GeoFeed helps you identify
"geographical references" from all
types of content.
serial consign (GeoFeed.net)
Mon, 05 Jan 2009 20:25:36 +0100
Hibernation (of sorts)
I'd love to be using this post to announce an exciting winter vacation but really all I'm doing is warning about a disruption in service. Sometime in the next few days I'll be pulling Serial Consign offline to port the existing content into the new build/theme of Drupal that I've been plugging away on for the last few months. I want to start working on a live site rather than with a cloned database and now seems like the time to do it. So aside from my link sharing on Vague Terrain, I'm in stealth mode for a few weeks.
I'm aiming to relaunch the site sometime between January 5th and 12th - depending on how much mischief I get up to over the Holidays. I'm happy with the way things are coming along with the redesign and I look forward to sharing it.
Many thanks to everyone who subscribes to, comments on and browses this site - have a safe and happy holiday season!
Vintage Future: Craig Hodgetts' Ecotopia
This week Ken Saylor highlighted some really incredible work on the Architect's Newspaper blog where Saylor built a post around a set of concept design drawings produced by Craig Hodgetts. These drawings were for a film version of Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston, a 1975 novel by Ernest Callenbach which, true to its name, schematized a futuristic sustainable utopia. In 1978 Hodgetts was commissioned to create renderings to speculate what the architecture and infrastructure of Callaenbach's world might look like.
These gentle, washed out drawings have a virtuosity and playful optimism that is lacking in the majority of digital renderings. The example above delineates a solar-powered mag-lev train system and the rest of the set illustrates city life and power generation in a futuristic Pacific Northwest breakaway nation. This work is inspirational - Check it out for yourself and be sure to note the comments from Hodgetts on the drawings and the film that was never to be. [via archinect]
Informative Headgear
A few weeks ago I posted a summary of a conference panel entitled "The City as Gameboard" which featured a presentation by Blair MacIntyre. MacIntyre is a scholar in augmented reality (AR) and new media experience and, inspired by his talk, I wanted to point out two projects related to these themes.
The headgear pictured above is a prototype of Thesis Helmet (alpha), developed by E. Roon Kang as part of his studies at the Yale School of Art this past spring. This work creates a responsive, 3D tag cloud which is directed by head movement. To facilitate this interaction Kang jury rigged a controller out of the innards of a construction helmet, a Wiimote and infrared LEDs to track the angle and orientation of an operator's head. Amongst the documentation material for this project there is a video that is worth watching to get a sense of how the system works.
[E. Roon Kang / Thesis Helmet (alpha) - diagrams / 2008]
This demo is definitely screen-based rather than AR, but one could image this system as an information overlay. Nonetheless, the project is a humorous meditation on the perception of an introspective designer (or obsessed student). This venture is a followup to a 2007 project 50 Words in Relation in which Kang explored his vocabulary of interests as a designer. This fascination with networks reminds me of what is so great about many of Bestiario's interfaces.
Kijin Shin and Youngbin Lim's The Third Eye is a speculative AR system designed for tourists. This project proposes a monocle which, when peered into, reveals information about the visible landscape. The device can be set to "commercial" or "tourist" modes, and the contents and tone of the display respond accordingly. In the comments of the project page linked above Shin contextualizes the work as follows:
One of the reasons to travel is curiosity and expectation about new experiences of unknown places. Nevertheless, all our fears missing out on adventures by moving to the cities are obligated by whole travel experiences. In order to have a better journey in a strange city, people makes huge effort to prepare and collect information about a destination before they leave. Moreover, it is not so difficult to imagine about your backpack heavily loaded with a thick guidebook, map, and devices. Now, here we suggest you the very simple and smart device for your travel.
Be sure to check out the documentation of The Third Eye as the drawings are sharp.
Bonus Links: Since "augmented" is the topic of the day, Annie Ok just shared a 2008 AR Wrap Up link with me via twitter. Her blog is also a great source of information for AR and progressive gaming news.
Celltexts
How many installations have you encountered that have an equally inspired website? Celltexts, by Ines and Eyal Weizman, was prepared for the YOUprison exhibition at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo this past summer in Turin. This exhibit, curated by Francesco Bonami, brought together a great group of architectural studios to produce work addressing the theme of prison architecture. Other participants included Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Bernard Khoury / DWG, Atelier Bow Wow and several more gallery-friendly studios.
As an installation, Celltexts combined the space of the library and the prison cell to catalog texts and creative work produced in prison. The installation, and entire YOUprison exhibit were quite thoroughly covered in a We Make Money Not Art post from this past July, what I'm interested in discussing here is the excellent web presence of this project.
The Celltexts website is an elegant, minimal index of writing produced by incarcerated authors. What sets this library apart from others is rather than employ the Dewey Decimal System to classify texts, this collection is organized by length of prison terms (which range from 1 day to 45 years) thus "undoing systems of designated knowledge". This logic is reinforced through shelfmarks, a custom organizational system which identifies disciplines addressed by each text, notes the year the work was written, the length of prison term and the name of the author. Within the Celltexts universe, Martin Luther King Jr's Letter from Birmingham City Jail would be tagged as POLI.PHIL.1963.9D.KING.
