Means of being in the loop

Quoting The Obvious? via the LIFT lab (emphasis mine):

When I learned, via twitter, of the car bomb that didn’t go off in London last night my first thought was “oh well”.

I first heard of 9/11 via katastro.fi mailing list. I remember someone commenting, that “CNN’s surely getting lots of hits now”. I was at the Uni then. There was no television in the faculty. We gathered into the lobby’s kitchen around an old Macintosh with a shabby TV tuner. It only tuned in a Swedish news channel. This unlikely mediation of the disaster made it even more disturbing.

Mileage check

Halfway through the year and it’s time to thank you all everybody for visiting this site. More stats will follow… now, thanks and see you soon!

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So, here’s the bigger version of the map overlay and the same for the visitors graph.

Midsummer Air

Patrouille de France in Luc-sur-Mer (2005). Photo by Nitot.

First of all, yes, Midsummer is bygones for a week now. Nothing Midsummer-like happened here in Berlin, but where it counts, e.g. in Finland, I’ve heard the circumstances were excellent (see dw’s video, for example).

I tried to ask some people about their cultures’ customs. A Danish colleague mentioned bonfires and “witch burning” (sounds familiar). From the Germans I only got a bit of a weird eye as response. Apparently Midsummer is no big deal – why should it be, anyway?

Two things, each worth one eurocent come into mind. Firstly, Earth’s axial tilt results in dramatic seasonal changes in polar areas, hence the greater importance of solstices. Secondly, in the periphery, a greater deal of the native customs have survived the Christianisation or assimilated into it (or vice versa).

The celebration takes new forms all the time.

In the region I grew up in, there is a military air base. Then it was called the Finnish Air Force Academy. Now it’s just the Training Air Wing and in another ten years it will probably be consolidated to Poland altogether.

Every Midsummer since 1945 the air base hosts the all family Midnight Sun Airshow including a healthy mix of bouncing castles, popular music and military equipment on display. It’s bonfire, schlager and jet fighters for the masses, baby! Of course we went there a couple of times. Usually about 15000 other people think, that it’s perfectly not strange.

The catch of course is the international guests. Look at this clip, it pretty much summarises the whole deal in 23 seconds (mind the soundtrack, too bad there isn’t more). This year they had Patrouille de France. Once the Russian And, and… can you mention an air show without mentioning the Red Arrows?

The best act however was completely vernacular. Once they announced for an ill-parked vehicle to be moved. This was repeated several times along the evening. Finally a heavy-duty helicopter arrived. It had picked up a car (like in that James Bond film), flew off the premises and dropped the car off from, say 500 metres.

Then it was time to light the bonfire.

Berlin weak signals

I’ve been based in Berlin for almost two years now. That’s a long enough period to become receptive to certain changes in the environment. I consider them as “weak signals”.

• Teenagers’ week-end invasions. Yes, especially at the Sch
  

Doppelg

Piim

Kahlasin samalla hieman vanhoja s

MikroPaliskunta takes on the “new web”

In a week I’ll embark on a bicycle trip with a couple of friends. First, out of Berlin and then around it in anticlockwise direction. It’s a direct descendant of the last summer’s mikroPaliskunta road trip, but also something completely different.

Just wanted to elaborate on the new thoughts through writing…

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MikroPaliskunta experiments with the contemporary practices of travel, exploration and documentary. The project aims at reviving the journey of exploration in the context of 21st century – by assuming a civil perspective, appropriating do-it-yourself, sustainability and readily available technologies.

The first trip in August 2006 was done with a vintage Volvo ticking with domestic biodiesel. The second one, Berlin round tour, will be on bicycles. The third one might employ sailing as means of transport. The idea is that travelling and sustainability needn’t be mutually exclusive.

Events and findings are shared online. The first trip was documented on a single website, organised around themes and locations. The second one will be spread across existing blogging, placemarking and bookmarking services, photo and video sharing websites (i.e. Jaiku, Blogspot, Flickr, Vimeo, Tagzania). Unique tag “mikropaliskunta” will act as a label for relevant content on and between different online spaces. This also facilitates anyone to take part in the “movement”, because tagging is open by nature.

As a documentary project mikroPaliskunta assumes no single point of view or method. Perspectives include, but are not limited to – artistic, journalistic and scientific approaches. Diversity of individual perspectives, foci, identities and/or assumed roles is necessary, as that reflects the diversity of our world experiences. This, and the possiblities of mobile production and connectivity have led me into liking to call the online part an “accumulation of near-time microdocumentaries”.

Altogether, mikroPaliskunta is inherently post-scientific – we acknowledge the vanity of our efforts in the age of Google Earth and Wikipedia, but in the same time we, out of curiosity, engage in a journey of exploration, as if our maps were decorated with “Here Be Dragons”.

Glad to be of service

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.

Doppelg

Artist’s vision of life in 1984 / Pecha Kucha Nights Berlin

CityWall Helsinki

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…