From a friend: “Details from the SFMoMA event using RFID for tracking people during an opening event party are now online…including images, video, and technical details…” http://www.urban-atmospheres.net/Experiments/Testing/

No place to hide at RFID tracking party, article by Declan McCullagh in Cnet News. Excerpt: “The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art hosted an RFID reception the evening of Oct. 27, 2005. Attendees were handed radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to place on their clothes. Then their movements were tracked, and their location throughout the evening was indicated on a screen.”

There was a time when men… and women had to sit in front of a TV set to eat a Swanson TV Dinner®, now a hotel provides “meals to take on the flight or drive home“!

“On Monday, February 16, 1981, after a year of trying and waiting, I was finally hired as a temporary chambermaid for three weeks, in a Venetian hotel: Hotel C.
I was assigned twelve bedrooms on the fourth floor.
In the course of my cleaning duties, I examined the personal belongings of the hotel guests and the way this succession of people staying in the same room set up their temporary homes. I observed through details lives which remained unknown to me.
On Friday March 6, the job came to an end.” Sophie Calle: L’Hôtel, 1981

The project of Sophie Calle: L’Hôtel caught my eyes for its beautiful simplicity in detailing life of strangers. In 1981, the artist—visual ethnographer, detective and fiction storyteller—Sophie Calle surveys a population in transit. By capturing traces of living being in transit, and appropriating evidences “She transgresses the boundaries between public and private, fact and fiction.” [1]

If I am not yet getting into the notion of objectivity, I would like to stress the interest of such a project to me who is developing a method to explore, describe and analyze people’s habits, in transitional spaces like hotel rooms. Statistical data can hardly inform you about the psychological and the emotional level of people on the move, and to what extent and how they get attached (or detached) to the built environment.

However, all the work is amazing! If you haven’t been to the Centre Georges Pompidou exhibit: SOPHIE CALLE M’AS-TU VUE held in 2003-2004, it is always time to track her :) or have a look at the book!

[1] Sophie Calle, a Survey; Exhibit curated by Deborah Irmas for the Fred Hoffman Gallery

Cyril Fiévet writes for InternetActu #95 an article on technology and hotels: Les hôtels, creuset de l’innovation technologique ? I read it with much attention as I cannot agree more… I quote, “L’hôtel n’est-il pas, par essence, le symbole du lieu nomade, dans un monde de plus en plus dominé par la dynamique de mobilité, celle de la connexion permanente (avec ou sans fil), ou celle d’appareils divers, partie intégrante de notre environnement personnel ? Et qu’en sera-t-il dans le futur ?”

For sure, this is another sign that I have to finish—FI-NI-SH—my thesis on the neo-nomad, and the spatial impact of mobility. I am currently writing about the trans-disciplinary method undertaken to study ‘mobilities’, and this by putting together the material collected so far, bits of interviews, and experiments… Still… I could not help myself but—stop—and look back at the material I had already collected on hotels… so as to feed the two long term projects that are cooking in the kitchen. The receipts of these projects will stay secret until further advancement in sponsor search… Anyway, here are few ingredients:

“Synthetic (and sometimes toxic) interiors of typical lodgings scattered in polluted landscapes characterize today’s throw-away environment.” This is how Steven Holl, architect, described his experience when staying at a Hotel in the Midwest, USA. [1] In fact, Standardization may ruin a sense of uniqueness, or at least an illusive sense of home that a traveler is looking for when having to frequently move from hotel room to hotel room! Yet it seems, there is a growing importance of hotel chains.[2]

However, the Hotel Puerta América in Madrid, conceptualized as an “urban refuge which inspires our senses” is a delight for us designers! “Prestigious architects and designers” have designed a hotel that stands more like a ‘permanent’ contemporary architecture exhibit. For example while the architect Zaha Hadid explores a design that “Pushes the manufacturing possibilities”, integrating furniture to the continuous surface (the design successor of the Dymaxion’s bathroom of Buckminster Fuller (1936) and the ‘House of the Future’ (1956) of Alison + Peter Smithon) for designing the first floor, Kathryn Findlay conceives the eighth floor for individuals to “Enjoy their own unconsciousness”… Yet the designs for such a hotel are rather fix, and do not take into account the changing needs of the various users in transit.

Another experiment, the Project Fox undertaken in Denmark in April 2005 plays as a marketing tool for the car, the Volkswagen Fox, “The maximum vehicle for the minimum money”, and is linking road and hotel in a singular manner!

I have yet to tell you about the integration of technology in the hotel room…

MORE is coming soon… :)

[1] Steven Holl, Parallax (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000)
[2] Frank M. Go and Ray Pine, Globalization Strategy in the hotel Industry (London: Routledge, 1995)

RSS feed and explore Gizmag! Another of my favorite… Lot’s of goodies like the now classic Nyx clothing with “built-in flexible display screens” also mentioned in an article of Courrier International: MO(N)DES - Quand les nouvelles technologies envahissent nos fringues.

