In London - hottest day of the year so far, 30 degrees celsius - as England plunge to world cup doom and the tangible societal ecstasis on the streets of the city on Wednesday when the team actually managed to win a match has reverted to contemplative despair (rubbish, hopeless, useless are a few of the classier words being used).  It's still London at its most intense: wandering with Brasilian artist Camila Sposati yesterday around the RCA Summer Show iwe find the galleries filled with designerly objects and attitudes - the Innovation Design Engineering department (a joint MA/Msc with Imperial College) throws up a fine mix of material, networked and systems based work (all addressing social, medical or environmental challenges)....the sound ofbrass bands in the neighbouring Albert Hall foyer seeps into the Royal College and a bit later, sitting in the cafe beside the Serpentine lake (blessed with a strong swan  with attitude which descends over the water feet cascading like a racing car then parks herself at the water's edge arguing loudly with a small dog which dares to bark at her) we hear the sound of a crowd elsewhere in the park carousing then find out later in the night that Stevie Wonder has been performing somewhere there across the trees. Walking to Notting Hilll through the park that housed the original Crystal Palace, Camila tells me of her mother who worked on social projects in Brasil, as an academic and politician who engaed directly with public spaces and people for a time after the end of Military Dictatorship and of how her own work and many of her peers has skirted around direct involvement with such issues, taking a more abstract formalist bent. The night ends with a stroll around Portobello Road and talking about how some Brazilian political exiles had lived near there among the market stalls, the poets, the psychoanalysts and the Rastafarians during more troubled times back home.It reminds me of another evening a year or so ago when I walked along Portobello with Tony White and Claudio Prado, who was then Cultura Digital advisor to Gilberto Gil, and by complete chance we bumped into  fab novelist Stewart Home, clutching a box of books about anarchism bound for Eastern Europe - one of which naturally fell towards Claudio and thence towards Sao Paulo.  

309 Regent Street is the venue for a new show called How We Became Metadata which opened last night in London (at Westminster University's newly kitted out gallery space just up from Oxford Circus) which connects works by artists, designers and architects who the curator Marquard Smith selected on the basis of their relationship with 'the logic, the status, and the nature of data, information and knowledge' and their desire 'to follow and to intervene in its unchecked rhythm'.  Included are works by Thomson & Craighead - pretty tea-towels imprinted with pages showing results of Google searches made in 2002, stating 'Please listen to me' 'Can you hear me?' 'Is there anybody there?' and 'Please help me', which were originally part of www.dot-store.com - a brilliant early retail online artists initiative selling vintage products and services http://www.thomson-craighead.net/dotstore/system/index.html; as well as deft and delicate 'Lagoglyphs' made by Eduardo Kac in 2007, silkscreen prints of pictograms forming 'a kind of cryptolanguage' concealing and revealing simultaneously 'as counterpoint to the barrage of discourses generated through, with and around Kac's infamous 'green glowing bunny, called Alba, created in 2000'.  RCA PhD researcher Eunju Han from Korea shows a 2D form of her installation  'Telecommunications Weather Map' which uses nano carbon tubes and LED lights to depict the temporal and spatial flow of data based on actual readings of mobile telephone communications over a 24 hour period in Seoul made in 2008. Essays by Sas Mays (Meta-Data and the Archive) and Gary Hall (We Can Know It For You: The Secret Life of Metadata) critically tie these and the other works together in an informative catalogue with Hall's essay telling us: 'for all its associations with computer science, metadata is never neutral or objective. The specific ways in which metadata is created, organised and presented helps to produce (rather than merely passively reflect) what is classified as data and information - and what is not. Clearly then, it's not just a question of free and open access to the research data. It's also a question of who (and what) makes decisions regarding the metadata, and on what basis such decisions are made'. He paraphrases Lyotard' 'Who decides what metadata is, and who knows what needs to be decided'.... also that 'members of Facebook are labouring for free, not only to make the owners of this social network make a reputed $1Billion a year from demographically targeted advertising but to supply law enforcement agencieswith profile data about yourself, your family, friends and colleagues'.  The only real-time piece in the show - '/Make Westing/' 2010 by Corby & Baily and Jonathan Mackenzie wasn't yet working making the description in the catalogue appropriate - ' we hope to articulate an aesthetic of /system-ness/ - a metanym for the interconnected forces operative within ecosphere to which lived human behaviour contributes and is a part'.  Today I'm off to the Tate to check out the Surveillance exhibition with the master of counter-surveillance heath bunting and Peet Thomson who runs http://www.blackboxgallery.dk/. That's if I can find them in the cafe beforehand.