I’ve just finished working with Carlo Ratti and various cohorts on a great little project, which I hope might see the light of day here before too long. In the meantime, I thought I’d post this discussion I had with Carlo late last year, which was recently published in Architectural Review Australia. We met at the Metropolis Congress in Sydney, where Signor Ratti had just given a presentation on his work at the MIT SENSEable City Lab, an outfit whose work I admire hugely, working as they do across many of my interests: interactive architecture, urban informatics, responsive envronments, multidisciplinary design and other implications of real-time networked pervasive information systems for the city.
(Incidentally, the interview was also recently published on the new-ish Australian Design Review website - which amalgamates AR with its sister publication (Inside) - and which is rather nice and proving more than a little useful. Kudos to Andrew Mackenzie and Mat Ward for steering that through so well.)
Robert Miles Kemp’s talk was always interesting and occasionally spellbinding, most of all when showing the work in responsive robotic structures. His videos of simple blocks self-assembling into what he called “nano-architecture” are quite extraordinary (sometimes eliciting a collective delight similar to that of The Living at Postopolis! NYC). Kemp situated this within a wider context of interactive and informational architecture, centred around his work at Variate Labs and renowned new media deisgn firm Schematic (and his blog, Spatial Robots) described in a consistently interesting talk, covering many of the primary themes in contemporary interface design - and indeed extending the idea of where and what interfaces are.
Saving me from having to transcribe my presentation, the very well-organised Lift09 conference got Swiss French Television to film all the talks. So please see the embedded video at the end of this entry, or here on Vimeo.
When I finally got to deliver this speech, I'd been travelling for some time without rest, as previously noted (and indeed, as described at the beginning of the talk). So perhaps understandably there were a few points I accidentally missed out, or stumbled over.
Firstly, the reason I was dwelling on the airline story so much is that it's the commercial model underpinning contemporary aviation - a model I see as part of soft infrastructure - that leads to poor service, not any particular technical issue as regards hard infrastructure. Boarding the passengers whilst doing the safety checks on the aircraft is a manifestation of how close to the wire airlines have to run things. Equally, there is little or no redundancy built into the system, due to the particular financial models underpinning them, which are in turn expressions of underlying social, cultural, political fabric. When something goes wrong, therefore, it causes very large ripples through that soft infrastructure of service and system, in turn.
The effect of bike-sharing networks such as Vélib' and Bicing, are so key to me as they indicate how soft infrastructure can utterly change the perception of the city - in this case the sense of mobility, effectively warping physical distance - without altering much in the way of hard infrastructure.
The closing video, which people always find compelling, is lifted from a fantastic advert for the Madrid Metro, which I discovered on SuperSpatial a while ago. I re-edited, and replaced the soundrack (using a bit of Jacaszek, I seem to recall). I'm not sure who created the original advert, but it's a beautiful piece of work and I usually try to declare its provenance. Here I forgot/ran out of time. I deploy it to illustrate the promise of informatics in terms of seeing through the hard infrastructure to the activity and behaviour of the city itself, the way people actually use the city. Here's my cut of the video:
I can't show much of my work in detail due to the stage some of the projects are at - and the nature of those projects - but they'll all make it out here in time. Thanks to Keynote's effortless integration of video I now use clips heavily in presentations, but that makes it a little tricky to easily share talks afterward. The camera crew often neglected to capture the screen, so missing out on a few of the videos. So for the record, here are a few of the videos used during the talk:
It's a crisp clear Swiss winter day. Geneva looks beautiful in the pale sun. That sun, which feels like a slowly failing 20 watt bulb, is the second clearest sign I'm a long way from the New South Wales I left behind on Monday afternoon. The clearest sign is that it's -2°C here, which is essentially 32° difference to the Sydney summer day I departed from. I wear a coat for the first time in almost 2 years.
It's my first time in Geneva, surprisingly, but being amidst the effortlessly elegant Mittel-European urban form again is a delightful confirmation of certain beliefs after getting all-too accustomed to the New World sprawls of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Bikes, trams, 4-5 storey apartment blocks, pocket parks and quietly civic squares everywhere - it's all so right, even given that Geneva is far from the best example. The other, more institutional bits of Geneva feel more like one's living amidst the giant sets of Tati'sPlaytime, which a part of me would be entirely happy to do.
