NY Times: Data Center Overload

“Much of the daily material of our lives is now dematerialized and outsourced to a far-flung, unseen network … But where is ‘there,’ and what does it look like? ‘There’ is nowadays likely to be increasingly large, powerful, energy-intensive, always-on and essentially out-of-sight data centers. These centers run enormously scaled software applications with millions of users … Small wonder that this vast, dispersed network of interdependent data systems has lately come to be referred to by an appropriately atmospheric — and vaporous — metaphor: the cloud … [T]he electricity on a low-end server will now exceed the server cost itself in less than four years — which is why the geography of the cloud has migrated to lower-rate areas…”

Photos: NY Times: Search Me

Carmakers around the world are cutting production as inventories build up to unprecedented levels. Storage areas and docksides are now packed with vast expanses of unsold cars as demand slumps.”

“Unsold cars at Avonmouth Docks near Bristol, UK.”

“Newly imported cars fill the 150-acre site at the Toyota distribution centre in Long Beach, California.”

“New cars jam the dockside in the port of Valencia in Spain.”

(via)

Paysage de champs colorés près de Sarraud, Vaucluse, France (44°01’ N – 5°24’ E)

Mr. Cassan and his family cultivate more than 600 acres of both traditional or ‘true’ lavender and lavendin, a sterile, hardier and much more prolific hybrid with a cruder, industrial, camphor scent. His great-grandfather was among the first lavender middlemen in France, roaming the back roads on horseback and paying farmers for the lavender that grew wild in their dry, chalky fields; his grandfather was among the first generation in France to cultivate the plants as a commercial cash crop. Until 3 most mornings these days, Mr. Cassan’s son Benoît runs two huge stills that transform the cut plants from their own and neighboring farms into essences that will infuse products as varied as body moisturizer and window spray. The elder Mr. Cassan also has begun to promote lavender aromatherapy to help the town’s economy. ‘My goal is to build our economy around lavender’s essential oils,’ Mr. Cassan said, ‘to give conferences and seminars, to hand out prizes. This is how we are forging our way into the future’.”

NY Times: In Provence, Commerce’s Scent Is Tinged With Lavender

See also: Les Routes de la Lavande

- Anne

Factory Girl: Dora the Explorer and the Dirty Secrets of the Global Industrial Economy by Lois Leveen

Throughout her adventures, Dora enjoys an unusual geographic mobility, crossing landscapes but never distinct borders, always returning home rather than staying somewhere new. Her animated domain is devoid of references to social class, labor, or a currency-based economy. 
But in reality, Dora is less a global citizen than a global commodity, a marketing dream of multicultural merchandise that simultaneously appeals to Anglo and Latino parents and children. Ultimately, Dora is the product of a global television market and serves the transnational capital interests of Viacom …[and]… the Dora franchise has earned over $3.6 billion dollars in retail sales since debuting in 2000 … The animated adventures of Dora the Explorer may seem very distant from the harsh realities of factory labor, but the connection between the multibillion-dollar television franchise and imperiled workers in a global industrial economy is both distinct and disturbing. Like Osito in ‘City of Lost Toys,’ Dora herself has appeared on the list of toys gone missing: In 2007, numerous Dora the Explorer playsets were recalled because they contained lead paint … With its emphasis on porous borders and foreign threats to the home and homeland, the dialogue surrounding the toy scare has pronounced parallels to anti-immigrant debates. In her incarnation as a lead-contaminated toy, Dora shares something with Latina factory workers after all—albeit not with the women of the maquiladoras so much as with the women (and men) who have been targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids on factories in the United States. And, just like unsafe toys, undocumented immigrants have entered our homes, with many U.S. households relying on both foreign-born domestic laborers and foreign-made plastic playthings as inexpensive conveniences. The concurrent toy scare and immigration backlash together imply that there’s a Trojan My Little Pony headed your family’s way, and whether it manifests as their toy or their caretaker, your kids may not be safe.
”

See also: Dora The Explorer, Constructing “LATINIDADES” and The Politics of Global Citizenship by Nicole M Guidotti-Hernández.

