Best of '05 » Javier Arbona

2005 marks the start of widespread internet tagging and thus a larger shift towards collective mapping of spaces. The very mundane task of filing just about any digital data in a myriad of categories has various -if also uncertain- outcomes. Some are even downright invasive. Above all, however, tagging and the “new” web it creates seems to hold potential for the moving subject to retrieve relevant data from the web based on exact geographic and spatial coordinates. The geographically-positioned downloads (thanks in no small measure to Google Maps and its hacks) could be just a useful getting-around instructions kit, sometimes leading the person to proximities of interest. It can also be a complicated palimpsest of narratives, photoblogs and stories culled from past presences in one spot. In fact, people are even starting to talk about objects blogging about their surroundings (see news here and here). So that's a whole zeitgeist compressed into one year. Therefore, I picked my items from my del.icio.us bank, now over 800 bookmarks big in just the past year. Some are things I liked that passed through our Archinect pages. Others, I don't remember (weird how easily we forget with all this archival technology).
 

• Hiroshi Hara Experimental House. For sentimental reasons; the first page I ever tagged.
   
• Harvard GSD's Bryan Boyer blog
   
• My tag cloud
   
• Rocio Romero
   
• Concert House in Stavanger by PLOT
   
• Archinect Feature: Hitching Stealth with Trevor Paglen
   
• Marlin's SciArc blog, especially K for King, B for B-side (dedicated to Ali)
   
• XXXmas Gifts
   
• All of bldgblog, especially this entry
   
• netpublics project at UPenn, especially Kazys Varnelis's contribution
   
• Flickr: Phaeno and de Young
   
• And finally, the best short article I read all year: Critical of What? Toward a Utopian Realism, by Reinhold Martin in the Harvard Design Magazine.