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Castle Building Gets Medieval, Bertrand Piccard, and GPS Atari Art

By Clark Boyd ⋅ August 14, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment
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Les PaulThis week’s technology podcast begins with a tribute to Les Paul, who was not only a master guitarist, but a master craftsman. He’s the man who did the pioneering work behind the single-body electric guitar. If you’re a fan of rock-n-roll, you’d be hard pressed to think of a more important piece of technology. Mr. Paul, who died this week at the age of 94, also had a role to play in many other technological innovations that shaped the sound of the music we love today. Where would we be without multi-tracking, people?

The podcast rolls on with a look at some French builders who are getting positively medieval in their quest to build, from scratch, a castle. That’s right. They’re using only 13th century tools, technologies and techniques to bring to life the Guedelon Chateau in Burgundy, France. The World’s Gerry Hadden reports, and takes pictures! Seriously, follow that link and check out the squirrel cage. Not to be missed.

From old school, to new school, we then hear about Bertrand Piccard’s dream — which is called Solar Impulse. In short, he and his associates want to build a solar-powered airplane. And not just any solar-powered airplane, but rather one that can fly, non-stop, around the world. Thanks to the BBC’s Jonathan Fildes for sending in that interview from the recent TED conference in Oxford, England.

Then, a short item on an interesting little project unveiled in London this week: the driverless car…er, pod. Or something. They certainly can’t make getting into or out of Heathrow Airport any worse, right?

spacedudeAnd we end the show with yet more proof that the show is as much yours as mine. Longtime WTP fan Vicente Montelongo wrote in to tell me about an interesting little art/technology/exercise project he and his buddies in San Francisco are doing. Call it GPS Art, or Geo-spatial drawing, or…something. They map out a route through the streets, then have their GPS app track them as they run the route on their bikes. The result? Well, to date, a lot of great geo-spatial pieces of art that look exceedingly like beloved Atari characters. Check it.

Also, see this article in the New York Times.

As always, you can subscribe to us on iTunes or via RSS. We’re on Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed.

Discussion

One comment for “Castle Building Gets Medieval, Bertrand Piccard, and GPS Atari Art”

  • http://www.paintersflat.net Brett Stalbaum

    Hi Clark, long time listener to your excellent show,

    First, I have to say this it is a little difficult for me to critical of your reporting, which I have come to value very much. But, I think you may have been a little sloppy on this one. First, you have credited the very cool GPS Atari Art project with coining the term “GPS Drawing”. A simple google search may have been in order, for example Hugh Pryor and Jeremy Wood are artists who have been been using the term “GPS Drawing” for some time, since the year 2000. You can learn more at (I really do hate to point this URL out), at http://www.gpsdrawing.com/.

    It may just be a blind spot in your knowledge, but there is an entire generation of artists who have been using GPS as a specific medium for this and related kinds of expression since the 1990s. Perhaps the very very earliest (for GPS) is interesting work by Masaki Fujihata. The “Impressing Velocity” project, though poorly documented online, is the example I am thinking of. (1994!) I teach locative media (and history of computing in the arts, and computer programming) in the department of visual arts at UCSD, and it has become very common for our undergraduates to work with locative media in ways very similar to your story. Arguably the first examples of drawing on the map to produce physical movement in the mapped spaces date back to the non-site work of Robert Smithson in the 1960s, but the first example that I am aware of where “the animation animates the animator” was this project in 2007: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzIKFvZMFKU I worked with Christin Turner, one of our best undergrads in recent years, to complete the technical requirements to implement her concept in 2007.

    I could go on, but I sometimes teach an entire quarter-long class dealing with this material.

    So again, I love your show. But I did want to point out that because it is new to you, well again this pains me, it may not be entirely new! And some cool guys in San Francisco (who I suspect I would like to meet) certainly don’t deserve to be credited as the innovators of the form or the creators of “GPS Drawing”. There is a very interesting history of locative media work that you may be interested in. In fact, I am in Germany as we speak installing for an exhibition at the Edith Russ Haus for Media Art. The exhibition is titled Landscape 2.0; you may be interested.

    Cheers,
    Brett Stalbaum

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