The relative proximity of Africa, rather than that of South-East Asia, is visible in the faces around me on the streets. The flat northern European colour-scheme of white, brown, grey and black across the textures of stone, brick, bare trees and filigreed overcast sky is a subtle and beautiful counterpoint to the intense light and rich colours of Australia. I'm lucky to live in both these worlds.
I also encounter 3 examples of haughty Swiss brusqueness in quick succession, from airport to taxi to hotel, which is a shock after the naturally easy-going and friendly Australian service culture. Still, I'm back in the country of my birth and I can live with this. My Swiss-ness is something I've continually over-stressed, entirely out of proportion to the <2 years I spent here after my birth in Zürich, and have spent much of my adult life adulating the likes of Josef Muller-Brockmann, Le Corbusier, Max Bill, Jan Tschichold, Herzog & De Meuron, Peter Zumthor, Claudio Sulser. The coffee's predictably poor, given its French heritage, but I can forgive almost all these foibles given the sheer delight of being in a country with the world's finest array of door handles, locks, window fittings and banknotes.
This is the pleasurable sense of disorientation I'm feeling. The less pleasurable aspects are due to the fact it took me 4 days to get here, when it should've taken just over 24 hours. This is due partly to 3 malfunctions across 2 different planes on the runway at Bangkok airport, but mainly due to the ineptitude of British Airways and Thai Airlines, which shuttled us backwards and forwards from runway to airport hotel numerous times. It was a bravura performance of truly appalling 'customer service', a cavalcade of unthinking, desperate, flailing, inhumane incompetence, all too familiar when encountering the raw edges often left exposed by global capital.
The journey ends up being Sydney to Bangkok to Hong Kong to London to Geneva, the last 4 airports all experienced within in 1 day. Despite the intense fatigue, hassle and frustration - which eventually left me drained of anger and resolving into a zen-like state of near-calm, as if the body itself was beginning to fade - I did at least get to explore Bangkok Suvarnabhumi (pretty good; wonderful concrete alongside giant stretched-taut silver canvas loops; not enough places to sit; over-staffed shops (not a bad thing necessarily); no wi-fi), Hong Kong (night-time descent along the lights of Macau; currently being re-modelled but still delivering a sense of massive; cavernous escalator-threaded atria; great automated transit; old people working everywhere; good shops and good food; good free wi-fi all over the airport), London Heathrow Terminal 5 (disclaimer: Arup worked on it; actually surprised by how much I liked it; also good automated transit; the finish of many details was very good; beautiful exposed structural details; the shops entirely out of kilter with the times (a glance down the departure lounge: Prada, Harrods; Dior; Mappin & Webb; Smythson; Tiffany & Co ... all predictably empty); wi-fi everywhere but not free and therefore not used) and finally Geneva (classic small European airport; functional, efficient and pleasingly so; concourse roof being remodelled presumably; no need for automated transit or shops; surrounded by Alps and so a wonderful arrival:departure experience.)
The 4-day journey is actually much longer story, which I'll spare you in detail, but it did inadvertently provide me with the opening few minutes of my speech at the Lift 09 conference. For that's why I'm here in Geneva.
The Greenhouse, by Joost and others, is an opportunistic temporary insertion into a gap in Federation Square, Melbourne.
It’s built entirely from recycled and recyclable materials. The exterior is dis-assembled shipping containers and packing crates, filled with straw bale and covered with plants. When I was there, the walls were embedded with strawberry plants and potatoes were planted on top (and used in the potato salad served below), amongst other things.
Well, more or less. Not quite the full platform imagined in that post - or this - but a small step in that direction.
I'm currently teaching a two-week class at University of Technology Sydney, on the Master of Digital Architecture degree. As per the 'street as platform' idea, we're creating a multiperspectival portrait of the street, seen through the lens of data. Some of this data is derived from various sensors we're placing around the immediate urban environment, some of it is scraped from websites or other sources. The patterns arising from the collision of these datasets are being explored through visualisations produced in the Processing language.
We've got the 12 or so students blogging about their progress throughout the course, which extends from learning Processing from scratch (plus working in a web services-enabled design environment) to exploring the possibilities and vagaries of real-time data, scraping historical data off the web, and thinking through what it means to visualise patterns in urban data, from conceptual, aesthetic and pragmatic viewpoints. We're heading towards a small exhibition based around an installation in which the visualisations are projected - so ultimately exploring the ideas of projecting urban behavioural data back into the street, as per this system diagram.
