This is a photo of Mt. Everest (Jomolungma or Sagarmatha); the top 1000 metres, in fact, from the South Col to the summit. It's a 1:240 scale model that Ben Coode-Adams and I built for the Hastings Museum and Art Gallery's "Experimental Spaces" program, and that featured in a performance piece we did there in January of this year (mentioned only now, in April, because we can post photos for the first time). The performance involved a real-time reconstruction over 29 hours of one especially tragic, and revealing day on Everest. Built from close readings of 4 first-hand accounts written about that day, the piece explored the ways that written narratives establish certain kinds of knowledge (e.g. truth), and how alternative methods of conducting research (visual reconstruction, performance) can usefully intervene in the production of histories. Ben and I are going to present an expanded version of the piece in Banff (May, 2003), in collaboration with the Banff New Media Institute and the Mountain Cultures department, and in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's first ascent of Everest in 1953. You can read more about this work, entitled "'Is Someone Coming to Get Me?'" here.
-kris

PHOTOBLOGS: I’ve been wondering how photographic photoblogs are. Photography has three obvious genealogical strands: art photography, photojournalism, and popular or vernacular photography (snapshots, etc.)—with all the interesting stuff (and maybe ALL the stuff) probably happening in between. These genealogies contain the ways we know how to think about photographs; they form the grounds for making sense of them (from what they depict to what they mean, culturally, emotionally, etc.). But in talking to photobloggers and trying to write about photoblogs, I’ve found these historical precedents misleading: what they seem to be about isn’t what photoblogs seem to be about. Which makes me wonder whether “photographs” isn’t the wrong word for what photoblogs display and “photography” isn’t the wrong word for what photoblogs do, in the sense that the words “photograph” and “photography” contain our analytics for thinking about what photographs are and how they operate. What I’m looking for, ultimately, are better ways, clearer ways to think about photoblogs, on their own terms (not the terms of historical photographic practice).
-kris

Just back from meeting up with the webteam for the Camden borough council website. I was impressed by the level of transactability on the site: borough residents can pay their council tax, parking permits and fines, make complaints as well as report problems with street and housing repairs. There is a live webcast available of council meetings, and several forums hosted on the site, including one specifically for young people in Camden.
adam

I attended the iSociety's launch of their latest report: MobileUK: Mobile Phones and Everyday Life. It was staged as a debate about the future of 3G mobile technologies, posing the question to several panelists: "Do we really need 3G?" There was a pretty bald sense in which the collective answer was "No". 3G, in any case, was given a tepid reception, the general feeling being that it was too expensive, and that there would be no obvious benefit of such high bandwidth services for the "average consumer". A lot was said _for_ the "average consumer". iSociety's report about mobile phones is grounded in an ethnography of mobile phone users; in its focus on the specificity of mobile phone use, it complements the more exploratory and definitional work of INCITE's recent report on mobility.

It was interesting, at the debate, to watch how even a discussion with anchors in ethnographic research—in common everyday practices of use in the present—so persistently slid into the future (with competing predictions for the future pitted contentiously against one another). This movement towards the future and prediction is a common habit of conversations about new technology. In a sense, ethnographic design research locates the future in present and past behaviour rather than in prediction.
-kris

BUSINESS BLOGGING: announcement of first conference for companies interested in learning about how weblogging might have applications for business. It seems the form of weblogs is changing again!
adam