Tuesday, March 24, 2009

CT scans of popular objects by an "artist-turned-medical student"



This article from the New York Times by Amanda Schaffer features Satre Stuelke a former art professor, now medical student who is using CT scans to have people "think about how things are constructued". You may also visit the artist's website radiologyart.

The Inner Beauty of a McNugget: A Cultural Scan

The New York Times slide show

radiologyart

Friday, March 13, 2009

Diagrams


we've begun to create diagrams exploring the developing relationships within the PROXY installation concept. layers of chronology, personal vs. anonymous communication, active vs. passive collaboration, physical space/movement vs. virtual space/movement and qualitative vs. quantitative are beginning to emerge and solidify.

Installation Proposal Presentation

a pdf of the installation proposal presentation can be viewed and/or downloaded from the the following link:

http://docs.google.com/fileview?id+F.ccfa856a-3b91-4d35-aa1d-c36a867f2970&hl=en

Installation Proposal Presentation

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

maps





































These are a couple renderings I did. They might provide some inspiration for the project.

Monday, March 9, 2009

twitter contributing to "real time" analysis














Continuing the conversation about the internet as a "brain", I found an interesting article on slate.

"By collecting millions of people's immediate thoughts, Twitter is building the Web's best database of "real time" information, these people argue. And that collection might be very valuable..."

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Maeve Installation


Mæve installation @ Venice Biennale 2008 from Maeve installation on Vimeo.


Mæve table application from Maeve installation on Vimeo.



Link

Case Studies For Visions


denCity.net

Creates virtual networks of real places with the use of QR codes which are used to tag buildings and urban sites. These codes can be read via mobile phones. The user shoots the codes and logs them in to dencity.net.

Anyone can tag places and create a denCity-site. All relevant information and data links concerning the particular user-request are released cartographically and depend on the desired degree of locality.

"This information exchange layer, through the tags's crosslinkings and referencing among each other, features a multidimensionality which oscillates between the local and the virtual.The tags are digital yet visible marks in the city. At the same time virtual and physical addresses. They establish interfaces between locality and virtuality. (
http://denCity.net)


Art in Odd Places

Providing an opportunity for people in the art world to explore and examine the role public space plays in our society. Using a map, the audience move about the Lower East Side revealing art in places throughout the community.

AIOP 2006 projects examine current public space potential, spaces that have recently been privatized, and the boundaries of public space.

On the interactive map available online (shown here), one can understand the relationships between authors, location, and projects, placed in three correspondent columns, by rolling over each one of the instances.




Sensity is part of "The Emergent City" series of works by Stanza. In this 3rd version of Sensity, Stanza aims at visualizing the dynamic data around his district as an audio visual artwork.

Sensity artworks are made from the data that is collected across the urban and environment infrastructure. A network of sensors, some fixed, and some embedded, collects data which is then published online. The sensors then interpret the micro-data of the interactive city. The output from the sensors displays the emotional state of the city online and the information will be used to create installations and sculptural artifacts.

These artworks made will represent the movement of people, pollution in the air, the vibrations and sounds of buildings, they are in effect emergent social sculptures visualizing the emotional state of the city.



Pedestrian Levitation.net


The work is based on the movement of pedestrians on a public space. Some pedestrians walk only on the sidewalk and use the pedestrian crossing for crossing the street, other pedestrians freely make shortcuts on the formally imposed traffic situation. Pedestrian Levitation.net is an artwork in public space that reflects on this movement. It visualizes the real movement of people, and adds a virtual movement based on the assumption that people's mind is not subject to gravity or any other physical limitations.

The movement of pedestrians is recorded with a camera from a high place like the roof of a building. A pattern of movement of the pedestrians is extracted by reworking this recording frame by frame with video animation software: it is as if pedestrians draw lines though the space. From this pattern, some dominant directions can be found. These directions will not be exactly what the urbanist foresaw when designing the public space at the location, but be the real flow, the real use of the city by its inhabitants.

The movement of the pedestrians could be regarded as force-vectors through the space. A person's trajectory from A -> B is nearly never a straight line, as many obstacles are in the way (like buildings), imposed trajectories (pedestrian crossings, sidewalks) and physical limitations (gravity). At this point a question is asked: how would the pedestrians move when they were not limited by anything?



Tracing the Visitor's Eye

Fabien Girardin is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science and Digital Communication at the Interactive Technology Group at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain. His current investigation explores the people perception of discrepencies in the context of collaboration supported by mobile and ubiquitous environments.

