# SWARM /// The Brooklyn Pigeon Project

In 2004, the young architects Ben Aranda and Chris Lasch have realized a research on the swarm phenomenon of homing pigeon flight the " brooklyn pigeon project, a terraswarm project".
They used small localization devices that were carried individually by each Pigeon.
They measure and observed the flight of each pigeon and then they have done a modelisation/visualization like maps and diagrams of the itinerary of the birds that is linked to the atmosphere of the neighborhood.

More in their book Tooling (Pamphlet Architecture 27)
More on the Aranda/Lasch Flickr account

PHOTO CREDIT:
Peter Hall

# SWARM /// Ants, termites, bees, birds, fishes etc.

Here are two articles to introduce the swarm as an intelligent animal group. One is from the National Geographic, it is very complete and tries to see very much the human application (see also the photographs gallery) and the other is from the New York Times and even if it more concise, it proposes those two diagrams which are very important to understand how those colonies of ants and other animals evolves as swarm to create a collective intelligence.

# New Israeli colonization plan in Palestine

Israel is continuing its colonization policy in Palestine (West Bank) by authorizing yesterday the construction of 455 new housing units, once again transgressing every current international laws.
Read more in todays' New York Times

# Contemporary relics

September 11th attacks' eighth anniversary is approaching and the New York Times is today releasing an interesting article about those relics from the World Trade Center which are being conserved in a 80000 square foot hangar in JFK airport and in another one in the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
Those symbols of collective unconscious are apparently requested by a lot of towns in US which would like to create memorials. One of these steel trident will be for sure held in the future transportation station on ground zero.
It is interesting to understand that this country has the abitlity to charge objects in an almost religiously way of collective history, emotion and pride...

# SWARM /// Introduction

For the purpose of Ferda Kolatan Pratt's course called Design by Nature, I have to prepare a presentation for September 28th about Networks intelligence and I thought it could be interesting to report my research on boiteaoutils then readers might comment on it and give some ideas !
Swarm intelligence is interesting in its absence of hierarchy and its greater production as a group than as the sum of individualities composing it. This topic is widely tackled by biologists, programmers/architects and their work may appear in this research, but I would like to also link it to its political potential.

To begin, here are two formers articles on boiteaoutils (here and here)and a recent one on Pruned about birds migrations (and some more pictures from Richard Barnes)

# Public School, knowledge exchange and experimentation

A short post about the brand new Public School of Paris "Ecole publique de Paris".
This school is in fact a free exchange of knowledge and practice, anyone can make a class/lecture/seminar proposition and anyone can attend to it.
It 's a really interesting system that is now a network between NYC, LA, Chicago, Philadelphia and since few days Paris thanks to the Art Center Beton Salon.

Go have a look on that, and take part of it!

Maybe you can create a new one in your own city!

# La vida loca by Christian Poveda

Film maker and photographer, Christian Poveda has been assassinated this week by a Salvador gang he was currently working on. Here are some pictures published today by Le Monde and another gallery on flickr illustrating what Jean-Pierre Limosin was showing in Young Yakuza and David Cronenberg in Eastern Promises, the whole story and categorization of those gangs' members tattooed on their skins. The result always surprised me in the ambiguity between a form of primitiveness and cyborg manifesto.

# Daniel Wicke(Rural Studio), Lecture in Paris

This Monday september 7th, a lecture of Daniel WICKE will take place at the Cité de L'Architecture (7 pm at the Auditorium).

This lecture is part of the exhibition "Habiter ecologique" (sustainable living) at the Architecture museum in Paris.

# Learning from the High Line

New York City High Line opened its first portion to the public about three months ago, it has been published in hundred of blogs and magazines praising Diller & Scofidio's design, and when I visited it, I heard a lot of people saying that they actually loved it.
However, I think that some pieces of reflection could be useful here. New York City is getting more and more gentrified, suppressing thus its social diversity which makes this city so interesting and this whole High Line seems to me as a violent estate operation bringing back high social class people in Meat Packing district. The High Line as an architecture project is symptomatic of this will of gentrification. It wants to look wild like it used to be but in a very sterilized and secure way. This piece of railway used to be a long and narrow abnormal territory of illegibility within the city and it is now part of the capitalistic machine ruling it.

Paris still owns a space like that. It is called La Petite Ceinture (the small belt) and consists in an abandoned railway all around the city. It is forbidden by the law to walk on it but its same illegibility protects illegal visitors to be seen by the authority.
It probably won't be too long before estate investors realize how great it would be to develop it, but I would argue that the city needs those zones of non-authority where you have to negotiate a new balance between freedom and security. Their way to live them are different that the ones we use for the city all around just like in Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker where the Zone has to be experienced by other behaviors than usual ones.

pictures from Joel Sternfeld

First portion of D&S's highline nowadays

Petite Ceinture in Paris

# SEA /// Offshore city on BLDG BLOG

Still in our thematic SEA, you can read BLDG BLOG article about the offshore city of Oil Rock in Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea.

# District 9 by Neil Blomkamp

Imagine a story where aliens are not anymore the bad guys but we, humans, are. The part of Neil Blomkamp's District 9 is an remarkable docu-fiction (alla Peter Watkins or Chris Marker) using alliens as a global metaphor of foreigners as a people and illustrates pretty well how apartheid (the movie takes place in Johannesburg) has some social and urban consequences. District 9 is a slum where people (aliens) are forced to live, exploited by a nigerian-mafia and controled by a omni-present military surveillance.
Second part of the movie has a interesting Cronenbergian aspect but Blomkamp looses the docu-fiction mean which makes the movie being much less amazing.

# Artificial paradise

Artificial Paradise is a short movie of the belgian born visual artiste Jean-Paul Frenay
this movie is a beautifull way to show a possible evolution of technologies, were data is mixed up with mechanic, were liquid is combined to solid... It's situated between matrix, transformers and ghost in the shell ... Enjoy!




found on Fubiz