Again another cool article in PingMag: Masaru Tatsuki’s Decotora Photo Op showing the decotora, the Japanese truck decorated with lights. The photographer, a photo-ethnographer in fact, stayed 10 years with truckers before producing his book.

Majestic! Elegant! Pretentious!? Make way for the King of the Road. From the “Decotora” photo book. © Masaru Tatsuki | My home is my castle: A portable parlour with all the comforts of home on the highway. Cosy! From the “Decotora” photo book. © Masaru Tatsuki

Tatsuki says in the article:

“About two or three years into the project, I realised that the trucks rather than the drivers were being overly emphasised in the photographs. Because if you don’t define your subject, the subject defines itself. So I started going to meetings where large numbers of truckers would gather. They were all very outgoing, and I gradually felt welcomed into their community. Then, I started to discover things I respected about them - and things I didn’t like. For the first time, I felt I really knew the truckers. I realised that they possess a sense of masculinity that is dying out in Japan. I could also understand their feeling of wanting to decorate the tools they use for work.

People are surprised that I spent ten years on this project, but it simply takes time to really understand something. And I wanted to really understand the things I wanted to express. That is why it took so long.”

This is also something that I do: immerse with the subject. Don’t know if I can call myself a “psychosociologue” (Currently reading Georges Perec, Les choses, 1965 where the author speaks about people conducting open-ended and structured interviews…)

Anyway, decorating a standard vehicle is a matter of appropriation, and we see this phenomenon throughout the world, in India for example… Taking a cab in the Middle East is also particularly interesting… As if you were to travel in a living room.

Still can’t get how you can type and drive at the same time… Thank you N.B. for the link… But here is how one can cope with mobility when you have a chauffeur… A classic… “what I am going to do while in transit?” Is that so boring to do nothing? Check this Car computer System.

Un article qui nous fait penser à nos sociétés “on-demand”: Axa veut faire payer l’assuré comme il roule. Dans Challenges! Article du 11-10-2007 par Eric Tréguier. (Merci Mehdi!)

Le principe est simple : la boîte reliée à un GPS transmet régulièrement à l’assureur, via le mobile du client, des statistiques sur l’utilisation du véhicule. La compagnie adapte ensuite la facture. Vous roulez beaucoup et en pleine nuit sur de petites routes ? Vous paierez plus cher que si vous laissez votre voiture au garage ou si vous ne l’utilisez que le midi, du lundi au vendredi. Tout sera détaillé dans votre facture.

An MIT self-piloted land rover… semifinalist in this year’s DARPA Urban Challenge. A video of the “Obstacle Test“. FYI: DARPA means Defense Advance Research Projects Agency. It is the agency at the origin of the Arpanet, which became the Internet…

Hotel Fox website:

For the launch of the new Volkswagen Fox 21 international artists from the fields of graphic design, urban art and illustration turned Hotel Fox in central Copenhagen, into the world’s most exciting and creative lifestyle hotel.

Ulrich sent me the paper he wrote with C. M. about Hotel Fox: Creative industries as a cultural resource : how cities can prepare the ground for future leisure offers and demands. Towards a theoretical framework for futurizing the leisure sector. The authors write:

The basic idea behind Project Fox was that Volkswagen didn´t want to organise yet another launch event only geared towards trade journalists but rather try to introduce their new product within the lifeworlds of what was to be called young urban travelers. In taking up this metaphor around urban mobility, the winning event design by eventlabs in Hamburg extended the notion of car travel into tourism and suggested a more long-term transformation of urban space by staging a variety of experiences.

Find the conference website! HotelFox .pdf

A very interesting 52 minutes 1972 BBC documentary (directed by Julian Cooper) staring Reyner Banham (1922-1988), architecture theorist, member of the Independent Group, who also had contacts with Archigram.

We learn in Encyclopedia Britannica…

[…] The automobile so dominates life in this uniquely mobile community [Los Angeles] that Reyner Banham, an English observer who took his cue from scholars who study Italian in order to read Dante, is said to have learned to drive a car so he could “read Los Angeles in the original.”

Reyner Banham is according to Nigel Whiteley the Historian of the Immediate Future!

To read as well: The kinetic icon: Reyner Banham on Los Angeles as mobile metropolis.