The group meet up at Alex's swish pad where he served up a fine chicken and salad. Then we went to Tate Modern and saw "global cities". The exhibition was a perfect starting point for our discussions on civics and the city. Afterwards we went to a fantastic Brazillian place where we ate more good food and got to grips with some of the ideas generated from the day.
This is a currency developed by a town called Berkshire that supports local business and people. A very interesting model for how to approach capitalist alienation.
The aspect of the ‘ Photosynth’ software I’m interested in using, if it's going to be possible to get my hands on it any time soon, is the construction of Notre Dame cathedral only using other people's photographs. This aspect of the software could be used to produce a complete three-dimensional navigatable map of oxford, as far as I know no one has compiled something like this. The aspect of doing this which interests me is not producing a true map of oxford containing all buildings, roads etc. Instead only using photographs other people have taken of oxford, which would predominantly be photographs taken by tourists, so the majority of the images making up the map will be ones taken by people who don’t really know oxford and of sites that have been given cultural significance by oxford city council and the tourist board. In a broader sense the added possibility of Meta tagging the images, so they cannot only link between different points in the oxford map, but also to other maps.
There is some more information about the software and the people utilising it: www.labs.live.com/photosynth/default.html
