<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><P align="justify" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 9px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;">Dear Mark,</SPAN></FONT></P><P align="justify" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 9px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;">Thanks for your reply. Brian Holme's text is fascinating. From my non-expert viewpoint (cyberneticists please feel free to correct me ...) cybernetics still considers 'systems' , which to some extent is grounded in the underlying assumption that a system in itself has some form of boundary and can be studied objectively as an entity- which can be limiting as an approach . Although, having said this, related-theories such as those of emergence do seem to be able to at least recognise the inherently open nature of changeful processes, and can allow for a process to be an outcome. The question then lies in how we can try to understand information flows which do not break processes down into components which no longer give us any insight into the changeful whole. If I refer back to situated interaction with technology; where computers supposedly respond to real world events and places then you still get human and digital systems colliding because they work on different paradigms: </SPAN></FONT></P><P align="justify" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 9px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;">'</SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;"><I>The discrete nature of computation means that both specification and implementation of computer systems tend to focus on events that occur at specific times. However most mobile applications detect or measure status phenomena i.e. they are things which constantly have a value that can be sampled. The translation of status phenomena into events is problematic and is often done accidentally within systems, with the consequent probability of errors [Dix, 2000]. This may contribute to the fact that the fundamental infrastructure and services that make up ubiquitous and pervasive technology exhibits a great deal of spatial, temporal, economic and organizational variation [Chalmers 2004]. </I></SPAN></FONT></P><P align="justify" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 9px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;">Underlying this is the question of humans interacting with technology , where there often remains the issue of the concept of feedback, which is essentially structured around the idea that any input of data will create some form of output (even if it is just an error message) - ie it requires in some way a sequential flow of activities with the assumption that there is an outcome. So there seems to be an inherent problem in that it responds to change in a way that may not allow for unexpected outcomes or perhaps the scenario where there is no outcome at all.</SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Times New Roman" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;"> </SPAN></FONT></P><P align="justify" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 9px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;">A narrative is essentially a piece of information undergoing change. A story unfolds and ideally the process of unfolding is interactive - the storyteller reacts to an audience or weaves in pieces of information that tap into people's memories or hopes. So, as you say, it responds to the condition of in-betweenness (for more on this topic and how it applies to public spaces see karen martin and colleague's workshop on inbetweeness </SPAN></FONT><A href="http://www.inbetweeness.org/"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001FE8">http://www.inbetweeness.org</FONT></A>/)<FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;"> .</SPAN></FONT></P><P align="justify" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 9px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;">My only thought is that we need to look away from science for solutions; to literature, film, theatre and other such fields to give us paradigms for interacting with information and which can deal with loose, sticky and ambiguous threads. These fields deal with subjective qualities of things rather than objective quantities.</SPAN></FONT></P><P align="justify" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 9px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;">coming back to Deleuze (From Cinema 1)</SPAN></FONT></P><P align="justify" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 9px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;"><I>'if one had to define the whole, it would be defined by the Relation. Relation is not a property of objects, it is always external to its terms. Relations do not belong to objects, but to the whole, on the condition that this is not confused with a closed set of objects... Through relations the whole is transformed or changes quantitively</I></SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;">'</SPAN></FONT></P><P align="justify" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 9px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;">Your quote from Deleuze on multiplicity also refers to the idea that a 'whole' is not a systems but a set of relations; what he calls a multiplicity. ' </SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;"><I>it's the borderline, there's always a border, a line of flight or flow, only we don't see it, because it's the least perceptible of things</I></SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;">' </SPAN></FONT></P><P align="justify" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 9px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;">Following up on your idea that authors ( you gave the example of Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan) have created good precedents for how we might approach narratives about place, another example might be the work of writer Iain Sinclair. In his book 'London orbital' he documented his journey along the M25 motorway which rings London (for those not familiar with London, the road is literally a 117mile long circular bypass around the city). The story captures some of the in-between space which portrays the London that many experience everyday in their journeys; as opposed to the dominant the narrative told by tourist brochures, estate agent windows or sat-nav systems:</SPAN></FONT></P><P align="justify" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 9px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;">'</SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;"><I>for the first time since Shenly we didn't need maps.... we trusted the ground... we followed our noses. Patches of greenery, dog grass, a few trees; they are absorbed into a grander scheme Isolate one Lombardy Pine. Stand still and </I></SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;"><B><I>listen</I></B></SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;"><I>. Outsiders are struck by effects, shifts, that locals walking their animals, or collecting their kids from a fenced-off school, take for granted. There is a mystery at the edge of great conurbations; in the light, in places travellers have passed through for centuries</I></SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;">' (pg. 191-192)</SPAN></FONT></P><P align="justify" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 9px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;">By structuring the text around a motorway, a thoroughly inbetween space, the text somehow captures duration of an experience and how London is held together by the many flows of people on a road where if you keep driving you end up where you started, just at a different time.</SPAN></FONT></P><P align="justify" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 9px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;">Another field that seems to offer so many opportunities for a better approach to the subject is that of theatre and dance. The methods of performance are very much based on systems of response and non-verbal communication, so it would be great to know how this might hold some clues about another way of thinking about the problem....