Keep an eye on the students' blog for progress updates, and I'll post more links, context, images, notes &c. to follow, but for now, a quick word from the street itself:
Following on from our recent 'post-occupancy evaulation' of the State Library of Queensland's wi-fi (see previous post) in my role at Arup, I thought I'd share a couple of outputs. (Thanks to Tory Jones of the State Library of Queensland for permission).
One of the ideas I've been exploring relates to how urban industry - in the widest sense of the word - in the knowledge economy is often invisible, at least immediately and in situ. Whereas urban industry would once have produced thick plumes of smoke or deafening sheets of sound, today's information-rich environments - like the State Library of Queensland, or a contemporary office - are places of still, quiet production, with few sensory side-effects. We see people everywhere, faces lit by their open laptops, yet no evidence of their production. They could be using Facebook, Photoshop, Excel or Processing.
I've been developing a few ideas for exploring this industrial activity, which I hope to share here later, but the post-occupancy work on the Library's wi-fi involved creating a few representations of the service; a service which is all but invisible. Outside of monitoring the server logs, the wi-fi can only be perceived through the presence of users themselves, or of course via devices that detect wi-fi.
So as well as photo-essays, videos and in-depth interviews with users, and relating to this idea of making the invisible, visible, I mapped the strength of the wi-fi signal across levels 1 and 2 of the Library, the primary areas that the Library’s wi-fi is used. By taking readings across the floor of both levels, using standard wi-fi-enabled consumer equipment in order to mimic the conditions for the average user (in this case a MacBook laptop and a Nokia e65 mobile phone), I was able to construct a snapshot of the wi-fi signal strength across the Library.
I then articulated this set of readings as a basic 3D model in SketchUp, with peaks representing good wi-fi signal strength (4 bars, for example) and troughs representing poor wi-fi signal strength (no bars/no connection, or intermittently 1 bar). Each ‘bar’ defined a level in the 3D model (1 bar = 1 metre, roughly). This gives a sense of the wi-fi as a shape, with a physical form. Although literally misleading, it helps to understand wi-fi as a discrete phenomenon, via a form of translation.
While this model is not intended to be totally accurate - wi-fi signals may change in different atmospheric conditions, and perceived signal strength will vary depending on the equipment used - it does convey a sense of the overall ‘shape’ of the wi-fi, as if we could perceive it in physical form. Sensing the wi-fi like this is almost akin to dowsing - detecting the presence of unseen forces - and mimics the sensation of users attempting to discern where the wi-fi signal is strong.
The model was initially overlaid onto a floorplan of level 1, and subsequently scaled up to sit over a snapshot of the site from Google Earth. When comparing with the built form, we can explain the strong signal over the north-western egress of the Knowledge Walk. Through our observations at the Library, we saw that users have figured out that this is a good spot - one of the 3 wireless access points currently on that floor is located in the nearby meeting rooms, not that users would know this. The presence of the ‘bench’ extruded from the wall provides useful affordances for users too, almost suggesting it’s a good spot to sit and access the wi-fi (although again, we suspect that is accidental coincidence of design). Similarly, the floor-to-ceiling windows from meeting rooms and open corridor leading outside means there is minimal concrete to block the signal. So this 3D model helps suggest a correlation between use of the space, the shape of the space, and the strong wi-fi signal.
Following the central spine of the wi-fi model through towards the south-eastern edge, we can see how the wi-fi ‘leaks out’ of this end of the building, through the open end of the Knowledge Walk outside onto the concourse in-between the Library and the building destined to be The Edge. Elsewhere, thick concrete mitigates against wi-fi spreading far, unfortunately including the café and the fabulous deck areas on the river, where the signal falls off sharply (currently).
I allocated the SketchUp model a skin of netting, in a nod towards the Cedric Price-designed aviary at London Zoo. This seemed to me a similar structure, and suggests that 'wi-fi cloud' might actually feel like a containing volume - a net of wi-fi, as if seen from a user’s or bird’s point-of-view.
