Sao Paulo No Logo. Tony de Marco.
MS: “…, I was interested in thinking through the derivate impact on urban space of an alternative, extreme informatics regime, a future-fiction where literally all information loses its body and is off-loades from the material substrate of the physical city to the personal, portable, or ambient displays of tomorrow’s urban information systems. What happens when mobile and pervasive technologies are used to substract this kind of information from the physical world, reducing rather than adding to the visual field of the street?
AG: ” You know, I am not sure that the visual load ever does get reduced. Just because there will be this additional, personal informational channel made available doesn’t necessarily imply to me that the mass or builfing-scale channel goes away. Although I must say that the image I get of your take on things is a striking one – I imagine a rather starkly monochromatic city blosoming into “augmented” chaos when you blink the contact lenses on or whatever…
One of the things I think does happen, though, is that the ability to find one’s way around independently of the embedded environmental cues begins to atrophy. This is just that favorite McLuhan quote of mine being worked out in detail: “Every extension is also an amputation.”…”
[1] Urban Computing and its Discontents. (Buy here, or download the free PDF. Be sure to check out the other pamphlets in the series, too.)
