Building, coding, and designing all things spatial while running around trying to fix the political means I didn’t have the time to indulge in the metaphysical aspects of geography. That should change this year, and consider that a promise for proper design, cartography and psychogeography blog posts as well as the usual tech stuff.

As the first holiday since last January, this winter break meant eating, drinking and sleeping a lot. It also gave me the chance to catch up some of the many books and movies I missed out on, over the course of a particularly hectic year.

Tokyo! is a cinamatic tryptich of stories set in the Japanese metropolis, that explore our relationship with the urban environment – “Do we shape cities? Or do cities shape us?” Its a wonderful psychogeographic journey through issues of alienation and confinement in the concrete playgrounds of the city. (If you’re in a hurry you can skip to the video at the end).

It all opens with a rather beautiful map of Japan.

And quickly segues into the outsider’s typical image of Tokyo; neon, towers and noise. A big, bright, bustling city that looks fun! fun! fun! The imagined space is somewhat in contrast to the monochrome reality above.

And this being art-house cinema the main issues being explored here are alienation and confinement. In particular, a sewer dwelling creature called

With exceptional use of out of place sounds to create the feeling of unease, in a familiar urban environment.

And then we have the hikikomori. A growing problem, particularly with young Japanese who isolate themselves from society and confine themselves inside the home. Urban ghosts.

Which gets so out of hand, that the only answer is robotic pizza delivery.

Is techonology to blame? Or are we just seeking easy technological fixes to deeper societal problems that need to be addressed? It certainly creates some spookily empty urban environments.

I thoroughly recommend watching the clips of the best psychogeographic visuals that I’ve cut into a video (click for HD)

WhereCamp 2009 – ‘Curating Big Data’ with Aaron Cope from Flickr and Tom Carden from Stamen from Christopher Osborne on Vimeo.

Creating meaning from “the abundance of data produced in the precise but distant language of machines”.

Tom Carden from Stamen Design and Aaron Cope from Flickr talk about massive machine generated datasets in general, and the Flickr Alpha Shapes project in particular. Reverse geocoding the geotag of user contributed photos to Flickr to create epresentations of psychogeographic space.

Recorded at the 2009 WhereCamp