Saturday, April 26, 2008

"Do androids dream of elecric sheep?"

I had to get up early this morning as I had agreed to help Phil out on a Webcasting job. It ended up being a long day what with loading gear.

I had difficulty sleeping last night, I went to see Sandbox at Moho Live last night. I was a very loud and hot gig, I stayed to watch them and drank one can of Red Stripe (£3.50) and two cans of Red Bull (£2.50 each!) by the time I left I felt wired on the loud music and Red Bull, sweaty and vaguely ripped off by the stupid bar prices.

Sandbox were good, they looked and sounded relaxed, I loved Million Marlboro lights, shame neither Ian, Nick, Phil or Bruce could come as they were all either busy or tired, or both.

After driving about for a while I found a space in Picadilly Basin; the area behind the train station. I remember walking around there when I was at uni, the place has totally changed. Gone are the dodgy back street enterprises replaced with flats apartments. As I got out and started walking I was staggered how much has changed in the last few years. I saw people in the windows of their apartments crowded round little tables, is it the future? There were certainly plenty of people milling around the Northern Quarter, I always think how great it would be to live there, yet its prohibitively expensive.

A while ago I read this Wired Article about how the contextual web is enslaving people as they become "memes for the machines". Slavishly adding context to pictures, maps and all manor of things. A few times recently I have felt myself being a machine meme, after Japan I uploaded most of the photos to Flickr and I was poised to add titles and geo-reference (add to the map).
Today however was much worse, a program malfunction causing slides not to upload to the website automatically. I had became a meme for the machine, manually uploading slides to the internet as they changed.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

*poke* You've got a reader now. :D Found you by looking at my profile and clicking on Scuba. Done any diving recently?