Quoting The Obvious? via the LIFT lab (emphasis mine):

When I learned, via twitter, of the car bomb that didn't go off in London last night my first thought was "oh well".

I first heard of 9/11 via katastro.fi mailing list. I remember someone commenting, that "CNN's surely getting lots of hits now". I was at the Uni then. There was no television in the faculty. We gathered into the lobby's kitchen around an old Macintosh with a shabby TV tuner. It only tuned in a Swedish news channel. This unlikely mediation of the disaster made it even more disturbing.

In a week I'll embark on a bicycle trip with a couple of friends. First, out of Berlin and then around it in anticlockwise direction. It's a direct descendant of the last summer's mikroPaliskunta road trip, but also something completely different.

Just wanted to elaborate on the new thoughts through writing...

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MikroPaliskunta experiments with the contemporary practices of travel, exploration and documentary. The project aims at reviving the journey of exploration in the context of 21st century – by assuming a civil perspective, appropriating do-it-yourself, sustainability and readily available technologies.

The first trip in August 2006 was done with a vintage Volvo ticking with domestic biodiesel. The second one, Berlin round tour, will be on bicycles. The third one might employ sailing as means of transport. The idea is that travelling and sustainability needn't be mutually exclusive.

Events and findings are shared online. The first trip was documented on a single website, organised around themes and locations. The second one will be spread across existing blogging, placemarking and bookmarking services, photo and video sharing websites (i.e. Jaiku, Blogspot, Flickr, Vimeo, Tagzania). Unique tag "mikropaliskunta" will act as a label for relevant content on and between different online spaces. This also facilitates anyone to take part in the "movement", because tagging is open by nature.

As a documentary project mikroPaliskunta assumes no single point of view or method. Perspectives include, but are not limited to – artistic, journalistic and scientific approaches. Diversity of individual perspectives, foci, identities and/or assumed roles is necessary, as that reflects the diversity of our world experiences. This, and the possiblities of mobile production and connectivity have led me into liking to call the online part an "accumulation of near-time microdocumentaries".

Altogether, mikroPaliskunta is inherently post-scientific – we acknowledge the vanity of our efforts in the age of Google Earth and Wikipedia, but in the same time we, out of curiosity, engage in a journey of exploration, as if our maps were decorated with "Here Be Dragons".

The stupidest website I've ever visited twice might be Faceanalyzer.com. It's kind of phrenology or anthropometry for the age of www. You upload a mugshot and get back racial analysis and ratings about your intelligence, sociability, income and so on. Apparently the score determines your personality archetype, like Academic, Artist, Boss, Charmer, White Collar…

The 2004 me was 63% Eastern European and had a celeb twin called Christopher Walken. No problem there, he's got the moves. The new me is now, uh, 100% Chinese, just like Leonardo DiCaprio. Career prospects of a Theta-class Academic have also changed into the one of a Blue Collar.

But there is a pattern! Walken and DiCaprio have starred together in one film - Catch Me If You Can, by Spielberg. Playing Frank Abagnale Sr and Jr, respectively, i.e. father and son. Spooky.

Too bad Faceanalyzer hasn't been developed since its inception. Ga2so.com has a funny post about its shortcomings. Kind of a failed Reverse Turing test. After all, there's certain food for thought here - face recognition and analysis is after all one of humans' most finely tuned sensibilities.

Picture: Head-Measurer of Tremearne