The browser for this collection appears as a horizontal barcode and users can scroll from side to side and access information on each text. The library includes work from Antonio Negri, Mumia Abu-Jamal and even the fabled Marquis de Sade. Ines and Eyal Weizman's statement contextualizes the library in relation to space as follows:
Through the collection of texts an archipelago of prison cells emerges. The cells are thus revealed as sites of intellectual production, marking the limit condition of writing. The collection is assembled in recognition that spatial confinement and isolation may induce a process of creative, imaginative, sometimes spiritual, cultural production.
Moving through this index of texts creates an uncomfortable ambiguity between the library and the prison house.
Pictured above is the explanation for the shelfmarks system. This succinctness is echoed by the understated interface and typography making for a pretty seamless navigation experience. I'm really impressed by the precision of this project - kudos to the Celltexts website designers Polimekanos and Wolfram Wiedner.
If you'd like some additional information about Celltexts, Ines Weizman discussed the piece in an interview as part of Jackie Summel and Herman Wallace's The House that Herman Built, an undertaking also invested in exploring architecture and incarceration. [via The Complex Terrain Laboratory]
A Variety of Machines
[Hegeton?s Ram and Tortoise and the Water Screw / from Book X of The Ten Books on Architecture]
Systems thinking has been my focus over the last few months. Not in the cybernetic or network theory sense, rather how machines and assemblages can produce and modulate representation. Beneath are links to two recent texts of mine which address this theme towards different ends.
- Interface Aesthetics at the Dept. of Rhythmanalysis is a review and commentary on the control panels of Kevin Hamilton. This, my second post on Rhizome, explores Hamilton's "Rhythmanalysis" machines in light of interface culture and as narrative and musical instruments.
- My Visualizar paper, Beyond the Edifice: Architectural Visualization Reconsidered, is now available for download as a PDF. With this text I attempt to parse past and present thinking about architectural representation to identify visualization as a possible endgame for diagrammatic thinking. I believe the scale at which urban informatics read the city speaks to long-abandoned aspects of architectural practice such as the design of infrastructural machines. This text is fast and loose - more of a roadmap for future research than anything. I plan to further develop this material in a series of posts in the coming months.
On Advertising
As part of the launch of the (long overdue) redesign of the site, I'm currently noodling with the advertising presence on Serial Consign. I just signed up with Culture Pundits, who I'm hoping can be the primary revenue stream for this blog. Culture Pundits is an ad network for art and culture blogs who serve images of artists' works in the ad spaces of the network for a portion of page views each month. They've popped up as an alternative to the usual suspects and are helping support some great sites like Rhizome, Art Fag City, Life Without Buildings and Curating.info.
On the topic of ads on blogs, I'm a realist. Online presence is most definitely founded on the notion of an attention economy. Every blog is selling something - be it influence, expertise or a creative practice. I find it odd that new bloggers instinctively turn to other publications for revenue and want to get in the habit of seeing a pittance of income for all the time I put into writing here. Even groceries once a month means quite a lot and micropayments are allegedly the way of the future for content creation right? If you'd like to view this content ad-free I recommend you subscribe to the RSS feed.
In terms of layout, things are a little clunky at the moment, but when I switch to a three-column layout it will all make sense. So please bear with me, the site will probably be changing and/or offline later in the month for some festive retooling.
.txt/081206
Hot links from the last few weeks:
- Régine Debatty posted a great review of Cinema Sim - Narratives and Projections, currently showing at Itau Cultural in Sao Paulo - Milton Margues' maquettes (one of which is pictured above) are incredible.
- CTlab conducted an interview with Antoine Bousquet on technology and warfare. Bousquet is the author of the forthcoming The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos.
- Lebbeus Woods is going to be publishing a series of essays by theorist Manuel DeLanda on his blog in the coming months. The first, Building with Bone and Muscle, is a thoughtful consideration of the material quality of various types of organic matter.
- Telic Art Exchange's Distributed Gallery is currently showing a selection of work by Tom Moody. The venue has posted an interesting interview with Moody in which he discusses his work and blogging.
- Over at Architectradure, Cati Vaucelle announced that she is designing an immersion pod for World of Warcraft players.
The City as Gameboard
Due to fact that I am presently underemployed such a dutiful blogger, I took some notes on the live stream of the "The City as Gameboard" panel at Living Game Worlds IV. That conference wrapped up at Georgia Tech yesterday and it was interesting to peek into the proceedings by way of Ian Bogost, Blair MacIntyre and Susan Bonds' panel. Bogost and MacIntyre discussed augmented urban space in the context of their personal research projects and, unfortunately, Bonds (of 42 Entertainment fame) was asked not to stream her presentation. Here are notes from the first two talks.
[Stephen Shore / U.S. 97, South of Klamath Falls, Oregon, July 21, 1973]
Ian Bogost talked about the defamiliarization of urban space through gaming: "There is an unmet opportunity to expand our interest in real world game boards beyond the city as a locus for pseudo-politicized, hipster neo-modernism or beyond situationist inspired, one-off conceptual art, or even beyond low participation media spectacle".
