To provide some context regarding the previous post…

There is a fascinating event scheduled to take place in Hackney next week and while I doubt I'll be crossing the pond to attend it, the announcement has informed me of some work worth mentioning here. Artist Graham Harwood will be in conversation with Jean Demers and Matthew Fuller about his recent work Coal Fired Computers (300,000,000 Computers - 318,000 Black Lungs), produced in collaboration with Matsuko Yokokoji and Demers. The project employs a coal-burning century-old steam engine to power a computer that displays historical data regarding the respiratory health of miners. This system is connected to a set of synthetic lungs that breathe in sync with the metabolism of the apparatus. Harwood has a PDF overview of the project on his site, which is quite informative but deliberately coy about presenting any images of the device (there are two composites of details, one of which is included in this post) – an excerpt from that document:

The 19th century's great engines of change vented coal-fed steam. This was a society that rested on its mines; its products dominated life and determined its inventions and transport infrastructure. In this way the coal mines of England recursively transformed the bodies of those who touched them and redirected large parts of its society to feed its machines.

In 1825 the steam engine escaped from the mine and spread out across the landscape, applying itself to transportation. By 1840 the Great Western Railway Engines demanded that the landscape be compressed into manageable chunks of aligned timetables. This was the first time all the cities in the UK used the same time zone, helping coordinate their bodies into mass labour. The mines transformed the body as the body transformed the mine, feeding lungs in the hungry boilers of empire

If you can look beyond the techno-determinist tone of this passage it is quite a brilliant encapsulation of how advances in industry played out across the landscape, within the body and retooled management and governenance. The focus on labour is refreshing, and vital given that while coal produces 40% of the world's electricity that this energy source is far more prominent in countries where computers and digital devices are manufactured. Harwood and company have explored these themes before with Tantalum Memorial (2008), a project dedicated to the millions of people that have died in the 'coltan wars' in the Democratic Republic of Congo [coltan is the ore from which tantalum is extracted - tantalum is widely used in mobile phones, laptops and gaming consoles].

I look forward to seeing this contraption in operation, presumably it will be making the media art festival rounds soon, but in the interim some video documentation would do. London-based readers should consider checking out the artist talk by Harwood next Tuesday – it takes place at SPACE in Hackney.

Related links:

• Video of an earlier presentation of Coal Fired Computers in which Harwood and Demars join ex-miner/activist Dave Douglass to discuss the project.
• See the section on "The Gizmo as Geologic Extract" in mammoth's excellent post on gizmo landscapes.

The finalists at the Independent Games Festival student awards were recently announced and one of the titles caught my eye. City Rain - Building Sustainability is an interdisciplinary project developed at Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP) in Brazil. Emerging from the collaboration of computer science, design, and radio/television students, the project applies the blue sky urbanism of SimCity towards explicitly environment-focused ends.

In addition the altruistic goal of promoting sustainable development and ecology, the game also boasts a playful interface. Martin Wisniowski is on point in noting the influence of Tetris on the City Rain UI as there is something quite strange about watching buildings and infrastructural elements descend from the sky. Is it too easy to call this out as an example of top-down design thinking? Furthermore, is the act of rotating proposed buildings in midair to create an optimal fit with existing urban fabric even more obsessed with modularity than the "plug and play" approach to erecting structures in most god games?

At the end of the demo video above the narrator implores (with a chuckle) "the city has become so violent that even the cops are afraid to go out a night" - clearly the offending neighbourhoods need to have a few community centres and police stations dropped on them. With my facetiousness I'm hoping to highlight the Modernist subtext that is always present in city building games. In their best moments urban simulations represent cities as ecosystems and in their worst, merely as scale models.

To step aside from my crankiness, the optimism that drives City Rain is commendable - I think the game could be a valuable educational tool for young students. You can download the game at the project website and also donate to support further development. Now excuse me while I go cruise Liberty City while listening to The Beat to banish that sucrose-y City Rain soundtrack from my memory.