![]() ![]() Satellite images of server farms, those giant, anonymous sheds where machines crunch out the internet. And he continued in the same vein, trawling through the crackling, accelerating networked world. Bridle called the Tumblr, and the undefined product it represented, the New Aesthetic. Here, though, there was no project beyond the collage itself. Mood boards are collages made by designers to piece together the visual inspiration behind a project. What links those images? They share a veneer of digital modernity, perhaps, but what else?īridle, an expert on digital publishing and a member of the Shoreditch-based design partnership the Really Interesting Group, or RIG, called it a ‘mood board for unknown products’ in a post on the group’s blog. Among the images posted on the first day were: a photo of the screen of a cathode-ray television at the moment it is switched off examples of make-up that could be used to defeat face-recognition software Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan as it appears on Google Maps and fighter jets with a camouflage of blocky patterns suggestive of pixels. Tumblr favours images and snippets of video and text, which is exactly what Bridle posted, a stream of images, screenshots and video, backed up with an occasional quote or sentence of commentary. ![]() In May 2011, a British writer and technologist called James Bridle set up a blog on the social networking service to document a few of the phenomena he had seen. And strange phenomena can arise in this technological crucible. It’s in these streets that the boundary between the digital and the physical is at its most porous - in the devices and the minds of a far-seeing local population who are among the first to understand that there might not be a boundary at all. Within a few blocks are hundreds of people devising new applications for digital technologies - new ways of bringing the electronic global network to bear on life. Although bathed in broadband glow and old-media hype, what these companies actually do is ancient, primal: they build tools. It was urban alchemy - the chance intersection of multifarious factors of money, technology, education, culture, time and space, which locked into a temporary virtuous feedback loop, long before the politicians arrived and tried to take credit. Dozens of web and ‘new media’ firms, including Last.fm and TweetDeck, set up shop here and make this grimy but beguiling district their home. Shoreditch, east London, is home to a remarkable cluster of technology start-ups. ![]()
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