What a wonderful visit! The current exhibit being shown is Urban Crude: The Oil Fields Of The Los Angeles Basin all about the oil field underfoot throughout the Greater Los Angeles area. Having grown up in Culver City, sporadic oil pumps were just an occasional part of the landscape, but as a child of course I had never stopped to think in-depth about what their presence meant, and definitely never realized the complex and unique network underpinning the entire endeavor.

I was also lucky enough to meet Matt and Sarah, and I told them a bit about our project and they shared some ideas about potential connections to stuff they are working on. When Marek arrives this evening I’m looking forward to relating all this to him and I think we should consider applying for CLUI’s residency program in Wendover, Utah.

After hearing about our project, Sarah recommended You Are Here: Personal geographies and other maps of the imagination by Katharine A. Harmon, which I purchased and have just begun reading. It is a collection of many people’s uniquely personal maps and relates quite nicely to some things we are trying to do with [here][now]: mainly, aggregating subjectivities into something that hopefully creates a whole greater than the sum of parts.

We’re super excited about the show, and especially about the possibility of participating in it, as it seems exactly in line with many of the ideas we are interested in with [here][now]. Mainly that people can not just affect, but literally shape their world, just by participating in it. The path to meaningful change consists of thoughtful observation, conceptualization, and confidence in the belief that we all possess the capacity to re-program our environment.

Some literature about the show proposes that contributing artists are “invited to either interpret the UN Millennium Development Goals or to propose goals of their own.” The goals are listed as:

• Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
• Achieve universal primary education
• Promote gender equality and empower women
• Reduce child mortality
• Improve maternal health
• Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
• Ensure environmental sustainability
• Develop a global partnership for development

The thing that initially strikes me about all these items (except for perhaps the last) is just that they are such massive problems despite many possible solutions existing, and despite the fact that most people clearly agree they are problems.

One reason for this disconnect — between the world we all want and the world we have — is our inability to recognize our ability/responsibility to change things. In this “information age” now more than ever before, as life becomes data and data becomes digital, we all possess the capacity to reprogram the pathways and architectures that define society. Technology can be a democratizing force or it can simply reiterate past structures. The key is to recognize and harness it’s distributed capacity, to realize that we can come together to talk to each other, and collaborate to visualize and make the future.

On the evening of January 12th we’ll be doing another showing of our work in progress. If you are in the area stop by! And we’ll posting more reports and documentation of progress here over the next couple weeks.

The abstract describes one potential theoretical framework for understanding some of the ideas addressed by the project. It focusses on urban space as understood through simulation, and touches on our use of psychogeographical methods in constructing virtual urban worlds.

The abstract is here: Neither Here nor There: Simulation and Urban Space (pdf).

… which is kind of hilarious.

The midnight oil burning was due to the fact that we needed to rewrite of a huge chunk of the Java code, and almost all of the VRML — the details about why that was necessary will be included in another post to come soon.

As we walk around Seoul, to and from our workspace at Nabi, we’ve been consciously always taking different paths, wandering around through different neighborhoods, and snapping pictures to use as textures along the way. Our workshops are helping to determine what types of images to gather.

This morning as we were doing this, we realized this process is really essentially an example of the Situationist dérive — a way of kind of trying to understand a place on an empirical level, without any preconceived notions such as zoning rules, socio-political history, etc. If [here][now] is an example of our society as spectacle, then these walks, manifested in the project via the images as textures, are a way of understanding the real reality that the project represents virtually.

Installing Django on a Red Hat Linux box from about 2005:

1. Fortunately, MySQL came pre-installed, but upon trying to run the server daemon I was getting a
   “STOPPING server from pid file” error, with the log file saying “Table ‘mysql.host’ doesn’t exist”. This was fixed easily enough with the mysql_install_db command (as well as some miscellaneous other permissions and config changes).
2. Next step was installing MySQLdb so that Python could communicate with MySQL. Had to try this install a couple times due to an “ImportError: libmysqlclient_r.so.14: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory”. Finally after some LD_LIBRARY_PATH tweaks and installing from source, I thought the install worked, but then I got an “undefined symbol: uncompress” error. Reading the MySQLdb README file, I realized I needed to install zlib. But zlib came pre-installed on the box! And here is where things got tricky …

   I came across this lame build error in older MySQL versions. Apparently the _r version of libmysqlclient.so wasn’t properly linked against zlib. So even though zlib was installed, the library file that MySQLdb was referencing wasn’t linked. I guess “_r” stands for “re-entrant”? Because if I built MySQLdb with the threadsafe option set to False in site.cfg, MySQLdb linked against a different version of libmysqlclient, which apparently links against zlib properly. I heart the ldd command. anyway, that finally worked.

   (This article was helpful in this process.)

3. ok, now I installed DJango which went smoothly. And installed my Django code. But trying to run Django syncdb, I got “Illegal mix of collations (latin1_swedish_ci,IMPLICIT) and (utf8_general_ci,COERCIBLE)”. Now this was a massive pain to fix, and this mailing list thread was pretty helpful here. I edited /etc/my.cnf and set all my encodings and collations to utf8 and utf8_unicode_ci (see this and this from the MySQL reference — note this is the 4.1 documentation). After dropping and re-adding my database a few times, and running syncdb a few times, I was still getting “unknown encoding: latin1_swedish_ci” errors. argh!

   ok, found this helpful post which talks about this problem with MySQLdb. I’m still not sure why db.character_set_name() wasn’t returning “utf8″, and I’m not sure if it is a MySQL config thing that I could fix somehow or something else, but I just unzipped the MySQLdb egg file and hacked the source to hardcode my encoding to be “utf8″ and everything worked. This is a hideous kludge that no one should be proud of, but at least it should keep everything running for now.

ok! tedious work but worth it as now we have a full test of the system up and running here at Nabi.

And here are two nice evening images from Seoul …

In 1975, Milan Kundera moved to France. There he published The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) which told of Czech citizens opposing the communist regime in various ways. An unusual mixture of novel, short story collection and author’s musings, the book set the tone for his works in exile. Critics have noted the irony that the country that Kundera seemed to be writing about when he talked about Czechoslovakia in the book, “is, thanks to the latest political redefinitions, no longer precisely there” which is The “kind of disappearance and reappearance Kundera explores in the book.” ^[3]

That is from wikipedia.

But this idea of forgotten geographies was an early motivating idea to the project and has shaped several key elements of the piece.