Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Paris catacombs: underground movies

A secret, underground movie theater has been running deep in the Paris catacombs .

Further along, the tunnel opened into a vast 400 sq metre cave some 18m underground, "like an underground amphitheatre, with terraces cut into the rock and chairs".

There the police found a full-sized cinema screen, projection equipment, and tapes of a wide variety of films, including 1950s film noir classics and more recent thrillers.

And it's a temporary autonomous zone who knows how to exit:

Three days later, when the police returned accompanied by experts from the French electricity board to see where the power was coming from, the phone and electricity lines had been cut and a note was lying in the middle of the floor: "Do not," it said, "try to find us."

Self and blogging: the case of Iran

Masserat Amir-Ebrahimi has an essay, Performance in Everyday Life and the Rediscovery of the "Self" in Iranian Weblogs, which argues that the general practice of blogging in the specific situation of Iran enables certain forms of self-presentation, criticism, and alterative media production. Such blogging creates an accumulative sense of identity, archive narratives of the self, as well as a different form of self-censorship, still subject to gendered difference.

Through the continuous practice of writing, individuals can assert layers of their personality that they were hitherto unable to in real life. It is a new public space which has more qualitative than quantitative importance for Iranians.

Excellent work, cutting across the usual tropes of blog discussion, and very much worth reading.

Fiendish Flash game from Polyphonic Spree

Match Zimmerman points us to a delightful, fiendishly seductive Flash game from Polyphonic Spree.  It's a series of landscapes to explore, much like Samrost.  The band's music creates a gentle soundscape, reminding me of Flyguy.
I'm only on the third screen.

2004 US election: another visualization

More American election visualization tools: this animated map shows United States Electoral College outcomes based on polls, much like Electoral-Vote.com or NARA's text-only Electoral College Calculator. But it adds a temporal dimension, displaying the results in succession as different poll results were published. This makes for a nice historical record, yielding a good sense of which battleground states are most contested.

(thanks to Cheryl Fuller!)

Words of the conventions

The New York Times has an interesting visualization of leading keywords from speeches during the two national election conventions. Here's a sample:

Strindberg and Helium

A reminder: check out Strindberg and Helium.

Web Stalker looks at Infocult

Web Stalker is a handy hyperlinks visualization tool.
Here's a sample, crawling this blog:

This week's internet porn fear

Fleshbot notes a new ABC story on the terrifying evils of sex addition, er, internet porn. The article makes some classic, bad moves, like unproblematically describing behaviors as addiction, demonizing nonmainstream sex, conflating images and bodies, and ignoring the positive aspects of cybersex.
Try some of the language, which is halfway to the Gothic:

But for some who are enticed to open these cyber doors, one click can ruin their lives.

"I thought it was just a recreational thing that I could do on my own, but it cost me everything," said Michael Leahy.

He told 20/20 that he kept his habit a secret from his wife, Patti Onorato, for 14 years. But eventually his life came crashing down, just like that of an alcoholic hitting rock bottom. In this case, though, the drug of choice was cyberporn.

(emphases added)

(If you don't recognize the image attached to this post, click on it to get the full glory of Time's horrendous article. FAIR does a good job on it.)

Japanese p2p maker on trial for aiding copyright infringement

Following up on a story previously on Infocult concerning one battle in the international copyright wars: the putative creator of peer-to-peer application Winny, is on trial in Japan for making a device which facilitates copyright infringement. Isamu Kaneko, a research associate at the University of Tokyo, was arrested in May. He also helps lead the free-wheeling Channel 2 forum.

This case happens during the same season when, in contract, a United States federal court, following precedent, refused to allow civil lawsuits against software creators. However, such suits would be supported under the INDUCE Act, should it become law.

(via BoingBoing)

Educause Review articles

Some fairly shameless friend- and self-promotion: the new issue of the Educause Review has articles on new collaborative tools and their educational possibilities. Check out the fine work on blogging, wikis, games, and emergent trends.
Full disclosure: one of the essays is mine (on wirelessness).

Noted by NFAIS, Peter Scott, e-Clippings.