Today I had a very interesting conversation about place, and the ways in which I'm starting to approach the idea. The observation was made that a lot of my work deals not just with the sense of place, but in using my projects to transcend place.

This struck me as accurate, and its making me go back and look at my existing and proposed projects in a new light.

Take, for example, a project I proposed for my Network Landscapes class. Its a collaboration with my mother, who is also an artist, designer and, for many years now, a successful blogger. When her mother died this summer, we were left with many (many, MANY) boxes of stuff accumulated from two or three generations of my family on that side. There are hundreds of stories and memories in these boxes, and I was frustrated that I wouldn't be a part of telling them from across the country.

So I proposed that we each take one box, and agree to unpack one item (or logical collection of items) out of each box each day for two weeks. My project is to create a tool that allows each of us to post a photograph of each days findings, and to start a collective dialogue about the historical narrative taking place in each.

The project - the working title is Unpacked - is an exercise in unpacking our relationships to our physical space by creating a new online place that transcends either one. It will also produce a novel form of recording family history and personal narrative, and result in a portrait of my grandmother built up from her own history.  

This evening I went to a lecture that easily ranks in my top 5 lecture experiences of all time, by the writer and historian John Stilgoe. His lecture style has been described as "a journey, a walk, or a drive," and its true -  he meandered and hopped and broke from the beaten path so frequently and so delightfully that at the end you were surprised to see him returning back to the slide he started from, having come full circle through such disparate themes as globalization, railroads, women in advertising, shop theory, gastronomic color theory, sustainability, wooden boats, and photography. At the end, Michael and Elana and I looked at each other with amazement because he'd managed to say fruitful and interesting things about pretty much every thesis topic in our class.

For me the lecture was particularly interesting because Stilgoe has some ties to the phenomenological philosophy tradition, and often talks about the ways in which technology - particularly the screen - is changing the way we observe and "read" the world around us.

Tonight I'll be adding one of his books, Outside Lies Magic, to my reading list.

The following is the beginning of a site survey, conducted from the veranda of the casino in Roger Williams Park, overlooking the gazeebo and duck pond. It is an exercise in seeing the world through the philosophical tradition of phenomenology. [View original journal entry].

I am sitting with my back to a red brick wall. Looking down at my hand, writing with a black pen in a medium-sized notebook. The notebook is set on a blue and white striped dress with buttons down the front, in the style of a men's shirt. The hands gripping the notebook come out of sleeves clad in gray heathered sweatshirt material. I am writing with my left hand.

I am surfing the web from Windows for the first time in two years. A Mac running Parallels running Windows running IE 7, to be more specific. It is a little surreal, and is part of day 1 of my Network Landscapes class within the Digital+Media* department.

What IS fun, however, is learning how to use a cool tool called mscapes. Its a visual editing tool that lets you build GPS-based interactive experiences. So I can create a little program for any GPS-enabled phone that will show an image when you get into a certain zone, or play sound when you get within a certain area.

For someone looking to explore a hybrid digital-physical experience, this is pretty darn cool.

* These guys are really serious about that plus sign. Even when spoken in a speech -- like, say, by the new Provost at convocation -- you are supposed to say "Digital Plus Media" with a completely straight face. Its like no one here learned anything from the dot com era.