Via Anne Galloway: the Urban Tapestries project. Years and years ago, I was daydreaming about running community cultural development projects involving young migrant people's hypertextual annotations of urban space, perhaps on the web or CD-ROM. But Urban Tapestries takes it to another level:
Urban Tapestries allows users to author their own virtual annotations of the city, enabling a community’s collective memory to grow organically, allowing ordinary citizens to embed social knowledge in the new wireless landscape of the city. Users will be able to add new locations, location content and the 'threads' which link individual locations to local contexts, which are accessed via handheld user devices such as PDAs and mobile phones.
It may sound abstract to some, but in a fundamental way this approach removes a level of abstraction that occurs when an archive tries to map one's experiences of a space, but outside that space. Interesting. I sense a wealth of radical, everyday uses for this kind of infrastructure, once the technology becomes commonplace.
