Urban CT-scan: The City as Body(ies) in Movement

Comfort: Exercise and the Environment

2010-04-27T10:31:00.000-07:00

I would like to continue to explore the idea of comfort and how it affects my physical, mental and emotional state when I go running. Running is a relatively new routine that I have adopted and I am still at a stage where I am only comfortable running in certain places and situations. Currently, this means running in a private area that is fairly unpopulated with both cars and people, such as the Botanical Gardens. I try to avoid running on streets where there is a lot of traffic or pedestrians. With the data from Notation Three, I was able to see the beginnings of what it means for me to be in those two different locations: the calm of the Botanical Gardens versus the noisiness of Perimeter Road. Other aspects to explore are: private/public – the private pathways in the Gardens versus the public, exposed streets of Perimeter; natural/man-made – the curvy paths of the Gardens versus the rigid straightness of Perimeter; organic/mechanical – being surrounded by nature versus being surrounded by cars.

Since we are studying the city as a dynamic, living organism that is constantly changing, I am interested in exploring how that parallels with the body as it is also changing from exercise. I will continue to track my progress as I go running in the two places. It should be interesting to see how not only my physical body changes in relation to my environment, but how my mental and emotional state changes as well.

Out of Pace_bicycle analysis

2010-04-22T11:18:00.000-07:00

This video is an analysis of the determining factors that create the pace

of a bicycle.

Click the link to see the video

http://vimeo.com/11152296

X Clinic - Improvement of Environmental Health through Individual Action

2010-04-03T12:21:00.000-07:00

Hello group, here I am sharing a great project Natalie Jeremijenko and her team, The Environmental Health Clinic and Lab at NYU [x Clinic]. It was presented by Dr. Jeremijenko at the Miomimicry panel that I participated in last week in New York City at the Sustainability Practice Network.

The X Clinic rather than looking at the internal biology and genetics of an individual, it looks at the surrounding environment and our dependences on it and it prepares the patient for awareness and action. In this clinic, "you walk out with a prescription not for pharmaceuticals but for actions: local data collection and urban interventions directed at understanding and improving your environmental health; plus referrals, not to medical specialists but to specific art, design and participatory projects, local environmental organizations and local government or civil society groups: organizations that can use the data and actions prescribed as legitimate forms of participation to promote social change."

2010-03-09T06:55:00.001-08:00

http://vimeo.com/9848424

Collaborative Mapping - Personal Projects and Questions

2010-03-03T04:29:00.000-08:00

NOTATION 3 - ARCH 699 - Michael Whitmire
http://www.vimeo.com/9693423

Which is more effective: the gentle journey through a slideshow via progressive images, a series of video shots stitched together as a whole, or an intentionally-linear, photographed and geotagged route through a site? All of these correspond - roughly with the first two and exactly with the third - to a path, a route travelled. The path of the first two are hand-drawn into an online map, which is in turn linked to each video:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&t=h&msa=0&msid=100666044675598845897.00047f0f7ce0e388b3d29&ll=34.693202,-82.788661&spn=0.002616,0.005509&z=18

Neither route, however, is an exact record of the actual path travelled, nor are the photos of the slideshow tagged with exact locational information. While close, the paths are approximate - and I believe they serve some purposes, such as communication and illustration of existing issues, very well.

The original video, made of actual video footage, is also found here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR3CH03pjuA

The second linked video, the one produced as a slideshow, is also found here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nL_utwO04k

Ultimately, the slideshow video of the Apartment Complex to to Catchment Basin to Stream (mirroring my own second video, above) co-produced by Nick and myself, and compiled and presented primarily by Nick, has a much more measured, definite, and linear nature. Its production as a linear, measurable, and intentional path was considered from the beginning, and that nature shows up in the final piece. Linking to this presentation with the online Google map is pending.

The embedding of the linear GPS route, presented by Nick is his Flash production to the German group, into the online map is also pending. [*need link to Nick’s Flash presentation HERE*]. I expect that layering the “Route” from the GPS device onto the collaborative online map would manifest a line more quantitative than the hand-drawn lines I have used in that map already to indicate my own two videos. As such, the GIS Route might serve additional useful purposes, such as providing compatible correspondences to other data layers, such as topographical data, speaking for example to expected water flows across the landscape.

As an additional consideration, the linking of historical data with this map would be useful in determining past forms of the site. For example, “Was there a preexisting stream in the area?” and “Does the eroded gully predate construction?” I have heard that Google Earth provides historical data. Surely such data is also available in local historical records, construction records, and the like. The appeal of the online data is that it is so accessible. Which is the best path to answering the questions about past landscape form?