- Anne

Liberty City is inspired by New York, but not beholden to it. While there are many parallels, Liberty exists in its own universe and rightfully so. Many open-world games have cities that feel as if they existed only from the moment you first turned on your console, but Liberty City looks lived in. It’s an old city and each block has its own vibe and its own history. Drive around Liberty City and you’ll be able to identify each individual block. Though Liberty is filled with brownstones and a myriad of similar brick buildings, you can tell one from the other, just as you can in New York. Go to an affluent neighborhood and the street is likely to be newly paved, the pedestrians better dressed, the cops more plentiful. But head to Dukes or Bohan and you’ll find streets nearly stripped of asphalt, homeless people wandering about aimlessly and criminals preying on the weak. [Grand Theft Auto IV Review: This is the American Dream]

[T]he real star of the game is the city itself. It looks like New York. It sounds like New York. It feels like New York. Liberty City has been so meticulously created it almost even smells like New York. From Brooklyn (called Broker), through Queens (Dukes), the Bronx (Bohan), Manhattan (Algonquin) and an urban slice of New Jersey (Alderney), the game’s streets and alleys ooze a stylized yet unmistakable authenticity. (Staten Island is left out however.) The game does not try to represent anything close to every street in the city, but the overall proportions, textures, geography, sights and sounds are spot-on … [L]ike millions of other players I will happily spend untold hours cruising Liberty City’s bridges and byways, hitting the clubs, grooving to the radio and running from the cops. Even when the real New York City is right outside. [Grand Theft Auto IV: Dystopian Liberty City]

It’s important to stress though that we never limited ourselves in keeping faithful to the real city … It’s a distilled, exaggerated New York, a caricature of a city and not a brick for brick recreation. We exaggerated the best and worst bits, twisted the real city to suit our needs and left out whatever we felt wasn’t necessary … I keep seeing game worlds of sprawling futuristic metropolis or whatever and the first thing that occurs to me is where the hell do people buy milk, where do they get a cup of coffee? It’s too easy to get lost in the aesthetics of something and forget to think in those terms. How does it work? How do these people live their lives? Where do they eat? Where do they work? How do they get home? Where do they park their cars? When you start thinking along those lines it gets easier to work on something of this scale. It’s emulating life so you have to imagine living in the world you are making … You’ll see branding for oil companies on barrels, gas stations and gas attendants clothing and then when you visit some of the more industrial areas of the map you’ll see the same branding on industrial facilities. We even created history in the branding with older variations on old painted ads fading on the side of old buildings. You’ll see virtual artists advertised outside galleries, see some of their work through the window and then see other examples in some of the homes you’ll get inside. Tiny businesses, dry cleaners for example will have a store on a certain street, and you will see their van driving around the area. There are stickers, graffiti, posters, signage, billboards, adds on the internet, phone numbers to call, company cars and vans, products, tv shows, films, radio shows, theatres, fashion, jewelry, food, drink, sweets, cigarettes, pharmaceuticals, businesses, perfume, institutions, law firms, banks, credit cards, garages, warehouses, car dealers, city services, shops, airlines, travel agents, sports teams and brands, the list goes on and on. And they are referenced and cross-referenced in as many ways as we can over as many types of media and situations as we can think of. [GTA IV: Building a Brave New World]

All images from Rockstar Games: Grand Theft Auto IV.

Update 13.05.08 – Liberty City vs. New York City: A photoset showing the similarities between Grand Theft Auto 4 and real life

- Anne

Arturas Valiauga: I dropped in on Stepas, we talked about life (2002-2003)

An old lady and her middle-aged son live in a modestly furnished house. Some of the photos show the two of them at home, on the sofa, at the kitchen table, or on the edge of the bed. What was most important to the photographer was the relationship of the house’s inhabitants to their domicile, a space that they have formed themselves. For over ten years, they have been papering over the walls with colored and black-and-white clippings from newspapers and magazines, seemingly opening their doors to the world, albeit in a small format. This world of everyday images is supplemented by decorative candy-wrappers and white dots of paint on a closet door, giving rise to the feeling that they fear empty space. One could say that mother and son live in an archive of the present, consciously or unconsciously using images from the recent past to visualize the passage of time…

I Dropped in on Stepas, We Talked about Life:

could be regarded as the most precise reflection of our days: the inhabitants’ faces and postures are from the golden times of Lithuanian portrait photography; and the walls, colors and, finally, the choice and arrangement (i.e., overabundance) of clippings pasted instead of wallpapers convey the assault of the present day image and an attempt to make it more aesthetic, i.e., to control. This process is further continued by the frames of A.Valiauga’s shot. Everything is just an absolute concept of beauty: an artist who works in advertising makes press photographs.

Home becomes the map of the inside and outside world.

