Photo City

photosynth link

Not only does the rapid presence of cell phones with camera and video technology help disclose spontaneous acts of something-whatevers occurring all over the world, but new technology's are actually conceiving of new perspectives cities created by those inhabiting them.

Geotagging uses a digital application via cellular triangulation and GPS to encode photos for unlimited possibilities in how we store and view our media. Image anyone with a camera can participate in taking a perspective (photo) of our built (and unbuilt) world, and uploading it to a database for all the world to see.

How can an open system of site positioning urban surveillance serve? How does a database for time, history and perspective of place reevaluate our understanding of identity, culture, geography? and what impact does a "virtual" database of place (accessible thru such devices as iphones and pda's) have on reality?

Additional applications:

ATP Photo Finder
HoudahGeo
Merax Photo Finder
Pharos Tip
Amod AGL3080
Flickr

Creating a Pink Network

Malawi- Sub-Saharan Africa:
One can't help but notice how the new marketing strategy Zain (formally TelCel) is making its imprint on the urban conglomerations in Malawi. Painting local vendors buildings their "branding" color of pink, it becomes a no brainer in locating the "top-up" cards to fill your cell phone with minutes.

And beyond that, the color pink begins to visualize the invisible cellular network in a rather under developed part of the world, where one would (initially) assume cell phone access would be limited. Now, while traveling/shipping/conducting business about the countryside, the presence of these pink buildings denote the invisible presence of cellular connectivity. Moving from large city to large city, reveals blurs of pink within interspersed towns, villages, urban conglomerations. The network is made visible thru architectural and urban strategies.

In a country that is one of the least developed and densely populated, splashes of color are all you need. What was once Coca-Cola painting the new globalized frontier, it is now cell phones and the services that connect people.

Can the car help end global poverty?

There is this great blog written about in the New York Times recently, Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty? It focuses on Jan Chipchase, this anthropolgist / corporate researcher crossing the globe taking pictures and asking questions about cell phones. Its basically market research for his employer, Nokia. Lucky for us, he shares a lot of that energy and fascination on his blog (http://www.janchipchase.com/).

I guess what I am interested in is how we might re-discover the automobile within our living environment. While not as tech-y as the cell phone, and as dated as it might be, it is something so visible, yet we are failing to see how it really operates, could operate and how it might want to operate.

By looking at the different conditions that it is placed within, the ways it interacts with people, space, time and culture, can we not begin to see again how the automobile operates within the built environment? And globally? how does this make mass marketing limited by socio-cultural boundaries?

so my question would be, Can the automobile help end global poverty? or have we given up on that...

(photo from janchipchase.com website)