Formally, the result is hardly elegant, and bears little relation to the AIA award-winning structure by Donovan Hill/Peddle Thorp. (Incidentally, it’s been a great pleasure to work with Timothy Hill on this and other projects recently). The sharp angles and abrupt faces are accidents of the crude construction in SketchUp and the simplicity in my measurements. I should probably take it into 3D Studio Max or something, to render it with more graceful curves, or a material that would more properly represent the qualities of radio waves - perhaps something like Diller+Scofidio's Blur Building.
The “Modern Times” exhibition at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum - part of Sydney Design 08 - is something of a curate’s egg. Containing some wonderful artefacts, the show is worth seeing for a few items alone. However, the unimaginative presentation is fairly disappointing and you walk away sensing an opportunity lost, as much as you are enlightened and enlivened by the possibilities inherent in the material.
The “untold story of modernism in Australia” is a tagline open to misinterpretation. It’s not that modernism in Australia is an “untold story” - as Australian modernism, through the likes of Boyd, Grounds, Seidler, Nolan, Preston, Dupain, the Featherstons et al, has a well-documented history here, and the architectural scene in Sydney in particular has an ongoing relationship with modernism. It’s more that the curators intended to tell a different story of modernism, one that focused perhaps a little less on architecture and built environment, and more on the social and cultural patterns emerging throughout the modern period. (This insight gleaned in an interview with curator Ann Stephen on ABC Radio National’s By Design show.)
While this is laudable, it should not negate engaging with architecture and urban planning - as this is the built expression of those social and cultural patterns. And it’s the buildings that we’re left with, marking modernism in the streets around us every day, long after the fashions, posters and poems have faded. Sure enough, many of the artefacts directly relate to architecture and urbanism nonetheless. In fact, although the exhibition opens on the body, health and the emerging fashion, it tends to become more centred around architecture, cities, and other fragments of built fabric as it continues.
As the result of some conversations about a month ago, Arup have been commissioned by the State Library of Queensland to do some analysis of their free wi-fi service, which runs throughout their Infozone and Knowledge Walk areas.
I’ll be doing research there next week, looking at usage patterns from various quantitative and qualitative perspectives, some analysis of how the variability of wi-fi maps onto the informal use of space enabled by the Library’s open design, some benchmarking against best practice in terms of denoting the presence of public wi-fi, some technical discussions. That kind of thing.
I’m keen to explore new ways of discerning spatial usage patterns, including software-based analysis of video If possible. Otherwise, it’ll be students, counting.
I’m also keen to explore some interesting ways of visualising the use of wi-fi mapped onto use of space. Whilst thoughts on the methodology and sketches of representations are ticking over nicely I thought I’d ask readers if there are any interesting examples of similar research that we should be aware of. In return, I’ll post some observations on methodology and visualisations afterwards (IP-permitting, and with the Library’s approval of course.)
I know of two studies in particular. Paul Torrens’ work on ‘wi-fi geographies’, which layers signal strength data over Geographical Information Systems (GIS), usually for urban-scale spaces such as this visualisation of wi-fi access points in Salt Lake City:
I quite like the visualisation of a wi-fi cloud hanging over the city (see movie here, about half-way through) though I’m not sure how actually meaningful the representation is. Additionally, I’m dealing with a microcosm of this space, rather than an aggregation of numerous wi-fi access points across a city.
Then there’s Andres Sevtsuk, Sonya Huang, Francesco Calabrese, and Carlo Ratti's work with the SENSEable City Laboratory at MIT (see “Mapping the MIT Campus in Real-time Using WiFi” (in Foth 2008, full ref. below.) Their work focused on mapping usage of the campus-wide wi-fi network, using a system (iSPOTS) which observed the volume of traffic emanating from the numerous wireless access points. This gave them a way of producing images of the blooms of wi-fi coverage across the campus (incidentally, nice axonometric view reminds me of Stirling, Archigram etc.), as well as graphs mapping the amount of usage at different times of the day.
Both interesting approaches. Any others?
I'm also interesting in surveying best practice in denoting the presence of wi-fi. This is an interesting area, as - obviously - wi-fi is invisible, so the service is usually denoted by the presence of people with open laptops, and/or small signs, for which a universal language has not quite emerged. Perhaps both of these indicators are fine, but are there better alternatives?
But do you know of other interesting, robust, useful and beautiful ways of communicating the key facets of a wi-fi network (presence, availability, speed etc.)? If so, please add to the comments below, and many thanks.