No more problem with washing (which was the main argument of the skeptical) I quote: “Jusqu’à présent, les câbles ou les puces en métal intégrés aux vêtements – ou aux jouets en peluche – avaient un ennemi redoutable : le lave-linge. Mais de récentes innovations permettent d’innerver les fibres des vêtements de conducteurs électroniques en plastique, qui ne se corrodent pas. Voilà la porte ouverte à bien des rêves.”

Obviously, wearable technology is an important part of my research, as individuals, objects and environments, all become fields of hypertexts.

On that note, read L’homme radar ou la place des technologies dans les systèmes d’information du voyage by par Bruno Marzloff, Stéphane Chevrier et Stéphane Juguet. They write that “Les technologies participent à l’inflation communicationnelle, mais elles en encouragent l’exploitation radar, c’est-à-dire la collecte dirigée, le tri, l’organisation, la localisation pour le compte du voyageur.”

Check Cati’s blog… It is full of creative projects!

For example the beautiful touching memories project: “Touch is at the heart of intimate relationship. It is also a powerful trigger of past emotions. Touching memories is a system that detects and records a touch by a loved one. Be it a stroke, a pat, a hug, or a rub, the system will store the touch and play it back to you whenever you need it”

Browse!

Friday December 2, 2005: invited reviewer to the kinetic architecture class taught by Kostas Terzidis

Quoting the syllabus:

“This course examines the notion of motion in architecture through virtual and physical methods. It seeks to investigate, explore, and propose how motion can be suggested, depicted, or physically incorporated in buildings or structures. The goal is to link past practices related to kinetic form with motion-based emerging technologies in a meaningful way and project into the inherent architectural possibilities.”

“The area of kinetic architecture, i.e. the integration of motion into the built environment, and the impact such results has upon the aesthetics, design, and performance of buildings may be of great importance to the field of architecture. While the aesthetic value of virtual motion may always be a source of inspiration, its physical implementation in buildings and structures may challenge the very nature of what architecture really is.”

Experiment conducted/recorded for the purpose of my DDes dissertation:

Going to that corner café—which is the same as the other corner café—I can save ten cents on the price of my hot drink if I bring my personal portable and reusable cup, often made of a washable material. Or I could sit there, drink a first coffee and get a refill for fifty cents less. I could sit there. But I usually get my fix on my way to the office, and finish it sited at my desk, eyes fixed on my screen. As I am a rather heavy drinker of caffeinated beverages, I consume partly on the go an average of seventeen cups a week. So let’s say if the cup which is composed of a cup, a lid, and an insulating sleeve costs ten cents, I could save a dollar and seventy cents a week, three dollars and forty cents in two weeks, five dollars and ten cents in three weeks… etc… Enough to buy a cup, and avoid an irritating feel of guilt about polluting the environment. [1] I have made the experiment; the volume occupied by seventeen cups—yet not stacked—on my eighty by two hundred centimeters desk is rather alarming.

I should buy a re-usable cup. Yet I might want to look at how much energy it takes to recycle a plastic cup as opposed to seventeen paper cups. Both material originated at some point from nature, but who knows what they were before? As John McHale writes in The Plastic Parthenon “The metals in a cigarette lighter today maybe, variously, within a month or a year, part of an auto, a lipstick case or an orbiting satellite. Such accelerated turnover of materials in manufacture underlines the relative temporality of all ‘permanent’ artifacts.” [2] So nothing is really permanent and the urban nomad that I am still has to wash her cup, if I choose to get a re-usable one.

Yet I would like to get a cup that is not cumbersome, because of all the “gears” that I “have to” carry, a laptop, a portable phone, my iPod Nano which can contain four Giga of digitally recorded music, all items in fact storing heavy—to me—information. These are already too many objects to carry as an acquaintance was telling me, “I am still looking for a beautifully Mac-like designed small phone that is user friendly, that enables me to call, connect, listen to my music with wireless headsets (insisting on the wireless headset), photograph and record video with a decent quality (at least four megapixels).” Still I search online for a weightless cup. I find one through an online outdoor store. The Orikaso fold-flat cup is, I quote, “Superlight, 1.3-ounce (37g), ultra-compact, easy cleaning, and unbreakable, Precreased, folding panels with locking, leakproof tabs create an easily constructed cup, Dishwasher safe, 7.6-fluid-ounce (225 ml) capacity, Nonstick material.” [3] It will cost me roughly four dollars, approximately two weeks and a half of paper cups use… all what I need. Yet I will have to wash it. And I do not carry/possess a dishwasher. Maybe as my colleague obviously a fan of Formula 1 suggested to me, I could have a kind of fold-flat cup with peel-off layers, like the ones racers have on their visors for constant clear vision. I am convinced the layer is so thin, that is less damage for the environment. How bio-degradable it is? This is another question.

[1] Feel of guilt instigated by society, the one which also promotes consumerism.
[2] John MacHale, The Plastic Parthenon, in Gillo Dorfles, Kitsch: An Anthology of Bad Taste (London; Studio Vista, 1969); p. 103
[3] Search Orikaso at http://www.ems.com/ accessed December 1st, 2005