Number two is out ! Nummer twee is uit ! Le numéro deux est sorti !
2008-06-25 14:01:14 - by Pierre Huyghebaert

[ EN ]

The new towards publication is out. It contains :
 a history of the project including the numerous workshops and talks that happened the last two years.
 the schemes, ideas and plans for Tresor, a route accross free softwares for a subjective and collective cartography
 an overview of the maps collected in the framework of our nascent atlas of the subjective maps of Brussels

Using the tools and ideas explained in the Tresor section of the publication, we produced the cover. The code we have written at this occasion as well as an explanation of the process is available here.

Special thanks to the PEPRAV network for making this second publication possible and to Rafaella for her wonderful redactional work, insights and energy.

This publication is released under the terms of the Free Art License and you can download it here (45 Mb).

[ NL ]

Sinds enkele dagen is de tweede editie van onze tweede krant verschenen in een oplage van 3000 exemplaren. 8 goed gevulde pagina’s zijn het resultaat van meer dan 9 maanden voorbereiding. De grotendeels engelse inhoud bestaat onder andere uit :
 hoogtepunten van twee jaar activiteiten
 een selectie uit onze atlas
 een verklarend schema van het Tresor software-platform
 alle posts die op dit blog gepubliceerd zijn verwerkt in een cover-beeld

Gepubliceerd onder de Free-Arts licentie Je kunt de krant ook downloaden (45 mb)

[ FR ]

Notre deuxième journal est sorti à 3000 exemplaires de chez nos fidèles imprimeurs depuis quelques jours. Plus de neuf mois de préparation pour un huit pages bien tassé.

Au sommaire, principalement en anglais :
 Le point sur plus de deux ans d’activités
 Une sélection parmi notre atlas
 Un schéma explicatif complet de la plateforme logicielle Trésor
 Et une couverture qui reprend tous les post publiés sur ce blog depuis le début !

Publié sous licence art libre il est aussi disponible au téléchargement (45 Mb).

The power geometry of it all
2008-06-10 21:59:49 - by Nicolas Malevé

A Global Sense of Place – by Doreen Massey From Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

Imagine for a moment that you are on a satellite, further out and beyond all actual satellites; you can see ’planet earth’ from a distance and, unusually for someone with only peaceful intentions, you are equipped with the kind of technology which allows you to see the colours of people’s eyes and the numbers on their number plates. You can see all the movement and turn in to all the communication that is going on. Furthest out are the satellites, then aeroplanes, the long haul between London and Tokyo and the hop from San Salvador to Guatemala City. Some of this is people moving, some of it is physical trade, some is media broadcasting. There are faxes, e- mail, film-distribution networks, financial flows and transactions. Look in closer and there are ships and trains, steam trains slogging laboriously up hills somewhere in Asia. Look in closer still and there are lorries and cars and buses, and on down further, somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, there’s a woman - amongst many women - on foot, who still spends hours a day collecting water.

Now I want to make one simple point here, and that is about what one might call the power geometry of it all; the power geometry of time-space compression. For different social groups, and different individuals, are placed in very distinct ways in relation to these flows and interconnections. This point concerns not merely the issue of who moves and who doesn’t, although that is an important element of it; it is also about power in relation to the flows and the movement. Different social groups have distinct relationships to this anyway differentiated mobility: some people are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more on the receiving-end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it. In a sense at the end of all the spectra are those who are both doing the moving and the communicating and who are in some way in a position of control in relation to it - the jet-setters, the ones sending and receiving the faces and the e-mail, holding the international conference calls, the ones distributing films, controlling the news, organizing the investments and the international currency transactions. These are the groups who are really in a sense in charge of time-space compression, who care really use it and turn it to advantage, whose power and influence it very definitely increases. On its more prosaic fringes this group probably includes a fair number of western academics and journalists - those, in other words, who write most about it.

But there are also groups who are also doing a lot of physical moving, but who are not ’in charge’ of the process in the same way at all. The refugees from El Salvador or Guatemala and the undocumented migrant workers from Michoacan in Mexico, crowding into Tijuana to make a perhaps fatal dash for it across the border into the US to grab a chance of a new life. Here he experience of movement, and indeed of a confusing plurality of cultures, is very different. And there are those from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Caribbean, who come half way round the world only to get held up in an interrogation room at Heathrow.

Or - a different case again- there are those who are simply on the receiving end of time-space compression. The pensioner in a bed-sit in any inner city in this country, eating British working-class-style fish and chips from a Chinese take-away, watching a US film on a Japanese television; and not daring to go out after dark. And anyway the public transport’s been cut.

Or - one final example to illustrate a different kind of complexity - there are the people who live in the favelas of Rio, who know global football like the back of their hand, and have produced some of its players; who have contributed massively to global music, who gave up the samba and produced the lambada that everyone was dancing to last year in the clubs of Paris and London; and who have never, or hardly ever, been to downtown Rio. At one level they have been tremendous contributors to what we call time-space compression; and at another level they are imprisoned in it.