TRAVEL DIARY

A weblog regularly updated by Jodi Rose.

Friday, April 16, 2004

10:00 PM
Posted by jodi rose

das möbel - fodert wohnkultur
burgasse 10, 1070 wien
all warm and relaxed from sitting in the windowseat, soaking up spring sunshine. Konrad advises that if he had just 3 days in vienna, walk around a lot and go to coffee houses. I can manage that. Will try and make it to the balkan fever concert tonight, at porgy and bess, a newish jazz place done in red velvet. Check out www.t0.or.at for info about the activities of public netbase, very happening and subversive media art facilitators, artists and organisers.
Have started to make sense of the map - can find the post office symbols, work out which buses and trams go where, and today just noticed the stops are all marked with little dots, also realised the numbers at the start of addresses correspond to which district of the city the place is - and that is also cleverly marked on the map. It also starts to feel more familiar here, I love my neighbourhood, alles gut.
Disco laundro is taking off into a new dimension, stay tuned for details over the coming months.

Recent comments on living a life dedicated to poetry and beauty:
forget being poetic, men don't understand that - just say what you want and take it :)))))
You're a lonely island adrift in a very lonely sea....
some of the things you wrote are obvious, but others are unexpected

reading in the observer last sunday about emotional computing, which is being developed in england right now. The computer monitors the users heartrate, breathing, pulse, and minute changes in facial expression to detect emotional state, and responds accordingly: for instance, in a call centre when someone is getting angry and frustrated listening to the recorded messages for 20 minutes, the computer will divert that call to a human operator who can 'break the cycle.'.
what I would like to see is a handheld device combining emotional computing with gps mapping, the listings database and personals ads for any city or location in the world. let's call it eric. so that you could tell eric what you are looking for, and then eric would read your breathing, heart rate and facial expression to deduce the state you are actually in, and provide a selection of possible options, which eric would then direct you to using the gps mapping and hook you up with exactly the right person to spend time with, or go on a date or have a conversation, for the mood you are in.
So, for example right now eric might send me to a cosy retro cafe in burggasse, with a hungarian band playing wild gypsy music to have a long girl talk with an erudite, sassy, fun aussie sound sheila called sophea. that's my idea of technology working for you.

Some of the ideas at locative media using were intriguing, don't get me wrong, I'm not anti it or anything. Pete Gomes' work using global positioning to map shadows and ephemera for instance, is gorgeous.

Spent half an hour sitting in the park in the sun, watching people. One man across from me was particularly fascinating, he seemed to be totally engrossed in his own face, pulling out a compact mirror every few minutes, peering into it and checking the skin on his chin and nose, for blemishes, or sunspots maybe. Then he would get out some kind of make-up, or sun screen or tan lotion, or concealer, and rub it in, check again in the mirror, sit with his eyes closed for a while and then start all over again. he was tall, thin, wearing pale blue high waisted slacks, with an ugly, nondescript brown lightweight jacket, dark brown loafers, black socks, wavy shoulder length hair. it was very bizzarre.
Had a late night cup of tea at the suburban coffee house round the corner from my hotel last night, cafe Hummel. It was fantastic, dirty laminex tables and grotty vinyl benchseats, waiters in dinners suits with bow ties, a scene from some 50's movie that is almost cool retro but not quite. www.cafehummel.at