- Setting games in real world environments like cities thins the membrane between the situations represented in a game and those experienced
- Mobile devices (as agents of disruption and estrangement) are useful for subverting everyday experience
- Currently working on Jetset, a forthcoming iPhone game
- Cruel to be Kind - pervasive game of "benevolent assassination" co-designed with Jane McGonigal, based on challenging the social contract of urban space
- Interesting idea of Jane's: instead of alternative reality gaming, why not think about "alternation" as a process where gamespace intersects with the real world challenging the divide between fantasy and reality
- Good example of this paradigm from visual communication is anamorphosis (see Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors)
- A problem with alternation in the urban environment is that it only works on indigenous city dwellers (and fails at the edge of the city or in a semi-rural environment) - Stephen Shore's photography can provide some inspiration
- There are many other game boards we could choose to use as canvases - parking lot, supermarket, diner, street, etc.
- The holodeck is not the model we should be looking at, rather the portal in Portal - with recursion and feedback where gamespace loops back on itself
Blair MacIntyre has spent the better part of the last decade exploring the intersection of augmented reality with new media experience: "The Apple App Store is a new paradigm for experience distribution".
- Augmented reality has got very popular largely based off the promise of handheld/mobile devices
- MacIntyre is interested in literal intersection of physical and virtual worlds i.e. headset that allows individual to see virtual world avatars that are in the same space
- Head-mounted displays are the way of the future - they won't be clunky like in sci-fi, a better reference is some of the products being developed by Microvision (one of which is pictured above)
- Key reference in augmented reality (AR) games is Roku's Reward
- Can You See Me Now? is another great example - allows interesting physical/virtual collaboration across gamespace (in that case Nottingham)
- In terms of processing power - today's laptop is tomorrow's mobile device.
- What are we going to do when we can put graphics and information all around us?
In the Air
In the Air, our atmospheric visualization of Madrid is now live! I posted blurbs and images of it and the other six projects developed at Visualizar on FlowingData earlier today. In that summary I describe our research as follows:
The city of Madrid currently tracks air quality through a network of sensors distributed throughout the city. This allows for the monitoring of pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide and ozone at sites of traffic congestion and public interaction. In the Air uses this data to provide a (Processing-powered) realtime index of the air quality and a highly customizable interface for examining historical data. This visualization was simultaneously developed alongside a prototype of a diffuse facade - an experiment in using architecture as an ambient display for environmental information.
I won't say much beyond that as the research is quite extensively documented on the project website. The mechanics underlying the visualization certainly were quite different than we had expected they might be earlier in the development phase. Please check out the fruits of our labour and be sure to give the visualization a spin.
While I won't say too much more, I'd like to share the above video (made by Susanna Tesconi) documenting our two week design charette. There is something quite magical about any project in which code gurus and plumbers are the key technical consultants.
While a tip of the cap is most definitely in order for team leader Nerea Calvillo and interaction designer Victor Viña, this project was truly the result of mass collaboration.
Culver City Redux
While it is known for quirky institutions like The Museum of Jurassic Technology and The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Culver City is perhaps most synonymous with the film industry. The lot and production facilities of MGM Studios (now occupied by Sony Pictures) take up a sizable portion of this West L.A. community and additional former occupants include Culver Studios and Hal Roach Studios. Despite being overshadowed by the mystique of Hollywood, Culver City remains one of the key sites of American cinema, an urban space that has served as the backdrop to countless films.
Graphic designer and researcher Piet Schreuders has excavated a portion of this history with the creation of a 3D model of Culver City's Main Street in the 1920s. He took iconic shots from several Laurel and Hardy films and geolocated them within this digital model. The resulting video is a fascinating historical study of "the shortest Main Street in the world" and the idea of the cinematic city. This research is neatly consolidated in the above YouTube video and those wanting more information should note the 12 page excerpt from Furore #19 (1999) which Schreuders has posted online for Laurel and Hardy fans. [via Digital Urban]
[Piet Schreuders / Main Street Study / 1999]
While I do find this research quite exciting, I do have to admit my interest in it is partially fueled by nostalgia. I lived in Culver City for two years at the beginning of the decade and my design educated started at 3850 Main Street, the building at the very right of the above image (in Gregg Fleishman's studio - the original home of LAIAD). I also consumed several thousand shots of espresso at the Grand Casino Bakery (3826 Main Street) which is just off frame.
One of the things that I find so strange about Los Angeles is the manner in which urban space has been grafted into narrative cinema. Space is double coded and the "fictionalized" utilization of various sites throughout the city often eclipses their (sometimes banal) everyday use. This is the territory for exploration in Thom Anderson's 2003 documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself and also at the heart of my Critical Sections project - which I'm hoping will be launching on Vectors quite soon. Once that work is live I'll return to these themes of media-archeology and space in Los Angeles.
Special Thanks to Google for their wonderful mapping api.