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Motorola's growth impressive, and comes from 1m linux-based units shifted in China and some Q in the US, Sharp's from 1m FOMA in Japan. "Handhelds" (Palm, Ipaq etc) continue to drop.
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Suspect that svn hosting is in there too.
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"If they can't adapt it to the way they need to work, they simply won't bother using it. They can always get the job done some other way, maybe using their discretionary spending limits to sneak non-standard systems and applications in"
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Mona Hatoum's Map at Around the world in 80 days
I didn't make it to the South London Gallery-hosted half of this Jules Verne fest (the show has now closed), but did manage to see the ICA's half. Some notes on one of the works...
Mona Hatoum's Map (1999) comprises a lot of clear iris-sized glass marbles arranged in clusters on the concrete floor to form a large map of the world. The projection looks like a Mercator, and you walk round it on two sides, west and south, which puts it in the orthodox North-is-up orientation. The patterns of light, often where the marbles are stacked two-deep, hint at geo-political boundaries, but there are no labels, nor is there any political colour-coding. The show's booklet says: "Precariously balanced, fragile yet potentially dangerous, Hatoum's work powerfully suggests the contingency that defines the geo-political landscape". Or: the map is pre-political, pre-historic, showing continental land in a ghostly, glassy white, and the sea is polished grey-brown concrete.
Looking at it, you forget everything else in the room. The problem is that until you see it, the map is actually quite easy to miss: at first glance your eye goes straight to some bright photos on the wall. Not noticed by the invigilator, and not noticing that he's entering the map's space, a man strides across the Pacific and his foot crunches down on the Western seaboard of South America. It's a natural disaster for the people of Northern Chile and Bolivia. The UN prepares relief flights in helicopters made of tiny glass beads. It's also a disaster for the marbles -- they aren't stuck down. A ripple propagates through South America, nudging Brazil, and there's a spray of marbles rolling back into the Pacific from the impact site. The invigilator yelps, and trots over to brush the marbles roughly back into shape. The man looks at his trainer as if it has betrayed him.
Some commentators see this as an intentional metaphor:
Visitors to the show repeatedly found themselves literally stumbling into the piece, sending bits of the world skittering across the concrete, in what is a convincing metaphor for the various human depredations of Mother Earth
And speaking of a similar map in Basel, Hatoum said:
the map was very fragile: as soon as one set foot on the parquet, the marbles on the floor started moving. At the same time, the work was very menacing. I like it when things are attractive and forbidding at the same time; both seductive and dangerous. The marbles made the floor hazardous, because you could slip on the glass balls and fall down. I've done quite a few works which destabilize the ground you walk on.
Five minutes later, the invigilator explains to a woman that she's about to do the same. She stops in time, and looks down at the Pacific where she sees a few marbles scattered about, one here, a pair over there. She pauses for a couple of seconds. She assumes that they're stray outliers that have accidentally rolled away from the pack, rather than say, dutifully representing French Polynesia, because she helpfully sweeps them with her foot, tidying them towards South America. More yelping from the invigilator (and the UN wrings its hands over a most unlucky region). Even though it would only be clear to cartographers whether this marble is accurately placed to represent Vanuatu or not, the standard is to assume that things in galleries are deliberately placed. Look don't touch.
But perhaps it's not just a matter of an almost-camouflaged field of delicate material, or of the inherent manipulability of maps. It could also be the materials. Marbles are for play, for throwing. They're built to be rolled. The feel in the hand, the clacking sound they make, the flashing light as they roll - all make us want to throw them. And so, faced with marbles at her feet, her body reacted involuntarily sending them flying. A designer might say that marbles afford play more than they afford representation. Perhaps Hatoum is telling us that the world needs play -- the fluidity of happy give-and-take -- more than it needs the enframing, classifying, ossifying urges of cartographers and bureaucrats?
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There is a growing history of accidental iconoclasm: in 2001, Damien Hirst's Painting-By-Numbers was binned by a cleaner. Usually it's the cleaners, but I would imagine they're just trying to do and keep their job, rather than being the front-line for some shadowy cultural hygnenism dedicated to homogenising the art experience. I wonder if a cleaner has ever tried to casually swing one of Gary Hume's bronze bin bags into a skip.
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