“Drift helps you get lost in familiar places by guiding you on a walk using randomly assembled instructions. Each instruction will ask you to move in a specific direction and, using the compass, look for something normally hidden or unnoticed in our everyday experiences."
Another iOS app and corresponding (pending) website. I don’t know why the idea of talking random walks excites me so!
Turn right onto E Main St and then walk toward the heart of the city. If the city has no heart, give it one.
N Ashland Ave to Old Lafayette Ave – Lexington, Kentucky « Serendipitor
Serindipitor is an iOS app that guides you through a generative dérive from where you are to a random location nearby. A companion site archives of completed walks, including directions, maps, and photos.
Most people’s first mistake when walking is to know where they already are. Street names and recognisable sites should be avoided like the weekly chart countdown. If you know where you are, you cannot get lost. If you cannot get lost then you will constantly be distracted by things you have have already seen.
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"Like full-spectrum hieroglyphs, these spray-painted dots are ‘infrastructural forensic evidence,’ in Foster’s words, marking the ritualistic elimination of insects from urban space." (via BLDGBLOG: Dot Urbanism)
Public Telephone
Write down the number. Stand nearby and call it. Gesture excitedly and encourage a passerby to answer. When they do, ask them where they are, and ask them what the weather is like.
Getting lost means that between us and space there is not only a relationship of dominion, of control on the part of the subject, but also the possibility that space can dominate us. There are moments in life in which we learn how to learn from the space around us. […] We are no longer capable of giving a value, a meaning to the possibility of getting lost. To change places, to come to terms with different worlds, to be forced to continuously recreate our points of reference, is regenerating at a psychic level, but today no one would recommend such an experience. In primitive cultures, on the other hand, if someone never gets lost he never grows up. And this is done in the desert, the forest, places that are a sort of machine through which to attain other states of consciousness.
We felt as if we were moving in a strange new zone exactly halfway between randomness and order. No one could predict where the left-and-right pattern would take us, yet we weren’t wandering. The firm logic of the algorithm was constantly taking us away from the directions and destinations our whims might have chosen.
The city is a behavioral device. Its shapes and systems alter how we feel, how we see each other, and how we act. This would be a terrible thought if it were not for a second truth, which is that the city is malleable. We can change it whenever we wish.