OMB

I decided to go shopping yesterday.

It probably wasn’t the best idea, Covent Garden on the bussiest Saturday of the year. Still, I made it to the end. Before I had even begun the ordeal, I walked from Waterloo Station, accross the footbridge to Charing Cross Station. On the way there is an outdoor art installation :

This stuff is pretty po-mo, but its also quite nice. I like walking through london and seeing things like this; art that doesn’t reach out and grab you, but makes you wonder if it is actually art. Is this a local youth group who’ve put some lights into a bin? No, its David Batchelor, who says:

“I like to create temporary projects in public spaces, inserting something that will only be there for a few days or weeks, but will alter the experience of the space during that time.”

So thats quite similar to graffiti then. It is a temporary project in a public space, that alters the experience of people who experience the art. The remaining differences are due to the social status of the type of art that is being expresesed. Everything costs something. A graffiti artist must pay for their spray cans as David Batchelor must pay his mortgage. The difference is that people like Batchelor’s pay-cheque comes from a foundation or similar publically funded body, a factor which gives them credibility. Their work becomes art because the police cannot remove it, the council can’t get it painted over and because people’s complaints about it are labelled “old fashioned”/”not in touch with modern culture”. Conversely, the graffiti artist’s work is washed away with increasingly swift action, becuase it is not officially sanctioned.

Should art be reliant on state funding? Would we have a more balanced representation of the society we live in if art was subject to the same economic constraints that most of us live our lives by?

I think its quit nice - I probably wouldn’t have bothered talking photos if I had thought differently. Still, I’d like to know how much the installation cost the public purse so that I can make a balanced judgement.

Gaia is a project that started off as an attempt to reverse engineer Google Earth, that has now become focused on producing an open source 3D map viewer. The course of the project has been significantly steered by Google, who objected on various grounds to the project’s use of satellite and aerial photography outside of the bounds of Google’s own clients, which restrict access, impose copyright notices and so on. So now Gaia no longer shows Google’s data, but is restricted to free libre data sources. The project’s founder posts Google Earth’s Chief Technologist, Michael Jones’ letter of complaint on his site. My personal favourite was this line:

The kindness through which Google has made the wonder of our planet
available to more than 100 million users around the world is now threatened
– not by a menacing and fierce business competitor — but by you.

Oh, the overwhelming generosity of Google! All those developers working for free and the poor shareholders - how will they feed their childern? Jones has a valid point to make, but to try and play the “Google’s out to save the world” card belittles the intelligence and awareness of a community who are just waiting for the McDonalds arches to appear on every Google Map hack out there. Jones concludes:

We are like an iPod for Earth images.
If people could get the music out to play on other platforms then the music
companies would not allow Apple access to the music in the first place. This
is the situation.

This site contains excellent animations based on US FAA flight data, as noted on the OSM mailing list over the weekend by Andrew.

They are QuickTime movies, so Linux users will need to install something like Mplayer and the mozilla-maplyer plugin to view them.

Those time wasting agitators at BlairClock have produced a daily gif that tells you exactly how long we have to go. The image updates itself every day, letting you know exactly how much time you have to wait. To get this miraculous peice of Web 1.0 goodness on your site, copy and paste the code below.
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