serendipityoucity

Friday night is lookin’ good!  My soccer pal Pablo will be showing his work and i expect this will be wonderful!

Stéphane Couture m’a fais parvenir des urls formidables qui m’on apporté à une communauté intellectuelle francophone qui étudie, discute et critique les logiciels libres et autre aspect du web et la socio-technologie (le lab de communication médiatisée sur ordinateur LabCMO) . Ceci et une très bonne découverte car ces études sont toutes nouvelles pour moi et on dirait que sa me permet non seulement de découvrir des philosophes érudits dans un domaine que je trouve stimulant mais sa me donne finalement un contexte francophone dans laquelle je pourrais redécouvrir une partie de mon identitée qu’il me semble que je n’ai pas assez d’occasion à nourrir. 

En fin de semaine, ogWiFi est aller participer à un atelier sans fil avec ile sans fil à Montréal et plein d’autre groupe sans fil Québécois en voie de developpement.  Je discuterai de tous cela plus tard, pour le moment une de mes découvertes personnelles étais que oui je suis encore une francophone et que oui je partage une culture avec ces gens.  Cet une culture qui m’appartient mais qui ne fais pas partie de ma vie quotidienne. 

Géographiquement je suis présentement dans un quartier multiculturel et ma communauté sociale et académique est surtout anglophone.  Je ne vois pas très souvent ma famille donc mes liens familiaux francophones sont éloignés.

Donc je me sens toujours sur la frontière entre les cultures et mes identités, je sursaute et je danse avec les deux mais jamais complètement immergée dans l’une out l’autre.  Je cherche toujours à savoir laquelle est mon chez moi.  Je contourne et traverse toujours les frontières académiques en temps que disciplines, jamais j’adhère complètement dans une d’elles.  C’est la même chose avec mes interactions communautaires, je ne suis jamais uniquement dans un mouvement, je traverse les secteurs sociaux, environnementaux, justices, droits humanitaires, planification urbaines, géomatique et maintenant les infrastructures de communications publiques et communautaires.

Bref, je vois que j’ai beaucoup à explorer en moi même mais aussi je vois qu’il y a plein de partages à se faire entre les groupes académiques Québecois et le reste du pays, et plus spécifiquements entre les gens que j’ai rencontré dans les derniers 2 ans via Michael (un des rares anglophone montréalais passioné par la socio technologie et une amour pour sa ville qui travallaille avec les groupes anglophones tel que francophones - qui a aussi apris a communiquer en français) et les gens que je connais ici.  Il me semble qu’il y a beaucoup de collaboration enréchissantes à faire.  Et ce serait encore plus formidables si sa pourrait ce faire dans nos langues maternelles et non pas dans la langue dominante.  J’ai adoré qu’en fin de semaine nous puissions communiquer en français et que je puisse traduire en anglais pour les anglos et notre président Bulgarien de ogWiFi. Habituellement dans ce genre de regroupement on se trouve à parler anglais même si le groupe est composé surtout de français - mais pas cette fois ci!

Bon il s’agit aussi de réapprendre à écrire en français! Wow j’espère que les leçons de grammaires - des soeurs catholiques qui avais des verges de bois avec lesquelles on me tapait les doits (étant une Tracey dans les écoles à Hull lors du gros mouvement séparatiste dans les années 70 les permettaient de me frapper un peu plus que les autres!) lorsque je faisais des erreurs de récitation - me reviendrons!

Bon la journée est belle, et il y a beaucoup de travail à faire et j’espère que vous seriez patients avec mes fautes d’orthos, mon manque de vocabulaire et de métaphores contextuelles lorsque j’écrirai en français et que vous puissiez m’accompagner l’hors de mon parcours à ma redécouverte de mon identité textuelle français.

hugh has this incredible video up on his blog. 

I am officially cut off from rss feeds and well blog reading but am glad i made an exception today.

by the end of the video clip i realized i had tears rolling down my cheeks.  this went straight to my heart in the best of ways.  just to see and feel that spontaneous moment of joy in the most public and mundane of spaces - in between destinations in the day to day activity of transit - was liberating and reinvigorating.  i have so much hope and aspire toward something better and i feel such release of emotion when i feel these small acts.  so beautiful!

hhhhuhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

ok! In benedict anderson’s work imagined communities - nations or nationalisms - became collective sentiments via print literature associated with print capitalism that disseminated the same ideas to many people in many places at different times in a language that people understood.  The language and the story in print were static but not the interpretation and the context.  Latin was the language of the elite; luther’s bible was religion for the masses which bypassed the power of the clergy and the power brokers of the day.  Radicalism, usurpation of power structures and popularization of religion among other things was possible across time and space.  Interesting that the recitation of the koran is performed everywhere in its original language and coles notes are not necessarily welcome as this is interpretation not the texte!

