Platial News and Neogeography

Place-Based Food Traditions

A Slow Study of 12 Bars

This Platializer: Slowstudies

made this cool map: 12 Bars For Margaret

It's full of tiny little poems, that one can only imagine must have something to do with the drinking establishments they are posted on.

It's also got a bunch of great images:

Urban Palimpsests

Mike Kuniavsky has a new post on a specific kind of Urban Palimpsest:

Many Italian towns, such as Siena, still show the traces of the Roman coliseums that dominated their centers two thousand years ago, even though the coliseums and the buildings all around them, are long gone.

Modern cities have this, too, and they learn at an urban level.

Below you will find traces, found from the sky, of the old railroads. The only clues being a string of oddly shaped buildings amid otherwise boringly uninspired architectural site footprints.

I'm curious if there remains any trace of psychic barrier around these routes? Any remaining feelings of "the other side of the tracks" even though the tracks are no longer there?

Help Sam Find America's Revolutionary Spirit!

Seeking Suggestions From You

A new guest on the Platial Blog, Sam Gould, is driving around the country investigating revolutionary localities; sites wherein large-scale events took place that have affected the course of the nation, as well as smaller sites wherein self-revelatory events occurred for a small group, or possibly even just one person. He'll be doing a counter-clock-wise loop from Portland, through the South, up through the Mid-West, and back.

He's looking for suggestions, leads, stories to research, Places to go. Don't be shy, seriously. If he doesn't get a pile of leads to track down, this is what he'll be doing

I will stop into cafes, laundromats, bars, and the like, hoping to strike up conversations with people that may lead me to little known sites of radical change within the cities and small towns I visit.

He also goes on to say

am writing this e-mail to ask you to rack your brains and suggest to me any people, histories, or sites that you feel I should visit that fit my planned route. Any and all suggestions are welcome. Below I have included text explaining my trip a bit further. Please feel free to pass it along to anyone who you think might be interested in speaking/meeting with me while I am on the road.

I'd also implore you to be forthcoming with the suggestions, because he'll be reporting back to us here with what he finds out, nearly day by day. Leave your suggestions as comments to this post, or as email directly to sam via baldwin.gould [at] gmail [dotcom]

To find out more about Sam, and this Project, check out http://www.red76.com/revolution.html

TourMapper- Instantly Map Your Tour

Platial Announces MySpace TourMapper!

Make a TourMap from any MySpace page with an Upcoming Shows listing. Map your favorite band's tour or your own in minutes. Simply copy and paste onto your MySpace page or any other website.

Here are some links to some TourMaps that have already been made:

Hotel Cafe

Death Cab For Cutie

RockTheBells

Panic At The Disco

Peaches

ITenacious D

Tracy says "You should try out TourMapper. It's so easy your grandma could do it. On acid."

Artistic Actions in the Interconnected Urban Territory

An interesting show coming up in Genoa this weekend:

Artistic Actions in the Interconnected Urban Territory

The representation of the territory holds a historical role in the privileges of power. The geographical data has always been in its hands. The regaining of this representation goes through the description and sharing (often in personal perspectives too). This is made possible thanks to the collaborative tools and consequent changing of the value of the maps. These maps are not granted anymore by structures of power, but built by individuals who, drawing on the ideas of the psychogeographical movements, repaint the urban space according to fresh new coordinates.

WORKS BY: 01.org Vopos :: Cartografia Resistente Triangolazione :: Les Flottants Lasciare libero il passo :: Giuseppe Chiari Musica verità, Suonare la città, Che cos’è un happening :: Vincenzo Agnetti Spazio perduto e spazio costruito :: Guy Debord In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni :: Ernesto Fialdini, Matteo Dentoni Debordare.

The Leonardi V-Idea Association presents the exhibition-conference: Resistant Maps: Artistic actions in the interconnected urban territory by Alessandro Ludovico, Gianfranco Pangrazio, Tommaso Tozzi, Marco Villani :: November 25-26, 2006 ::

Contemporary Art Museum of Villa Croce: Via Jacopo Ruffini 3, Genoa.

This exhibition has been organised with the support of the City of Genoa Council, the Head of Culture of the City of Genoa Council, the Contemporary Art Museum of Villa Croce, Association “Amici dei Musei”.

Catalogue printed by: neos.edizioni.

For further information contact Marco Villani (tel. 0039 340.3160660)

(Via networked_performance.)

tube tunes

undersound is a new type of experience, an interface that is on your mobile phone and in the underground stations you pass through every day. It is part personal, part public and all about the tube. undersound is a way of listening to, distributing and affecting the flow of music in the underground that goes beyond just the music itself. It allows you to see your journeys, the people around you, and the tube itself in a new light. There are three key aspects of life underground that we tapped into in the design of undersound.

Fear of Locatability

Fear of Locatability: "

In this age of place, at the dawning of the locative technology 'era,' a countertrend is emerging - fear of locatability. Stories have emerged of countries blocking updates of Google Earth datasets to protect assets - nothing new here. Now Gizmodo points to a new category of personal technology - the GPS signal blocker. Of course, one only needs a simple building to do this, but high tech can be applied as well apparently to block devices in a certain location from being able to lget coordinates using GPS.

Reasoning given? The excuse du jour: terrorism. Personal or public safety may indeed be one motivating factor for throwing up a 50m or 50km cone of un-locatability around oneself, home, or facility, but such blank zones will become more and more conspicuous as location services ferret out the 'value' in every place.

"

(Via Smartspace.)

What about: instead of blocking the ability to gather coordinates, the device instead provided counterfeit coordinates? Perhaps even the coordinates to something else significantly related?

WarBike/Drive/Walk

GLOWLAB has a nice article up right now about a sound emitting wifi scanner, creating a sonic memory / new experience of your daily routes. Visualizing, through sound, the unseen communication structures all around us.

The Warbike converts the experience of wardriving into a deeper, more personal experience. The bike brings the participant closer to the street and the spaces that the networks inhabit, highlighting the psychogeographical experience that may be lost in a traditional wardrive, isolated from the environment, in a car. The knowledge of network presence, and the knowledge of open networks, is not quite as powerful as being able to hear and feel the networks flowing through the space that we inhabit. The ride on the Warbike is a visceral experience, communicating the invisible communications activity, something that we are used to processing intellectually. You’re invited to experience it for yourself when the Warbike is shown at Interaccess (link / map) in Toronto in summer 2007.

Blogger Template MapKit Preview

While I was doing all of that testing of MapKit on Blogger, I took some screen shots. I just got around to setting up a little gallery on Flickr where you can see how MapKit looks in some of the most popular Blogger templates.

It looks good!