COLLABORATIVE MAPPING

2010-02-21T09:17:00.000-08:00

Reading the article by Julian Bleeker, 'A Design Approach for the Geospatial Web,' was exciting and stimulated my creative juices. What possibilities are there for collaborative mobile mapping?

What if everyone on Clemson Campus could "tag" locations easily on a mobile, collaborative mapping application that would upload them to a common, collaboratively-created map? For example:

The "I would love to see a sitting space [HERE]" map.

CLICK!

And the person has voted, and tagged a spot, including user info (to control for one person overtagging or "multiple voting" relative to others).

A map idea I had in while living in the Carrboro, NC area had to do with preserving sacred spaces in the city. If each person could "vote" on their favorite (single or multiple) "sacred spaces" in the city, would that not lead to an emergent collective awareness, as well as some possibly unique and yet highly citizen-appropriate directions for planning and preservation? I would have marked a certain rock formation in a certain stream in a certain part of a certain park in Carrboro. Someone else may have marked their favorite "sitting and contemplating" spot. The uses for that data could re-define how we see ourselves as a people and as a citizenry.

In the article, interestingly, is the inclusion of craigslist as a location-mapping application. It does not use GIS -- and yet is tagging locations and making connections with every new entry.

What other things did you think of when reading this article? How could GIS, non-GIS, mobile phones, handhelds, ISP addresses, iPhoto tags, blogs with location tags, an other technologies evolve into novel ways-of-seeing, understanding, and interacting in the future?

How could they enhance other projects you have considered or are engaged in?

Response to REDEFINING THE BASEMAP by Alison Sant

2010-02-21T08:38:00.000-08:00

The gist of this article seems to be a call to reexamine the traditional, static, landmark-based mapping systems. "New mapping" technologies such as GPS and wireless reveal different patterns. Events, flows, routes, processes, and data based on statistical sums of multiple individual humans define the graphic patterns emerging from the locative-media-based mapping. The author cautions us to consider abandoning the traditional basemaps as well, with the view that some emergent pattern may therefore be more allowed to emerge.

I do think there is a lot of promise in locative technologies for mapping. Pulses and flows of life, for example between locations of day (work) time and evening (home) time for many individuals would reveal emergent patterns of home locations for various elements of the workforce. "Routes" prioritize chosen pathways of movement and may be more appropriate to examining the living processes within cities, while traditional "streets" prioritize official named landmarks but do not reveal use statistics or a myriad of other sociological data. Mapping events and processes, and the discovery of emergent patterns based on locative technological mapping, is a promising direction for understanding our lived spaces.

This is technologically-based, however. Without locative technologies, we would not be entertaining these novel emerging potentials. The technologies themselves, therefore, are foundational and pre-defining in much the same way that a "traditional static basemap" may be. Can we drop the "technology" and imagine mappable potentials beyond both locative technology and static physicalities? Conversational topics, perhaps -- admitedly based on the idea of "mapping" cellphone conversations? Aesthetic reactions throughout daily activity, multiplied by all of the people in a locale? Arousal? Interest? Cognative activity or level of awareness? Feelings of wellbeing? How would these be measured?

Additionally, the argument in favor of the traditional "basemap" is its representation of relatively static physicalities. In terms of orientation, that is an important factor. Will there likewise be more "static" processes -- ongoing events -- which emerge from locative mapping? "Most frequented locations", perhaps, by "the highest variety of people" -- would that be a shopping mall? A public park or downtown plaza? Certainly, these will also shift and change over time, but surely there will still be gradiations of permanence in process-mapping as well as mapping of physicalities. After all, the physical, the solid, the static are processes as well.

Kracauer, Sigfried, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality.

2010-02-09T10:51:00.001-08:00

Are films, "manufactured dreams"?

What relations can be drawn between dreaming and creativity?

Is their a connection between separating from reality and the process of design, in relation to the way this article defines film?

Hello again: CT-scan New Group

2010-02-09T08:52:00.000-08:00

We have started a new semester. It has started fast and with a great interdisciplinary group of students:

Michael Whitmire, Planning Design and Built Environment

Kevin Wayne, Planning Design and Built Environment

Shirley Yu, Digital Production Arts

Jason Butz, Architecture and Art

Nick Barrett, Architecture

We will also be joined by another six students from the Universität Kassel led by Marc Kirschbaum in one week for a three week exchange.

Join us on the Urban CT-scan discussion that will continue this semester.

Surveillance

2009-04-27T22:50:00.000-07:00

What is the meaning of public space today, or does public space even still exist?

If public space does not exist, how can architects think of new categories of defining space other than public and private?