but that is not what i want to talk about.

i want to talk about the imagined communities - the collective sentiments created between and among those who speak specific computer languages.  What are the collective imaginings, cultures, values, solidarities between and among those that read, write, translate and compile code?  What are the different modes of thinking and paradigms associated with these.  The most obvious ideological differences are between open and proprietary code writers.  Are their pearl, php, java, mms, mapobj, GRASS etc. subcultures?  What are their values? Which ones give you cred? Who else speaks what you speak and what do you have in common with them ideologically if anything? What standards and specifications do you follow, avoid and promote? Why? And what cultures and subcultures emerge as a result and what are their degree of social and technical influence?

latin and greek were the written language of high ranking members of the clergy, monarchies, and their scribes.  Computer languages are those of engineers, self taught geeks, mostly men, primarily western and white but not all.  They are a minority of the world’s population that are actively engaged in and influence most of what we do in the world today.  Almost everything! The power that this group brokers is unbelievable! One could argue that their power is diffused and distributed and mediated and moderated by those who pay them to write code or the groups for whom these groups write for and the modularity of code writing itself.  Yet, these multiple projects are written in languages which enact all sorts of performativities in social space that non engineers cannot decipher, study, critically examine, explore and/or compare.  We perform in what the code enacts! These languages and their associated constructs construct much or our contemporary world! They are the infrastructure, their ubiquity, dependencies, invisibility and complexity are indicators of infrastructureness (michael’s word) yet we do not have a social, public, cultural enigma machine to decrypt their messages!

i dunno what more to say right now except that i just realized, probably naively, that the ubiquity of the invisible code in our lives is something we need to collectively reflect upon and i would love for the code writers to be a part of that reflexive process! i would like a public discussion about something we are mostly oblivious to but which affects us all! 

Wholly schmokes! I am never going to get any sleep now!

This is the paper that got me going -  The Performativity of Code: Software and Cultures of Circulation by Adrien Mackenzie in  Theory, Culture and Society.  2005, 22, 71.  Let me know if you want a copy!

The ever so wonderful  is conducting a community wireless network (CWN) workshop for

and  in Montreal this weekend!  This is going to be soooooo great and we are going to come back real smart cuz they are the CWN gurus in Canada! Youppie!

Erin Robertson will be having a vernissage at Lafrenière Pai Gallerie! The work has been gestating for some months and I can’t wait to see it! Bravo Erin!

this solo show is 

a series of whimsical paintings and sculptures that explore our relationships with food, creating a contemporary twist on familiar mythologies.

Gallerie
13 Murray St., Ottawa, ON Canada K1N 9M5   613.241.2767

I found some great stuff by Michel de Certeau tonight. 

I think he developed a great way to understand agency, determinism, freedom, and unitended outcomes or consequences of interactions with and around infrastructure - strategy. And how community communication infrastructures i think might be characterized as both a tactic and a strategy.

Perhaps the most influential aspect of The Practice of Everyday Life has emerged from scholarly interest in Certeau’s distinction between the concepts of strategy and tactics. Certeau links "strategies" with institutions and structures of power, while "tactics" are utilized by individuals to create space for themselves in environments defined by strategies. In the influential chapter "Walking in the City," he describes "the city" as a "concept," generated by the strategic maneuvering of governments, corporations, and other institutional bodies who produce things like maps that describe the city as a unified whole, as it might be experienced by someone looking down from high above. By contrast, the walker at street level moves in ways that are tactical and never fully determined by the plans of organizing bodies, taking shortcuts or meandering aimlessly in spite of the utilitarian layout of the grid of streets. This concretely illustrates Certeau’s assertion that everyday life works by a process of poaching on the territory of others, recombining the rules and products that already exist in culture in a way that is influenced, but never wholly determined, by those rules and products. de Certeau

V Day
Originally uploaded by ms oddgers.

Oh lala!

less saturated
Originally uploaded by ms oddgers.

We had our Vday Party yesterday! We raised 32k, and 10k in kind so 42k. Then we raised a little hell with these sweethearts til 3 or so in the morning! Oh my!

That’s right! Until the end of this month i vow to:

• not look at my rss reader thing
  
• not post on this blog
  
• not post on the 4 other blogs i manage
• not read other people’s blogs
  
• not post pictures on flickr or bubbleshare nor search other people’s content
  
• not post on a list unless it is related to some sort of very important logistical matter
• not leave email on all day when i am working
• not go randomly surfing for whatever
• not watch stupid movie trailers
  
• check email in the morning when i get up, a lunch and at some point in time in the evening but not just before bed!
• read the content on my del.icio.us
• read the content i have already compiled on my machine
  
• synthesize a bunch of information that i think i know cuz it is simply in a file folder!
  

I am cut off!

This is serious behavioural modification! Yikes!