first few words or letters of each line and left the programme to finish the poem. The result is a strange but surprisingly loquacious account the political and economic reality of Berlusconi’s Italy. The poem went on rewriting itself for a year, until Google cancelled the Scribe project, and survives as a file with 111 versions of the original text, ordered according to the time they were written. The record of this ephemeral action is also conserved in a book containing the automatic machine translations of the original poem into 57 languages. The automatically generated text in My Country is comparable to the soliloquy that generates the programme Las Calles Habladas (2013)22 created by Clara Boj and Diego Díaz. An app developed for Android and iOS invites the user to perform
a dérive in their town or city, in keeping with Situationist practice, while listening to information about the streets they walk along circulating on the Net. The phone’s speech synthesis function reads out the pieces of text it encounters. In some cases these are meaningless, but at other times they reveal facts and opinions about the place that can be startling, even shocking. To draw attention to this convergence of physical space and data flows, the artists have provided megaphones to make this information public, sometimes prompting a response from the citizens. Paul Virilio has said that ‘in the future, architects will also have to deal with real time. The virtual and the real city will exist side by side’ (Armitage, 2001, p. 65). Las Calles Habladas generates a space of cohabitation — and friction — between these two facets of the city.
22. Clara Boj and Diego Díaz, Las Calles Habladas. Viewed at: http://www.lalalab.org/las-calles-habladas/
Gegenwart, Waiting for the Present Heidegger (1962 [2009]) provides another reflection on the relationship between being and time in the observation of present time and being as being present. These two concepts come together in what the philosopher believed should be called a ‘real time’, ‘the present as presence and everything which belongs to such a present would have to be called real time […] To talk of presencing, however, requires that we perceive biding and abiding in lasting as lasting in present being. What is present concerns us […] the German word that designates the present time, Gegenwart, means: what, lasting, comes toward us, us human beings’ (p. 10). The present time is thus conceived as a waiting, a being present and a being involved in what is happening at this moment. We have noted that being-in-the-world entails occupying ourselves with the surrounding world, to which this quality of presence adds itself. While almost all of the works described above are connected in one way or another with the present, it is worth remarking here those that in some way ‘last’, those that are attentive to events at the moment they take
place and show them as an incessant flow, a future that has no beginning or end. Martin Joh n Callanan develops his observation of the systems that govern our lives in two works that cull data in real time and present them in a sequence that is oriented not at the reading of each item but at the perception of the whole, which is subject to a constant circulation. Departure of All (2013)23 presents on a screen similar to an airport flight information board all of the international departures from major airports around the world, displayed in real time. The list, which includes time, point of origin, destination and flight number, is updated every five seconds, and it is in this progression that we observe the acceleration of a society in constant motion. In similar fashion, I Wanted to See All of the News from Today (2007)24 brings together the front pages of hundreds of newspapers and magazines from different 23. Martin John Callanan, Departure of All. Viewed at: http://greyisgood.eu/departure/ 24. Martin John Callanan, I Wanted to See All of the News from Today. Viewed at: http://greyisgood.eu/allnews/ 73