High-Yield Detonation Effects Simulator
2006-11-30 23:41:40 - by Femke Snelting

In the category ’curiosities’, this unusual use of Google Maps by Eric CSS Meyer:

"The High-Yield Detonation Effects Simulator, an experiment in AJAX and Google Maps programming based on public data and showing the destructive zones of large explosions".

In short, it visualises the effect of a bomb exploding in New York, Washington and a few other American cities.

Legend to the map (Overpressure Key):

• 15 psi Complete destruction of reinforced concrete structures, such as skyscrapers, will occur within this ring.
• Between 7 psi and 15 psi, there will be severe to total damage to these types of structures.
• 5 psi Complete destruction of ordinary houses, and moderate to severe damage to reinforced concrete structures, will occur within this ring.
• 2 psi Severe damage to ordinary houses, and light to moderate damage to reinforced concrete structures, will occur within this ring.
• 1 psi Light damage to all structures, and light to moderate damage to ordinary houses, will occur within this ring.
• 0.25 psi Most glass surfaces, such as windows, will shatter within this ring, some with enough force to cause injury.

Two days of workshops
2006-11-28 00:43:47 - by Pierre Huyghebaert

A few pictures in Google tool! ;)

The subjectivity of RSS feeds
2006-11-15 11:48:18 - by Femke Snelting

Lust (a design bureau based in The Hague) launched world/spectrum/archive today — a project which looks at RSS news feeds and than maps where on earth the news is ’good’ or ’bad’:

This is how Lust describes their project:

"The ’mood’ of a country can be partially read from the news in that particular country. (...) Using Google News RSS-feeds, words appearing in those articles are judged by an algorithm on whether they are positive or negative. It is interesting to see by the way, how according to Google, the western world is usually coloured more positive."

On termine la publication
2006-11-11 20:05:57 - by Pierre Huyghebaert

Jeudi soir. On se prépare à une nuit blanche pour terminer la publication (de moins en moins catalogue) de 16 pages qui fait le point sur l’expo Cartografie et les quelques développements en cours. Livraison à l’imprimeur Delferrière vendredi matin, 8h. Et là, on vient d’apprendre qu’on a jusque mardi matin, les traductions en anglais pour la couverture à encarter dans Janus n’étant pas arrivées... Coupette!

On Psycho/Subjective Geographic Systems
2006-11-11 18:34:17 - by Nicolas Malevé

PGS versus GPS : On Psycho/Subjective Geographic Systems by elpueblodechina dialoguing with yves degoyon ( MapOMatix )

A subjective positioning system would be developed after working on questions such as what is the meaning of location when the activities that are mapped are constituted by human practices? Some inmaterial entities are missing in the mapping of human activities, for example, how can you trace the influence of a writer in a network of conversations? When trying to give location to the inmaterial, ephemeral, distributed and non objective nature of for instance, human labor, human play and civil participation, it seems that all monitoring - based systems will fail in locating the subjective nature of flows of human activity and the processes involved.

[...]

The use of Global Positioning System becomes powerful for independent media practitioners when it can survey the activity of police or other control forces. In this sense, it can be seen as useful when it counterbalances the forces of world government (*) but, even in this case, it reveals itself as insufficient since a place as a set of geographical coordinates does not contain the experience of the place. Furthermore, it fails when it’s used in in dependen t practices if we consider that it makes a lot of sense in terms of market logic.

[...]

Spotting geographical locations, targeting and navigating are some narratives attached to GPS that are not so far from militar logistics or other kinds of methods based on stratification, verticality, identification, separation and distinction. We can relate to experience in different ways not all based on stratifying processes. A far more interesting ground of experimentation comes for instance from projects working on ways of materializing openness and the gift. A geo-wiki as mapOmatix points towards a reinvention of locality, not as a source of time stamped information but as a ground for narration. These practices bring to the global space of the internet a structural shift in the modes of relation to experience. As narratives composed by open nodes that enlight a distributed conversation, different dialogues are being assembled as units of the multitude (monades (**) ). These horizontal networks contain a space to participate and experiment developing models different from those of consumption.

* Nightmarruecos map made by indymedia estrecho ** Monads in the sense of myriads of infinitesimal changes :Gabriel Tarde (1893) Monadologie et sociologie.

Read more online

Cartographie subjective de Felix Gonzalez Torres
2006-11-10 11:07:55 - by Pierre Huyghebaert

En expo sans doute quelque part à Berlin (merci Benoît)...