ou, does it never stop…
It was about a year ago I crafted that laptop sleeve above from bubble wrap and gaffer, but somehow it wasn’t until today I added it to Thinglink, “an open database where makers can register their work for free and create labels for their products”.
More photos on Flickr under tag Thing:043XNE, and yes, a link to the thing itself.
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Update 17 May 2007
Uh-oh, something happened at Thinglink right after the day I posted this entry. It was right as rain but now my piece is gone and the user account as well. The current front page features only established design like Artek, Marimekko and Paola Suhonen. Was bubble wrap too much for them? Well, it seems they
Weltanschauung. That’s another fancy pancy German word you all saw coming up on this blog, right? The word maailmankatsomus translates it perfectly for the Finns. The International has to settle with two short words: world view.
Nevertheless, I’ve spared some thoughts on formulating Weltanschauung, building on a kind of an enlightened humanism, that is optimistic, based on reason, is creedless but tolerant and certainly doesn’t put mankind on some self-proclaimed pedestal. As I’ve got reservations about techno-faithful transhumanism, what I’m looking into is probably called post-humanism in general. Too bad the concept of humanism, in English at least, is almost synonymous to atheism. I don’t think it’s that straightforward.
There have been certain influences and interactions that have led me this far.
I listened to biologist Richard Dawkins’ “God Delusion” audiobook halfway through – until I fed up, because I felt the author was putting words into other peoples’ mouths and instilling ready thoughts into my head. Categorical atheism isn’t exactly a constructive approach. Like, how Karstein said: “What we need, is peaceful co-existence, not militant atheism.” Ditto, can’t disagree.
Although left unfinished, Dawkins still managed to instill one thought I couldn’t shake: agnosticism is for indecisive wussies. You know, Michael Scofield confessed, “I choose to have faith. Because without that, I have nothing. It’s the only thing that’s keeping me going.”
If a strictly secular scientist had little to offer, so seemed the institutions at hand. A Lutheran Easter procession in East Helsinki looked and felt like a gloomy lynch mob – and a jovial, local celebrity Orthodox priest didn’t raise much trust having said, that after buying an Alfa Romeo sports car, he was finally relieved of envy.
Luckily the institution hadn’t had its last word yet.
I’ve been listening to the podcast of the programme Merkkituote on Finnish YLE Radio 1. Nothing short of excellent public service. In one recent episode they interviewed Richard Holloway, the retired bishop of Edinburgh. He’s got a really convincing accent, a voice with whom he delivered such progressive thoughts, that pushed some stationary waves in my thinking into motion again.
So, I think that people should claim sprituality for themselves – and if they find that religious spirituality helps them do that, then fine. But, if it doesn’t, then I don’t think they should thereby just give up the spiritual life – because I think it is bigger than the religious expressions of it. Just as I think ethics and morality are far bigger than religious claims about those things.
The bishop leads me to assert, that faith as a spiritual position is bigger than religious definitions of it. But is it just a matter of free will? One simply chooses to have faith?
