Long time ago, I was what… 14? 15? Titouan Lamazou came to the Lycée Descartes, the French school of Rabat, to show some of his drawings. Along with the navigator came a gorgeous “brune,” ou “rousse” (du henné peut-être?), une magicienne en falbala, magnifique. I have little memories from my childhood, but this is one of them. Un voyageur-explorateur, Titouan embodied what I always wanted to be… and I haven’t started yet… well…

File from the Hugo Pratt archive

Titouan for me, c’est Corto Maltese, a hero of Hugo Pratt, ou encore Rimbaud (Rimbaud here interpreted by Xavier Pignon-Ernest)… : car à l’age de 17 ans, Titouan décide de créer un carnet de voyage, and to do so embarks on a boat (Rimbaud had not seen the sea when he wrote the Bateau ivre, but was the same age)…

[…] Et Dès lors, je me suis baigné dans le Poème
De la Mer, infusé d’astres, et lactescent,
Dévorant les azurs verts ; où, flottaison blême
Et ravie, un noyé pensif parfois descend ; […]

+ Rimbaud, Le Bateau ivre

Rimbaud par Pignon-Ernest

Check Titouan’s exhibit… Zoé Zoé aura lieu du 11 Octobre 2007 au 30 Mars 2008, à Paris. Au Musée de l’Homme, Titouan parlera de femmes!

Dessin de Titouan Lamazou

Le lien avec mes neo-nomades… l’ IMAGINAIRE

The collaboration of the German designer Stephan Ganz (It is actually his graduating project) and Porsche Design studios and Porsche Design engineering. It allows people with reduced mobility to stand up. What I like about the design it is that the object is both, a mode of transportation and a prosthetis.

Via Dezineo.

Back from Zurich, where we disscussed the future of the workplace: workplace2010. Thank you to the organizers: Jeffrey Huang, Silke Lang, Alvise Simondetti, Mark Meagher, Isabelle Bentz, Nicolas Nova! Few pictures:

First exercise… everyone had brought a picture of his workplace… to annotate. I like the picture of Roberto Vitalini: “Virtual Companions for Single Workers” ;)

In a team with Mark Meagher and Marc Schmit from Playze!

Working on a platform enabling total flexibility and visualization of the workplace, the workmate and work community. In ligne with some ideas developed in my thesis… taxi-city.

Thanks to D.K., I could put a name on the strange vehicle spoted in the streets of Copenhagen:

This is a Bubble car (a post WW2 production)! It immediately reminded me of the Cushicle by Archigram… (1966) and the Suitsalon (1967) (BTW, isn’t Orta’s Refuge Wear City Interventions 1993-1998 in the lineage of the Suitsalon? and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, 1972, so related to Archigram? I like hypertexting :) This is to say that I am quite impressed by Archigram’s sensibility toward their post WW2 everyday, and their subsequent mental assemblages.

Kronprinsessegade, the street where my office is… Totally disorienting for a tourist :) It is covered with another street name, a hack performed by an artist in protest of the demolition of the youth house: more info on guerrilla innovation.

A mobile graffiti? Seen on the red line… Boston-Cambridge, MA.

This below is the advertising campaign of WWF (China) to help us visualize the volume of harmful CO2 emitted daily by traditional modes of transportation. info via Le Blog du Marketing Alternatif. Isn’t car sharing a good alternative?

At the GSD, to watch the documentary movie Bigger than Barbie… The event was organized by the SoCA (Social Change and Activism) group and Loeb fellows. Monkeybiz was selling their craft: “All profits go back into the communities via payment for bead art and the provision of community services.” I saw this handicraft above… Cute how the cellphone culture influences our creativity!

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.