Although I'd been meaning to post the previous note on the Terracotta Army for months - in fact, since I'd first read the article in the LRB back in January - I actually hit the 'save' button in the middle of last night's stupendous Olympic opening ceremony from Beijing. It somehow seemed apposite, even though the quote was only tangentially relevant to the extraordinary events unfolding on-screen.
The ceremony frequently left me amazed, delighted and at times awe-struck, through its sheer ambition, scale, beauty and technical panache. As a friend noted in an email sent shortly after the movable type sequence, "there's raising the bar and then there's blowing the bar right into space". An extraordinary spectacle, and sublime in the original sense.
(London might as well pack up now. What could they possibly do in 2012 to match the extraordinary craft, precision and artfully poised readings of history delivered by Zhang Yimou, 14000 performers and an LED screen the size of a football pitch? I shudder to think, particularly given it might well involve Banksy, Amy Winehouse and Gary Lineker.)
And so it's clear, as Mitchell Whitelaw notes, that this was a Bob Beamon-esque 'leapfrog' by China, indicating their potential culturally and technologically, now way beyond much of what would be called the West. Whitelaw addresses the particular aesthetic of digital design in the ceremony and its architecture:
"The Water Cube and the Birds Nest don't simply display China's modernity, they claim a jump into a digital, sustainable, mega-scaled future. The computational aesthetics of multiplicity that mark these
structures are, again like the opening ceremony, a powerful cultural narrative: coherence, strength and beauty made of countless tiny pieces. Like the flickering grid of the drummers, the ordered diversity of these structures is important too, in that it's not total uniformity, a simple (modernist) grid. In fact these buildings contain a kind of post-industrial grid, where the uniformity or regularity is not literal or material, but procedural or computational - the computer's ability to resolve complex distributions of force is what enables the "organic" multiplicity here." [Mitchell Whitelaw, at The Teeming Void]
I'm interested in how those aesthetics of 'organic multiplicity' apply to the ancient practices of the Terracotta army, scripting, documentation and art, the patterns of China's ancient cities, and then evolve into these contemporary practices of digital design. Codes, arrays, patterns, complexity.
To balance the scales a little I'll end with this beautiful image of an earlier Beijing I found in this book review at The Economist:
"The city of street markets, temple fairs and the "little games" that so
delighted Beijingers: for instance, their passion for keeping fighting crickets, fed with honey, and for inserting tiny carved flutes of bamboo into the tail-feathers of pigeons; whole flocks created aerial
music over this reviewer’s courtyard house just a decade ago."
Imagine that. What did it sound like? How does this intimate everyday artistry relate to that now rendered at the scale of the new Beijing?
John Birmingham: Leviathan: The unauthorised biography of Sydney A fantastic read. Thoroughly subjective, impassioned, personal and slanderous. Well researched and hefty, but written with a light touch, it takes apart the Emerald City, revealing it to be both impossibly dark and essentially conservative. Along with The Fatal Shore and a few others, essential reading in terms of understanding the city. (*****)
Gary Hume: Toyo Ito: Sendai Mediatheque As with the Seattle Public Library book in this series from Actar, I've been poring over this over the last year, pulling details and insight into recent work. A good resource, well-produced. (*****)
Christos Tsiolkas: The Slap Clever yet eminently readable novel of modern Melbourne manners. Written with the devilishly compelling page-turnability of a good grown-up soap opera, it's also a smartly structured and beautifully nuanced depiction of contemporary Australian urban:suburban society, warts and all. (*****)
Steven Carroll: The Art of the Engine Driver Lovely evocation of late-'50s Melbourne suburb, and of the railways just before the heart was ripped out of them. Not just a warm nostalgic costume drama, but with rich atmosphere and complex themes rippling beneath the surface. (****)
Geoff Dyer: Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi: A Novel Hugely enjoyable, as ever. One of the finest British writers around. Not autobiography, but autobiography. Fiction, and non-fiction. Travel writing, and not travel writing. Hilarious and occasionally moving, learned and light, warm and bad-tempered, revelling in facile reactions and almost immeasurably deep. A mess of contradictions that establishes a coherent world-view. Which is a contradiction in itself, of course. Beautifully turned prose too, apparently effortless but almost certainly not. (*****)
