Another week really leaping between lots of different things, each very interesting. Between London and Brighton, helping Pupak with her photography projects and other family stuff.

So, importantly the Lighthouse studio project has been properly announced. I am working on the idea of ‘Emotional Infrastructure‘ and working up a couple of small proposals for ideas in developing the ideas around the diaries and other tools to gather an emotional response to the infrastructure around us.

In thinking about this today I was reminded of a quote that I stumbled across whilst on the train to Brighton a couple of weeks ago.

‘In most sci-fi movies it’s usually the elite who are on the cutting edge of whatever’s going on, but I think it’s going to be quite the contrary. It’s going to be a grassroots- type movement. Those are the ones who are not fighting it, not analyzing it, not organizing it. They’re just experiencing it.’

This is David Cronenberg, in the introduction to the published screenplay of Crash. I found the reference to it in an article ‘From Videodrome to Virtual Light: David Cronenberg and William Gibson’ by Dominick M. Grace.

It is that last sentence that in fact encapsulates what I am trying to explore with the idea of ‘Emotional Infrastructure’ to look at, most people do not get the opportunity to chose the infrastructure that surrounds them, that allows them to operate in the social construct of a city for example but they experience it every day, some elements of it every minute. What we can learn from examining these experiences I do not yet know, that is my goal for this residency at Lighthouse, to develop this idea into the start of a decent conversation about this.

In other news though, I have been trying to throw myself deeper into the world of MediaWiki as a tool and noting how I need to improve my own digital toolkit/chain so that I can get from idea and notes on paper to prototype a bit quicker. In fact that is my goal for the coming weekend, to sort out such a toolkit so I can quickly start a project with a framework which has a lot of the common elements I want in place from the get go.

I have also been identifying possible places to think about submitting papers and conferences from my work over at CSM. Plus doing a bit more background on Open Access Journals and how to set one up, something on Critical Infrastructure Studies is in a pipeline, somewhere near the Tehran/Belfast border.

Next week I hope to have more realised in code and hardware for Heresay as well as Emotional Infrastructure.