I recently finished reading Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (Verso, 2007), and I’m now in the midst of transcribing my reading notes into Endnote. It’s a remarkable text, in its narrative of spatial gerrymandering and in its sensitive articulation of applied architectural theory.  There are a couple of passages in particular (bridging archeology to architecture in Jerusalem; the palindromic commonality of architectural and legal “space”; Gen. Kochavi’s rejection of Derrida in favor of Tschumi; bridging from Fanon and the Algerian experience), that suggest my research is on the right track. I’ve discussed this a bit with Matt and Tim, who tell me there’s a similar tale to be told wrt British approaches to Belfast and Derry during The Troubles.

I’m going to be inporting some research content from a previously private blog. Around October-November 2007 I started putting research notes and various book and PhD related meanderings online, and had actually forgotten some of it once I started spending every spare waking moment building CTlab. I’m revisiting it now as I prepare the book outline and prelim draft chapters.

Two contributors to my next book, Making Sense of Proxy Wars: States, Surrogates, and the Use of Force (Potomac Books, 2009), have just submitted their draft chapters. I’ve read the first, and I’m delighted with the quality of it. Now settling into the second chapter, and it’s on a par with chapter one.

For the 26 Nov Battlespace/s public lecture, we won’t be able to webcast live, though we will have a post-event streaming video capture on the CTlab site. We’ll also be holding another online symposium, this one built around Antoine Bousquet’s book The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity (Hurst 2009), as follow-up to the lecture. The prelim announcement and Battlespace/s artwork is up, as well, and can be viewed here. Over the weekend, I’ll be querying potential participants, so we should have a better idea within a week or so what that’ll look like.

Still toying with a couple of ideas. One is to use a second, separate blog module for CTlab symposia, instead of conducting them through the main blog – which would make it easier to categorize, track and feature content without altering the main blog’s own structure. The other idea is develop a separate events/symposium page, ie. not embedded within the main blog page or as a subset of it. I suppose the former would require the latter.

The discussion with the publisher went well last week in London. With our respective schedules, we’re a few months away from ideas becoming plans becoming action, post-February 2009 being the most likely time frame for formalizing the relationship between publisher and CTlab. Meanwhile, refinements to the symposium approach will function as experimental, proof-of-concept exercises.