Real Time Riga

You might remember how much I loved last year's Real Time Amsterdam, and the Waag Society is currently at it again in Latvia with Real Time Riga.

Every city inhabitant has an invisible map in his/her mind. This map determines each person’s transmigration trajectories in the city as well as influences their everyday choices of particular paths they take. [The] Real Time project, by analyzing habits, how citizens move around their cities, attempts to visualize these mental maps. Psycho-geographical city maps are drawn using PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), mobile GPRS connections, Internet and GPS (Global Positioning System) technologies.

My paper for the Digital Genres Conference is shaping up quite nicely, thank you. Michel de Certeau wrote, "The ordinary practitioners of the city live 'down below,' below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk - an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmanner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban 'text' they write without being able to read it ... " And so here's to making the invisible, visible.