Back from Berlin! Thank you Sidi: you are a wonderful host.

Nomad thinking… I was very moved by the Garden of Exile, a space you find in Daniel Liebskind’s Jewish Museum… The architecture/sculpture of tall slanted columns with the sloped ground plan of rough cobblestone—le “plan oblique”—gives visitors a nauseous sense of… “non-place”… The dramatic weather (it did rain) added to the atmosphere. Even in the land of the olive tree—on top of the slanted columns olive trees have been planted [1]—exiled populations have unsettled emotion… about being away from HOME. This moving architecture does speak to every person who has seen his/her home taken away, has been expelled, to all refugees, hybrids, immigrants, nomads of some sort…

So a wall came down. Some see in it the triumph of capitalism. I see the fall of a boundary—an inflated one, a corridor—the meeting of differences.

Talking to my nomadic way of seeing, Mies Van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie… as boundaries collapse with the glass panels, the reflective materials and dark painted architectural parts. It is cloudy in there :)

[1] For more information on the symbol/history of the Olive tree (in French / article in progress), read: Trois arbres symboles: le sapin, le palmier, l’olivier.

Do and don’t… Monster’s advices when away from the office and traveling… and another article about air commuters…

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

It was not enough for me to travel around the world… I can tell you that so far the Nike+ iPod program is trully motivating!

Currently exhibited in Copenhagen, the INDEX: design to improve life 2007, a “Copenhagen based worldwide non-profit organization that focuses on design to improve life.” Biannually in Copenhagen.

All of it caught my attention… but particularly, “Sharer,” a service that enables neighborhoods to conveniently and securely share their household products that are seldom used…” “In today’s economy of excess, storage and recycling are an ever growing problem. Reusing is more energy efficient than recycling, but sharing is a vanishing concept in industrialized nations partly due to declining social interaction at neighborhood levels.” The jacket for the Danish police is a “mobile office” designed by Sidsel Kjøller Damkjær, Johan King & Mads Kjøller Damkjær. The work of FOC, Freedom Of Creation: “virtually stored products are e-mailed for 3D production whenever and wherever needed. Since 1999, FOC has created a global manufacturing infrastructure in contrast to today’s mass production infrastructure. This approach has the potential to revolutionize, transportation, storage, assembly, start-up investments, and_moreover_man’s footprint on the environment.” (Quotes from the exhibition material).

Premier post de mon nouveau blog: blog.neo-nomad.net! As I was writing in my thesis, States have always feared nomads… Thank you so much Jérôme+ Éléonore for finding this:

Screenshot from the CarLoft® website. An take on our society of storage place… for the rich. Thanks Uli! Any chance to have a version for Smart owners?

Suite à la lecture de l’article: La carte postale est “immortelle” (Laura D’Arrigo  | Le Monde | 14.08.07) qui dit:

La carte postale reste incontournable : elle peut survivre longtemps, collée sur le réfrigérateur ou épinglée sur le mur de son bureau, quand les messages sur les portables sont souvent effacés en quelques secondes… D’ailleurs, les inconditionnels de ces bristols illustrés sont les collectionneurs, qui les achètent, les classent, les échangent et les vendent. Alors qu’on ne connaît pas de collectionneurs de SMS…

Enfin, moi je les collectionne les SMS… J’hypertexte aussi pour tomber sur une définition de la maximaphilie… Serais-je atteinte de nomadophilie, alors que je collectionne le rien, l’éphémère, le fonctionnel (avec une tendance spéciale à justifier l’ornement comme nécessaire à son bien-être)?