- Anne

GOOD Magazine: Speakeasy Restaurants

In other countries, secret restaurants have flourished for years: In Cuba, mom-and-pop paladares are an alternative to state-run eateries; in Hong Kong, si fang cai offer elaborate home-cooked meals. Recently the phenomenon has taken off in America, with under-the-radar establishments popping up in San Francisco, Seattle, New York, and Boston. Operated out of people’s homes, by enthusiasts with no professional cooking experience or by chefs moonlighting from their regular gigs, these secret restaurants aren’t terribly secret. A bit of creative googling will lead you quickly to outposts like Underground Inc. in Des Moines, Iowa, or Shady’s Cafe in Penland, North Carolina. Still, they form a rapidly expanding and important ad hoc culinary underground … In the same way that punk and indie rock emerged as a response to the corporate-driven homogenization of popular music in the 1980s, secret restaurants prefer the unique to the ubiquitous, the rough edges of the handmade over the polish of the commercial. Speakeasies helmed by untrained, self-taught chefs celebrate a democratic D.I.Y. ethic espousing the idea that anyone can cook. The fare being served is hardly cutting-edge—ingredients like liquid nitrogen and agar remain the province of truly high-end restaurants; instead, the emphasis tends to be on authenticity and bold, hearty flavors.

For more on the underground urban dining scene, check out The Ghetto Gourmet and their “culinary comrades.” Of course, after any social movement gets press from the likes of Time Magazine and The Wall Street Journal we shouldn’t be surprised by claims that subculture dining has now gone mainstream.

A quick search of the internets didn’t yield any under- or above-ground groups in Canada, but we do have a strong enough liquor culture that “boozecan” is part of the national English lexicon. Started out east as part of the 80s punk scene, boozecans were set up in people’s houses and other places in order to sell and consume alcohol off-hours. Slowly moving west, these makeshift or DIY bars still appear (and get busted) across the country, although many are being replaced with “cocainecans” controlled by organised crime.

- Anne

As you travel east from Danshui along the number 2 highway that runs along the north coast of Taiwan, you come to the small town of Sanzhi. Just before arriving in Sanzhi, there’s an interesting site hugging the shoreline … Accounts vary on the origins of this complex, and indeed, as to whether it was meant to be a hotel development or a housing development. Apparently, it was constructed in the 1960s and included/was to include a dam to protect it against sea surges, floors and stairs made of marble and a small amusement park. The site was commissioned by the government and local firms and there is no named architect.

Local papers at the time reported that there were numerous accidents during construction which caused the death of some workers. As news of these accidents spread, no one wanted to go there, even to visit, and the project was subsequently abandoned. The ghosts of those who died in vain are said to still linger there, unremembered and unable to pass on. The complex was left in its unfinished state because no amount of redevelopment will bring people to the area due to superstitions about ghosts, and it can’t be demolished because destroying the homes of spirits and lost souls is taboo in Asian culture. When I was there, I met 4 young university students who were passing by and stopped for a look. They didn’t want to get to close to the buildings for fear that the ghosts would take them. They told me there was ‘heavy evil’ in the buildings.

– Craig Ferguson

Photos by yusheng & cypherone.

- Anne

After a drive through the stucco on chipboard crescents of houses in Chula Vista, San Diego’s southern sprawl near the border and Tijuana, I came across this sign in hipper Hillcrest, which illustrates Matt’s post on subprime mortgage crisis this week.

- Rob

As conventional suburban lifestyles fall out of fashion and walkable urban alternatives proliferate, what will happen to obsolete large-lot houses? One might imagine culs-de-sac being converted to faux Main Streets, or McMansion developments being bulldozed and reforested or turned into parks. But these sorts of transformations are likely to be rare. Suburbia’s many small parcels of land, held by different owners with different motivations, make the purchase of whole neighborhoods almost unheard-of. Condemnation of single-family housing for “higher and better use” is politically difficult, and in most states it has become almost legally impossible in recent years. In any case, the infrastructure supporting large-lot suburban residential areas—roads, sewer and water lines—cannot support the dense development that urbanization would require, and is not easy to upgrade. Once large-lot, suburban residential landscapes are built, they are hard to unbuild.The experience of cities during the 1950s through the ’80s suggests that the fate of many single-family homes on the metropolitan fringes will be resale, at rock-bottom prices, to lower-income families—and in all likelihood, eventual conversion to apartments.

~ Matthew