image of small turtle waiting while swimming tool is made level using Samuel KALIKA’s handy iPhone level application.

失物品 012：小乌龟（壳差不多9厘米长，头和尾巴伸出来的时候差不多14厘米）
发生失踪时间：2011年08月24日, 下午3点52分
地点：交道口北二条8号，家作坊乌龟游泳池

Lost & Found Object No. 012: small turtle (shell approximately 9 cm long, with appendages protruding approximately 14 cm)
Last seen: 24 August 2011, 15.52
Location: HomeShop turtle swimming pool

失物品 013：被拆散的录音磁带
时间：2011年08月17日, 下午4点半
地点：三里屯北路／东直门外十字路口，靠近西南角

Lost & Found Object No. 013: unraveled cassette tape
Date & Time: 17 August 2011, 16.30
Location: southwest corner of the intersection between Sanlitun North Road and Dongzhimen Outer Street

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如果您要收回家作坊失物招领处的任何物品，或者有关于小乌龟的信息，请跟我们联系。Please contact HomeShop if you would like to reclaim any lost & found item or have information regarding the turtle.

Dis-oriented ?

Here are some questions that we could relate to the tracing issues we talked about yesterday…

How do we communicate? 1/part

This question involves communication with other humans, but also with our surrounding environment. Which means also to consider how we orient ourselves in our environment. We talked yesterday about how autistic children seem to feel natural phenomenon such as magnetism and water, which could mean that they somehow communicate with their environment through the perception of signs or feeling that we don’t necessarily perceive. Yet, and this is very much obvious while we visit foreign countries, and especially, for western people, countries like china or Japan, where you can’t understand most of the urban signs and sometimes the urban structures, which capacities are involved, which signs are being read, recognized, interpreted, how is urban environment read? And how are people getting the resources to orient themselves? How do they communicate with surrounding environment, with signs, with humans, with maps? And also, how do the learn to cope with the feelings that disorientation creates?

I certainly feel that the capacity of observing, guessing, reading the urban environment has been strongly developed during my trips in china. It’s a very simple example, but when I was in Istanbul and Italy with my friends, I could feel the difference between us by the way I could easily find what I was looking for, by constantly reading the signs, etc. This capacity of keeping my eyes open comes essentially from chinese experiences.

Are we allowed to get lost? 迷路了吗 ?

Yet, the question is what is going to happen with GPS becoming popular? Are we paradoxically going to lose completely our capacity to orient ourselves? Because we’ll become lazy, will we lose this capacity to read our environment? And will we lose also these unexpected encounters, the serendipity that is somehow allowed by disorientation and that constitutes the core of urban life? Disorientation isn’t a way to keep out of routine, a way of looking at things in a pretty different way? Getting a fresh look on things and allow us to be surprised. Maybe the possibility // the ability to get lost is the difference between traces and maps.