William H. Whyte: The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces Amazingly, I'd never read this in linear fashion, from cover to cover, until recently. Quite brilliant, clearly, and written so well. With humility and grace, wit and candour, insight and experience. Although focused primarily on New York of the '70s, it's still essential. (*****)
David Peace: GB84 Not sure why it's taken me so long to read this, as I'm a big fan of David Peace's writing and this book is set in and around the early-80s Sheffield of my youth. But it was well worth the wait. Peace fictionalises the miners' strike, and the extraordinary events of 1983-85 as Britain teetered on the edge of large scale civil unrest. But it's only just fiction, no matter how brutal it seems. A brilliant evocation of the time, and a social fabric stretched taut to breaking point. (*****)
Cormac Mccarthy: The Road I don't recall being quite so affected by a book before. Absolutely extraordinary, particularly if you read within one day. It left me speechless, shattered and reflective. (*****)
Julianne Schultz (Editor): Griffith REVIEW 21: Hidden Queensland (Griffith Review) Very good issue. Although it pores over the same old ground again and again from numerous angles, it ultimately reveals a fascinating, multiperspectival portrait of a place. Beneath its becalmed, languid easy-going surface, QLD has the scars of an extraordinarily rich half-century of history; a set of stories and characters well drawn out here. (****)
Frank Duffy: Work and the City (Edge Futures Ser.) Excellent summary of issues around working environments by DEGW's Duffy - from numerous angles, taking in history and future. Very useful read, even if you sense there's much more to come here. (*****)
Models: 306090 11 (306090) Fantastic collection edited by Eric Ellingsen, covering all aspects of models as pertaining to designing the built environment. Digital and analogue in all modes, and philosophical and aesthetic considerations besides. (*****)
Monoliths and Dimensions Sunn 0))): Monoliths and Dimensions Ye Gods, the most startlingly beautiful thing I've heard for a long time. Absolutely stunning. They say: "the most musical piece we’ve done, and also the heaviest, powerful and most abstract set of chords we’ve laid to tape"." Features Eyvind Kang, Julian Priester (!), frequent collaborator Oren Ambarchi and a Viennese choir. (*****)
SND: Atavism Brutal in its starkness, these ultra-precise, ultra-sparse clipped rhythms are the polar opposite of Sunn O))). (*****)
Filastine: Dirty Bomb Not every track works here but those that do are fantastic. A rich stew of jump-cut rhythms and Hispanic samples, framed by an architecture of R&B. (****)
Various Artists: Pop Ambient 2009 A few quite lovely tracks on here, generally those featuring the brilliant Klimek. Others are pretty enough but a little insubstantial. (****)
Flying Lotus: Los Angeles Beautiful fractured rhythms and smeared fizzing neon samples. Wondrous piece of work. LA, indeed. (*****)
Antony and the Johnsons: The Crying Light Luminous, shimmering, iridescent. Seriously, quite lovely. Only a couple of off-notes; otherwise, a major progression. (*****)
Balla et Ses Balladins: The Syliphone Years Wonderful Guinean dance music troupe from the early-60s, recording on the state-owned Syliphone label. Sparkling guitar lines in particular. (*****)
1897 Seaworthy: 1897 Recorded inside the Newington Armory heritage-listed arms depot in Sydney (built in 1897), and so redolent of cavernous reverberating chambers, this is full of lovely drones and fragments of picked guitar. Rather good. (****)
Coward Nels Cline: Coward Fabulous new solo album from 'Patsy'. Hanging around Wilco has informed things a little here, but elsewhere you can hear the influence Ralph Towner, Thurston Moore, Derek Bailey, Fennesz, Rod Poole, Bill Frisell etc etc. But it's Cline, above all, and he's certainly eased himself into that august company now. (*****)
Dance Mother Telepathe: Dance Mother Very saucy NYC art-pop. TV On The Radio-influenced (and indeed aided and abetted by TVOTR) but fresher, sharper. Beyond the studied hipness there's substance here too. [via Jace] (****)
Le Journaliste Anne-James Chaton & Andy Moor: Le Journaliste Best record I've heard in ages. Impenetrable torrents of raw French over Moor's brutal guitar-led soundtracks. I heard this on DJ Rupture's show and was immediately intrigued. You will be too. (*****)
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