Paul Raven @ 12-05-2008
Another little gem spotted by the grinders: what would you get if you took the crime incident statistics for London and represented them as a 3D physical map?
Mount Fear is what you’d get. In the words of its creator, Abigail Reynolds:
The terrain of Mount Fear is generated by data sets relating to the frequency and position of urban crimes. Precise statistics are provided by the police. Each individual incident adds to the height of the model, forming a mountainous terrain … The imaginative fantasy space seemingly proposed by the sculpture is subverted by the hard facts and logic of the criteria that shape it.
While it makes for an intriguing art project, Mount Fear surely presages a short-range extrapolation of geolocative mash-ups.
In other words, being able to call up the data used for Mount Fear and overlay it on Google Maps running on your mobile device would make your next flat- or apartment-hunting experience that little bit more reassuring.
Or should that be less reassuring?
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Paul Raven @ 11-04-2008
Via the one and only Bruce Sterling, here’s a post that’s remarkably bullish about the potential of web-reality mash-ups like Google Transit to revolutionise urban life:
“… once the knee-jerk paranoia passes, the benefits begin to sink in. With live-feed transit information, Google Maps and Google Earth could eliminate the need for standing on a windy or snowy street corner for twenty minutes, waiting for a late bus. Outside it could be pouring rain, but you’d know exactly when to leave the house to catch your train.”
But it just gets better!
“At City Hall a few weeks later, the general happiness trend of your neighborhood is noticed to be on the rise. Civic officials study the area to learn why this spike in aura has been occurring, and use this people-powered live information to liven up some less brightly-colored spots on the map.”
It’s interesting to see this sort of positive spin on matters, as opposed to the usual privacy FUD. Even so, utopias rarely work out the way they’re meant to - how would this sort of urban planning affect the disenfranchised and the poor? [image by eyeliam]
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