R: one of the things i was tossing around in my head was building a kind of 3-D model city “space” – kinda like a search engine, but it doesn’t search anything. instead web pages are laid out in domains, or “apartments” and each person who goes on the website/browser is given a #colour so whatever path they take through the internet, someone else can click on their route colour and literally retrace the entire path with both the original person’s screencaps to compare. so yea, it’s a kind of search engine but it’s a search engine where *you* as the player, have to search for routes similar to yours….. like o hay that Pv1 in blue goes intersects my route 4 times, let’s click on his/her’s and find out what other pages they go to. The beauty of it, is that it’s completely and utterly anon and if you were to use the city as your “frame window” to browse pages, your IP would be totally proxified and etc etc untraceable. Mostly I like the idea of combining archiving combined with searching and a kind of anonymous randomness. Mostly I just like the idea of the internet as a giant, expanding, stacking city inside an infinite space – you can zoom out to see this invisible topography, or go down to street level and view screencaps of other people; maybe your route can start at google, then move up 3 “floors” into CNN then somehow land in wikipedia “bridge” and idk…. tentacle p0rn? who knows what routes people take on the web?
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Presenting…. PATHWAYS:
IF!….. if you could retrace the dream, each footfall of another passenger speeding down the trains that enter the city of infinity – that expansive city with no sense of scale and uncapturable size, where citizens constantly discovered new areas of unknown – the parks made of forums and basements seething with something awful and the sound of birds tweeting in the trees……
the idea that came, with just one thought: “what if we could check-in to twitter?”
J‘s comment was that I should really read (and probably re-read) Constant Nieuwenhuis’ New Babylon , which apparently is very similar my idea of expanding space.
I also bought 3 books off amazon – not really consciously thinking of thesis, but ah there was a cool feeling about it? In particular, I always wanted to buy City of Darkness ever since I watched Ka-Ku-Ren-Bo:
and also William Gibson comments on the digital walled city in Idoru, where the characters Masahiko and Zona Rosa are part of the Walled City – some kind of digital freespace (similar to the underground torrent sites) Also, check this out: Bridge City could become real
Anyway, the books in question:
Amazon: City of Darkness life in kowloon walled city
Amazon: Ghetto at the center of the World Chungking Mansions
Amazon: Shadow Cities, one billion squatters a new urban world
Shadow Cities is really really good. I had the least expectations for it, since I thought it’ll be really dry and full of statistics but it’s really amazingly well-written — good enough that I read it through in one sitting, and the case studies they had were really great especially when they did comparisons whether legality was really that important so long as the citizens had personal autonomy.
Haven’t really dug through Chungking Mansions yet – I do know the place though, since I’ve been/lived near there before. Also I have the Wong Kar Wai film as reference (also an excuse for a rewatch!!!) And of course, the City of Darkness one is fantastic and awesome and comes with huge picture spreads!! 😀 What I really like about CoD is that it includes biographies of the people who actually live there ranging from the medicinal doctors to the candy factory man to grandparents and each of them tells a story, no judgement without fanfare. The image of the city as an area of lawlessness and vice is complicated by the lives of others that took – people who went to school, who were tuckshop owners and made fishballs; of orchestra associations and even a temple built inside the walls – amazing feats of human ingenuity
ahhh still thinking about pathways….. is funny how the internet can vary from culture to culture, and then; still…
……. ah, I wonder what he will think of vocaloid.
strawberry.millefuille 
