I am attaching a document they have sent me (it is in French) to detail the expedition they are preparing: terra_incognita_francais.

Ben & Lara are looking for journalists to document their journey. They are preparing a book and a documentary.

Excerpt from ft-tech blog: Spike Lee: With user-generated content, who needs ad agencies? (June 26, 2009 by Tim Bradshaw)

It’s a brilliant Nokia ad - the sort of simple, well-executed idea that agencies charge six-figure sums for. Only this one wasn’t made by an ad agency - it was made by Hiroki Ono, a 23-year-old film student from Yokohama, Japan, who’d never made an ad before. The film, “Feel the globe”, took just two days to make.

Hiroki’s 30-second video was the winner of a competition run by Mofilm - a group working with film schools and YouTube addicts to find the best in user-generated content. Mofilm convinced companies such as Visa, HP, Best Buy and AT&T to “put their brands in the hands of consumers”, as Nokia’s head of brand engagement, Fiona Bosman, put it at yesterday’s press conference at the Cannes Lions advertising festival.

Judging this contest was Spike Lee, director of Malcolm X and Inside Man and an enthusiastic supporter of user-generated content and DIY filmmaking.

“I watched the final 12 films, the quality is amazing,” he said. “I think that this demonstrates that you can’t dictate where talent is. The same way I feel you don’t have to go to film school to be a filmmaker, you don’t have to be an employee of an advertising agency to make advertising also.”

SPM/MoD isn’t just about the design of these lightweight, highly efficient, electric vehicles, it is about inserting that technological innovation into the social and cultural environment and designing an intuitive system within which they function. The technological innovation embodied in these vehicles is just one piece of a larger system design which addresses issues from pollution, to congestion, to urban space, to economics, to energy use, to the very idea of personal transportation and what that means in a world with nearly seven billion inhabitants. It truly is - in the Bucky tradition - a transformative solution rather than an isolated piece of technology.

Hotel Transvaal uses the surplus of empty spaces in the neighborhood. In houses soon to be demolished, not yet sold newly built on derelict land and in unused spaces that have been refurnished by merchants from the neighborhood and artists into 1 to 5 star hotel rooms. The supply of rooms is very diverse in terms of furniture, luxury and price, so that anyyone, businessmen, students, tourists, residents and other guests can rent a place. When homes are sold or the torn down the hotel rooms move on.

The city of XXIe century will the sustainable city, opened to the plurality of mobilities and to the natural elements with a new philosophy of the relationship between nature and artificiality. It is a question of designing the contemporary cities around this new goal: to think urban space for lifestyles reconciling mobilities on a territorial scale and on a new proximity scale.

This is the abstract of my contribution:

The twitter line definition of neo-nomads is that neo-nomads are individuals constantly on the move who construct and reclaim a sense of belonging to places through digital means. One of their strategies to formulate home is sampling. In (electronic) musical terms, sampling is the appropriation—selection and recording—of sound and music bits (often part of a precedent creation by another artist) for reuse in a new musical piece. The musical analogy holds true for neo-nomads as they sample cultures and the urban environments they roam in to reuse in the creation of a comfortable, personal and movable space. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have amplified the phenomenon. This piece is an adaptation of the research on the technologically mediated relation between people and space when always on the move.

He authored:
Métapolis ou l’Avenir des villes, éditions Odile Jacob, 1995
La Société hypermoderne ; ces événements nous dépassent, feignons d’en être les organisateurs, l’Aube, 2001-2005 nouv.éd.
Les Sens du mouvement. Modernité et mobilités, éditions Belin, 2005 (co-direction S. Allemand et J. Lévy)
Le Mangeur hypermoderne. Une figure de l’individu éclectique, éditions Odile Jacob, 2005