In continuation of Fabien's exploration of Flickr geotagged images, he produced the "traces" left in Flickr by tourists and citizens of Barcelona based on around 4000 images taken between October and December 2006.

A trace consists in an ordered set of geotagged images taken by one person in one day. The data and visualizations remain somewhat raw, but there might be a potential to define and confirm patterns of how tourists navigate the urban space. The maps do not carry the sense of time yet to highlight when and where the traces start and end.

Monday, March 2, 2009

visions

I have been thinking about using these photographic devices as a possible jumping point for our discussion as we shape our project.

camera lucidia
camera obscura
claude glass

Questions for Discussion 8














In the excerpt entitled The New Langauge of Cinema, Lev Monovich discusses the evolution of cinematic representation parallel to technological advancements. In the section The New Temporality: The Loop as Narrative Engine, he discusses the traditional linear narrative of cinema; "In contrast, narrative cinema avoids repetition; like modern Western fiction forms in general, it puts forward a notion of human existence as a linear progression through numerous unique events.”

Monovich then draws on the history of the “loop” in computer applications, computer games, and playback interfaces (QuickTime) and asks the question "Can the loop be a new narrative form appropriate for the computer age?” The idea of the “loop as a new narrative form” could have valid application to the study of architecture and the city, specifically a way to evoke the narrative ability of architecture and the systematic study of the city through progressive “loops,” with each loop adding a new layer of information that is collected then graphically represented. “As the practice of computer programming illustrates, the loop and the sequential progression do not have to be considered mutually exclusive.”

The Loop as Narrative: Architecture

Can the narrative ability of architecture be logically explored in the terms of the loop?
Here are a number of projects that contain the two temporal forms (loop and narrative) and have a somewhat linear circulation flow pattern where the pedestrian moves through the building in sequential progression. It should be noted that Monovich lists the Mobius House in his article as an illustration of his argument.

The Danteum; Guiseppe Terragni; Rome; 1942 (never constructed)

The Kunsthal; OMA; Rotterdam, Netherlands; 1992
Mobius House; UN Studio/Van berkel & Bos; Utrecht, Netherlands; 1998
Pontifical Lateran University Library Extension; King Roselli Architects; Rome, Italy; 2006

The Loop as Narrative: The City
Can the mapping of a city be represented or re-played in loop format (multiple loops) so that thoughtful analysis can occur and evolve? Can a narrative about the city emerge out of these multiple layers or loops? Mapping can be thought of as a layering of information that provokes thought about new relationships so can we begin to represent these layers as audio/visual loops that progressively add more information?

The Invisible City: Design in the age of intelligent maps discusses the possibilities of what designers can do with mapping, which can be helpful in thinking of what these “loops” can begin to show. “The act of mapping itself is a process of analysis, discovery, and design. It is a process of finding and giving meaning to information, contextualizing information, and of developing new understandings of the places represented…[mapping can be used for] finding patterns by layering information and letting relationships emerge through the process. As making maps allows relationships and patterns to become intuitively apparent, when data is entered into a GIS, these intuited relationships can be quantitatively verified.”

Lastly, if we begin to think about strategically mapping the city and playing this information back in loops, each loop containing a new layer of information, or maybe just the same information collected at a different time; can we think of these loops as feedback loops that inform the future design of the city? This question goes back to the idea of the city as an emergent organism, that can be studied and learned from, much like computer software or “real-world organisms.” (The Myth of the Ant Queen)

Readings:
Albert, Saul, Critical Cartography
Manovich, Lev, The New Language of Cinema in the Language of New Media
Varnelis, Kazys and Meisterlin, Leah. The Invisible City: Design in the Age
of Intelligent Maps

(mentioned) The Myth of the Ant Queen from Stephen Johnson's "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software"

Sunday, March 1, 2009

A long Take of 15 miles and overlapping Images and Signs




Today in the New York Times an artist's project is presented, a three day walk on Broadway Street, a long take of overlapped streets, signs, faces, neighborhoods on a continuous film, a continuous story. Photographer Stéphanie de Rougé reads the city, literally through signs combined into sentences, images combined into the story(ies) of “varied backgrounds” together as it is New York City and as captured through the artist’s own movement through the city's “main artery”, Broadway Street while shooting on one continuous film which she advances as choreographed by the imagery in her path. To get the full effect of this immerse reading of the city, watch the short audio slide show.

The NY Times article: The City Visible, Broadway Mosaic
Photographer Stéphanie de Rougé's website