Friday 26 December 2008

Surveillance in Latin America EVENT

http://www.ssscla.com/
The announcement of papers selected for presentation will be released on the 7th January 2009!
I will keep it posted!
By the way, this picture shows the North-American artist William Lawson's intervention from November 2007, hacking a surveillance camera with a helium ballon.
Low-cost counter-surveillance or just art?

Saturday 13 December 2008

Transformative Spaces

André posted on his carnet de notes about a very interesting project called Urban Mobs, which alledgedly maps people's emotions in European cities. Quoting their official website: "Urban Mobs provide a tool to study crowd communication activities and paint a popular emotion cartography".

It reminds me of Lars Spuybroek’s intervention for the city of Doetinchem in the Netherlands, called D-Tower, constructed between 1998 and 2003. A website surveyed participants’ emotions every month to transform their sensations into an unstable and colourful tower in a public square. In this way, passers-by would notice what the artist/architect supposed to be the mood of the city. Marcos Novak calls this transarchitecture and Thomas Horan would define it as transformative recombinant design.

Of course that D-tower and Urban Mobs have their similarities in the way relational concepts are applied (with the aid of technologies) to depict, question and think through spatial manifestations. But, essentially, they do it and happen in different scale. I would say they both have similar ideas, one at the building (or architecture) scale, and another at the urban or regional (or global) scale.

Friday 12 December 2008

Follow André Lemos' Carnet de Notes

I only wish I were half as efficient as my friend André Lemos in updating this blog.

His Carnet de Notes is an essential web-publication (mostly in Portuguese)...

Keep it up, André!

Tuesday 9 December 2008

Surveillance, Security and Social Control in Latin America (1)

www.ssscla.com . PUCPR . curitiba-brazil . 4-6 March 2009
Surveillance is becoming the omnipresent and ubiquitous element dreamt by sci-fi novelists and writers. What is the influence of urban surveillance and control upon our understanding and experience of space? As urban beings, how do we behave under the constant surveillance of other people, the State and the market? Does this change the way space and place are perceived, built and experienced by us?
These and many other questions bear in mine and other colleagues minds, who wonder what are going to be the implications of the escalating use of surveillance and methods of control for places, for space and for our cities.
With the presence of many scholars from different parts of the world (David Murakami Wood, David Lyon, Nelson Arteaga Botello and Luiz Antonio Machado da Silva), Marta Kanashiro, Fernanda Bruno and I are organising the international symposium Surveillance, Security and Social Control in Latin America, to take place at PUCPR in Curitiba (Brazil), 4-6 March 2009.
Please send proposed titles and abstracts (no more than 250 words) by December 16th, 2008.
You will be informed of acceptance within a week in order for you to make travel plans as soon as possible.Contributions will be eligible for consideration for a special trilingual issue of Surveillance & Society to be published in early 2010. Please send them to: