Birmingham's invisible woman

Early in the article the idea of camouflage makeup is mentioned, but this is IMHO more interesting: first, going the opposite way (making yourself actually invisible to the infrastructure, not just unrecognizable). Then the bulk of the article is about revisiting the idea of invisibility (how certain people are socially invisible) which is also fascinating.

Hm, after reading the Wikipedia article on psychogeography, I am not sure whether it is satire:

> Psychogeography is the exploration of urban environments that emphasizes interpersonal connections to places and arbitrary routes, and follows a loosely defined urban practice known as the dérive. It was developed by members of the Letterist International and Situationist International, which were revolutionary groups influenced by Marxist and anarchist theory as well as the attitudes and methods of Dadaists and Surrealists. In 1955, Guy Debord defined psychogeography as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals."

> The first published discussion of psychogeography was in the Lettrist journal Potlatch (1954), which included a 'Psychogeographical Game of the Week': Depending on what you are after, choose an area, a more or less populous city, a more or less lively street. Build a house. Furnish it. Make the most of its decoration and surroundings. Choose the season and the time. Gather together the right people, the best records and drinks. Lighting and conversation must, of course, be appropriate, along with the weather and your memories. If your calculations are correct, you should find the outcome satisfying.

It's basically vaguely defined, and it can be anything from making a map of your area, basic geography, "the feeling you get in a place" to an impenetrable academic critical kind of study to a kind of radical situationist thing. So a lot of it is intentionally elitist and obscure.

This example is more along the lines of whats called "Walking Art" so it's more about practice outside by artists, and tends to be less art-speaky and is more approachable but with a fair bit of radical influence.

Back to definitions, Denis Wood says it's basically two types (geography vs politics) https://krygier.owu.edu/krygier_html/geog_222/geog_222_lo/Ly...

Here's the way I understand it.

Geography - there is a hill.

History - there is a castle on the hill.

Psychogeography - how does it feel to have an imposing castle looking down on everything you do? In what ways does the geography - and built environment - affect your mood, behaviours, and practises? Do you intentionally walk a certain route so you won't be seen from the castle?

Some of it is abstract - and deliberately so - and some of it is asking you to reflect on the way geography alters you and your behaviours.

> a particularly abstract, intellectual thing that people who (appear to be) much smarter than me seem to understand but which I cannot.

It’s not a “smarts” thing, but it is highly contextual.

European philosophy went in an interesting (and often derided) direction in the 20th century. You can trace a line from 13th century scholars of hermeneutics up through Heidegger and Wittgenstein— smart folks! — and then, in the US, to people like Quine.

In Europe this also lead to approaches like deconstructionism (let me gloss it as “wait, can a text exist without context?”, which is almost the precise opposite of those hermeneuticists of 900 years ago). These classes of questions were then applied to everyday culture and phenomena, which were often not the subject of study, e.g. thus semiotics. This is actually a really interesting field, because it causes you to revisit things that are so ubiquitous that you don’t look at them at all! For example, “land”, is generally the space between the roads, yet roads used to run through the land. Big deal…or not? Are there implications of this shift in perspective or is it merely just one of those things?

Of course the problem is it’s really easy to do a lazy job on these hard but not really quantifiable questions and thus it became the darling of a lot of humanities departments, leading to a kind of Gresham’s law phenomenon. The flood of fatuous and obscurantist work has condemned the whole field to well deserved mockery.

But a bit of study can unlock a lot of interesting insight. I say “a bit of study” because easily 95% of the “work” in this field is crap. And at the end of the day it’s nowhere near as hard (or significant) as, say, quantum mechanics.

It can be a very intellectual pursuit, in which you have to re read every sentence three times to understand it . I enjoy that some of the time, but for me the wonder of psychogeography has been the experience and feeling of actually doing it. Playfulness - and something somewhere in between mindfulness and mindlessness. The first time I did it I took my kids to the bus station, they chose a letter and we got on the first bus that went from that stand, then tried to find some random way to determine when to get off - but the dog was sick so she made the choice for us, then we got off and wandered. These days I like to take a walk following coded sentences which I make up. The sentence determines the directions I take on the walk , so I can't plan, which pulls me into the moment.

I didn’t recognise anything except St Martins from this video.

Birmingham is in an unfortunate position in the UK- while technically it’s the second city (where London is the largest, richest and most populous), Birmingham by contrast seems deeply impoverished and constantly attempting to redesign itself.

The city, thusly, has more cameras per capita than London, since crime and poverty are slightly more abundant.

I was raised in neighbouring Coventry, my father was from Birmingham, as was my first girlfriend and college.

Coventry was much worse than Birmingham of course, but they’re both pretty grim compared to places like Evesham, Oxford, Leamington Spa or Bath

If I were to build a facial recognition system, I wouldn't use color input. Doesn't e.g. Apple's facial recognition use infrared?

It's also about that classic social engineering tactic to blend in. Who would even notice a beige middle-aged woman anywhere, just like a high-vis and clipboard will avoid most suspicions.

Given how facial recognition software struggles with people who aren't intentionally trying to fool it it couldn't be that difficult.