Monday, July 07, 2008
Back from Umeå
And while I have the blog window open: I have moved back from Umeå, and am in Volda, about to start moving into my old office. Feels good, although there's a lot I am going to miss about HUMlab, the department of Culture and Media, where I was situated, and the colleagues there. But it feels extremely good to be here, tucked in between the mountains and the ocean. It feels like home.
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10 comments:
Good luck unpacking. Time to reread Benjamin's "Unpacking" essay. :)
Absolutely! Got it right here :)
http://www.idehist.uu.se/distans/ilmh/Ren/benj-bookcoll.htm
Torill, even though you are back from Umeå now, you might be able to help me with an important gaming matter connected with the city. Or rather: Not just me, but the community of players committed to the ARG "The Lost Ring".
We need at least one reliable person in Umeå for an urgent mission crucial to this game - someone to run (or cycle) a so-called
"city labyrinth" or "omphalabyrinth" in central Umeå. Similar labyrinths have already been run in 19 cities all over the world - from Wellington to San Francisco, from Paris to Salvador in Brazil.
The result of these efforts can be watched here:
http://164.109.150.213/index.html - a net of intersecting blue-dotted
lines. To complete this net, we really, REALLY need someone to do a
labyrinth in Umeå.
Information about these city labyrinths can be found on the players' wiki - http://olympics.wikibruce.com/Earth-omphalos - or in the "Lost
Ring" section of the Unfiction Forums - http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/index.php?f=237 - or on the central
character Ariadne's blog -
http://www.findthelostring.com/ariadne/detail.do?postId=1764 .
All our contact person in Umeå must do is to follow a labyrinthic path through downtown
Umeå, collect data by means of a GPS trackstick (which will be sent to the labyrinth runner by the games PMs and which you may *keep* afterwards!) and upload
those data to a certain website resp. send them to one of the game's characters.
I have already sketched a labyrinth design for Umeå:
http://tinyurl.com/54sbus - it might happen that I still have to
modify it a bit, but I am quite confident that this design will be
approved by the responsible character.
All the Umeå contact needs to do now is to contact Kai - kaitown@gmail.com! - another
character (this is a huge, very complex and enormously brilliant
game!!!) and ask him to send you a trackstick.
Please let me know if you are able to help by helping us find a labyrinth runner in Umeå. ("Run" not to be taken too literally, bicycles may be used as well!)
Thank you so much in advance!
I'll send your request on to some people who might be able to help you with this. If you don't get a response, I suggest you get in touch with Jim Barret or Stephanie Hendrick at HUMlab, both of whom may be able to pass your request on to other interested parties.
Torill, thank you so much for your help! I had already contacted HUMlab in general, but not received a reply from them. Since we must save the multiverse (and that before the beginning of the Olympic Games), it's absolutely essential that we find a labyrinth runner in Umeå asap.
If that's the case I really don't know if I can find anybody for you soon enough. My main contact is on vacation, and I don't know what the others are doing. I left a month ago, and didn't check itineraries before I left :)
Good luck though. We don't want the multiverse to collapse.
Hi Torill, Canzonett,
If it is for saving the metaverse, then how could I refuse? Or have you already found someone else?
Jan
Jan, it would be so gorgeous, awesome, brilliant och helt enkelt absolut hemskt fantastiskt!!! if you could help us, that I'm running out of superlatives. Would you contact me at canzonettSPLATgooglemailDOTcom? I also suggest you contact Kai directly at kaitownSPLATgmail.com and ask him for a trackstick for the Umeå omphalabyrinth. If he replies that it's too late for the trackstick to make it to Umeå in time (we must finish these city labyrinths by 8 August), ask him to send one nevertheless and use some other means of documentation for your labyrinth. We currently have teams in Bergen and in the Innu reseve of Natashquan in Canada that are forced to do their labyrinths without tracksticks. They have received the advice that "a Google map drawing of the labyrinth, combined with key photographs -- say, at the points of labyrinth turnings -- would be sufficient". More infor via mail or at the "Omphalabyrinthoi boreales" thread on http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/ (you can post there as a guest if you don't want to register).
PS: Since the basic structures of our omphalos network are complete now - have been completed before the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games - we aren't under deadline pressure anymore. Still, it would be great to get that omphalabyrinth in Umeå done! Have you already written to Kai and asked him for a trackstick?
Canzonett, I suggest you talk to Jan directly now :) I assume he has mailed those responsible, but either way, I can't do more. Good luck!
Torill
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