[-empyre-] you are here

[ryan griffis <ryan.griffis@gmail.com>]

Hi Ricardo + all,

> While I attended the opening events of inSite and and stood near the
> border fence in Playas, Tijuana, (where LowDrone was flown), a marine 
> on
> the other side of the border approached our group to see if there was a
> paletero(icee cart) near by that we could call over for him.

yes - this anecdote makes a compelling case for the "realization" 
here... great story.

> A recent announcement by Sal Randolph of her new experiment "Where You
> Are" seems much too appropriate to the topic of discussion to not pass
> along the link and brief description:
> http://whereyouare.org/
> "Whereyouare is an experiment in the collective documentation of
> neighborhoods... Everyone is invited to participate by documenting any
> neighborhood they love...  The project harnesses the power of 
> folksonomy
> tags from a range of sites that host and organize content of different
> kinds (flickr for photos, vimeo for video, delicious for links, etc.)."

> However at the moment, Williamsburg includes a couple of
> videos of an awning flapping against wind and some pigeons hanging out
> on a street - the sort of content that leads me to question whether or
> not this is just more unnecessary stuff online, time will tell.
>
> It will also be interesting to see how widely the site is passed along
> and if neighborhoods of non-Western or "underdeveloped" countries are
> added to the site.

so funny - i was just thinking about this project when reading through 
Ricardo's earlier post! and, of course, Ricardo brings up the right 
questions about it - it can so easily fall into something resembling 
mass observation, situationism and surrealism mashed together and 
stripped of meaning to create a depoliticized psychogeography that 
looks like the scene in American Beauty where the kid is watching the 
video of the blowing plastic bag - only he's geotagged it and put in on 
a server for the world to see.
i was thinking how projects like WhereYouAre (which are already an 
interesting use of available user-based technology), attached to 
something like http://neighbornode.net/index.html have really 
interesting implications.
i think, getting to Ricardo's last question, Google Earth© needs its 
version of postcolonial critics... like Coco, Ricardo and Alex and 
Angel.
best - ryan