</SPAN></FONT></P><P align="justify" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 9px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;">But I realise this is all very far away from the reality of a software engineer programming a mobile device so that it can respond to the change in location of the device and the corresponding sophisticated switching of network coverage from one cell to another. I just wonder how it is possible to start to reveal somehow both the ambiguity and change inherent in such systems as well as the actual eventfulness occurring in the flow of information so that we can start to weave them more meaningfully into our messy 'real' world.</SPAN></FONT></P><P align="justify" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 9px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></P><P align="justify" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 9px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;">regards</SPAN></FONT></P><P align="justify" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 9px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Verdana" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;">Katharine</SPAN></FONT></P><P align="justify" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 9px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></P><P align="justify" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 9px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Times New Roman" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;">reference</SPAN></FONT></P><P align="justify" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 9px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Times New Roman" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;">Dix, A., Rodden, T,., Davies, N., Trevor., J, Friday, A., Palfreyman, K.: Exploiting Space and Location as a Design Framework for Interactive Mobile Systems. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), v.7 n.3, p.285-321, Sept. (2000)</SPAN></FONT></P><P align="justify" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 9px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Times New Roman" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;">Chalmers, M., Dieberger, A., Höök, K., Rudström. A.: Social Navigation and Seamful Design. Cognitive Studies: Bulletin of the Japanese Cognitive Science Society 11(3), pp 171-181, (2004)</SPAN></FONT></P><P align="justify" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 9px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Times New Roman" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;">Sinclair, I ( 2002). London Orbital. Granta, UK</SPAN></FONT></P><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">On 21 Oct 2007, at 02:37, Mark Shepard wrote:</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001DD7">Hi Katherine,</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001DD7"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001DD7">Your call for us to consider how Situated Technologies might serve to help us "find ways of slipping through the boundaries in order to trace our own meanings and memories on the spatial world" would seem to reflect Brian Holmes' post on his blog of an abstract for an essay on Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies: </FONT><A href="http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2007/07/20/escape-the-overcode/"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001FE8">http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2007/07/20/escape-the-overcode/</FONT></A><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001DD7"> - although knowing Brian (at least though his posts here and elsewhere) I'm sure he'll have issues with this correlation (which I look forward to reading). What's your take on this?</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001DD7"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001DD7">This condition of being betwixt and between - "the story comes into being in the space in-between" - is something I think anyone migrating from one place to the another is of course familiar with, and their stories are probably a good place to start in thinking through this. "Crossing the BLVD:</FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001DD7"> </FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001DD7">strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America" is a book by Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan that presents a kaleidoscopic view of new immigrants and refugees living in Queens, New York -</FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001DD7"> </FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001DD7">the most ethnically diverse locality in the United States. Excerpts are available here: </FONT><A href="http://www.crossingtheblvd.org/"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001FE8">http://www.crossingtheblvd.org</FONT></A></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001DD7"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001DD7">Also, your question "how long is a piece of string?" poses interesting problems vis-a-vis ANT theory, at least as far as Latour articulates it. What are the limits by which we need to trace what is "strung together" or assembled by contemporary story-telling technologies and techniques?</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001DD7"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001DD7">Finally, what "kind" of narrative are we talking about here? Surely we're not thinking of the master narratives and grand schemes of orthodox modernism. But at what point does this "shared experience" become enmeshed in larger aspirations toward empowerment vis-a-vis networked technologies?</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001DD7"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001DD7">Below is an exerpt from a conversation with Gilles Deleuze on the television broadcast of Jean Luc Godard's "Six fois deux"; Cahiers du Cinema 271 (November 1976).</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001DD7"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001DD7">Best,</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001DD7">Mark</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001DD7"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001DD7"><snip></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001DD7">AND is of course diversity, multiplicity, the destruction of identities. It's not the same factory gate when I go in, and when I come out, and then when I go past unemployed. A convicted man's wife isn't the same before and after the conviction. But diversity and multiplicity have nothing to do with aesthetic wholes (in the sense of 'one more,' 'one more woman'. . . ) or dialectical schemas (in the sense of 'one produces two, which then produces three'). Because in those cases it's still Unity, and thus being, that's primary, and that supposedly becomes multiple.</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001DD7"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001DD7">When Godard says everything has two parts, that in a day there's morning and evening, he's not saying it's one or the other, or that one becomes the other, becomes two. Because multiplicity is never in the terms, however many, nor in all the terms together, the whole. Multiplicity is precisely in the 'and' which is different in nature from elementary components and collections of them.</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001DD7"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001DD7">Neither a component nor a collection, what is this AND? I think Godard's force lies in living and thinking and presenting this AND in a very novel way, and in making it work actively. AND is neither one thing nor the other, it's always in-between, between two things; it's the borderline, there's always a border, a line of flight or flow, only we don't see it, because it's the least perceptible of things. And yet it's along this line of flight that things come to pass, becomings evolve, revolutions take shape.</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001DD7"></snip></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001DD7"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#001DD7"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; color: rgb(0, 29, 215); min-height: 14px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV></BODY></HTML>