How can surveillance be used not out of fear or privacy invasion, but as an architectural process for mapping and diagramming a new meaning or understanding of public space?

Considering the Usefulness of the Flaneur

2009-04-22T17:47:00.000-07:00

Questions:
How has the flaneur changed in our society with the advancement of technology, particularly the internet, social websites and cell phones?

Can the attitude and the characteristics described by Benjamin be filtered into a way of studying an area, a street, an artwork, or a building by creating a system of observation and experience?

Could we use the observation powers of the flaneur to assess the efficacy of past works, whether in architecture, art or city planning, and use them in the creation of new works?

How does the experience of the flaneur translate from being memories, emotions and curiosities into useful data and information?

buzz buzz

2009-04-20T19:00:00.001-07:00

“The Geography of Buzz.” - mining photos from Getty Images that chronicled parties, etc on both coasts for a year, beginning in March 2006. The maps show the density of different types of cultural events in New York and Los Angeles.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/04/06/arts/20090407-buzz-maps.html

Mock-up Video

2009-04-16T11:32:00.000-07:00

The PROXY team just finished doing a mock-up for display at Hatchfest in Asheville, North Carolina. Check it out below!

Join the PROXYproject Collaboration!

2009-04-15T10:10:00.000-07:00

We want to include your photo of Florence, Italy in an international exhibit.

Our studio has been invited to participate in the Beyond Media 2009 - "Visions” International Festival in Florence - July 9-17, 2009.

We are collecting images and turning each one into a unique postcard. The cards will be used to create a dynamic, interactive installation. Please join with us and hundreds of collaborators to make this project a reality.

Here's how to help:

collaborate - donate $1 to sponsor your postcard, then upload an image of Florence, Italy:

Yes! I will help

continue - pass this message on to friends and family and become a fan of our Facebook page

thanks for your help!

see the PROXY website for the full story - www.proxyproject.org

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

2009-03-24T08:51:00.000-07:00

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

A proposal for a new theory for design

2009-03-16T13:43:00.000-07:00

A very interesting article by Paola Antonelli in SEED magazine

BOTH SCIENCE AND DESIGN—FORWARD MOTORS, PROVIDERS OF PERSPECTIVE, GUARDIANS OF BEAUTY AND TRUTH—ARE ESSENTIAL TO PROGRESS.

Tracking Tourists before and after

2009-03-16T13:27:00.000-07:00

A study by a group in Barcelona

Digital Footprinting: Uncovering Tourists with User-Generated Content

Mile of String by Marcel Duchamp 1942

2009-03-14T10:50:00.000-07:00

Diagrams

2009-03-13T17:39:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-13T11:11:00.001-07:00

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

2009-03-13T10:30:00.000-07:00

maps

2009-03-10T06:51:00.000-07:00

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

twitter contributing to "real time" analysis

2009-03-09T09:57:00.000-07:00

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..."

Maeve Installation

2009-03-04T23:13:00.000-08:00

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

Mæve table application from Maeve installation on Vimeo.

Link

Case Studies For Visions

2009-03-04T21:56:00.000-08:00

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

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.

visions

2009-03-02T15:37:00.000-08:00

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

2009-03-02T15:14:00.000-08:00

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"

A long Take of 15 miles and overlapping Images and Signs

2009-03-01T21:03:00.001-08:00

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

Visions at BEYOND MEDIA Florence, Italy

2009-02-27T15:36:00.000-08:00

We have been invited to participate in the SPOTS ON SCHOOLS exhibition in Italy and to represent Clemson University among a group of schools internationally in this event that is part of BEYOND MEDIA, 9th international festival for architecture and media in Florence, Italy. The event, which includes workshops, lectures, exhibits and debates, offers “an exploration, on an international basis, of state-of-the-art and cutting edge researches.” The theme of this event is Visions, as a vehicle for reflecting on “topics of figuration and representation” as a way to “put forward more effective visions which might be useful in tracing the outlines of our possible future.”

In order to envision future possibilities, we must perform thorough studies of our cities as living systems within an urban ecology filtering, transmitting, generating, changing, evolving.

The site of your next project will be the exhibit space in Stazione Leopolda in Florence, the space of the SPOTS ON SCHOOLS exhibit. You are to perform a CT- scan of Florence and visualize this city within a dark space of between 9 sqm to 18 sqm of concentrated exchange and interaction. The living body under analysis is the city of Florence during the week of the exhibit, July 9 – 17.

Our installation will be ephemeral, lasting just one week. How can the life of the city be scaled to fit the exhibition space and transmit something about the life going on outside, inside… how can we use contemporary visualization and mapping tools to “see” Florence much the same way a a CT-scan allows us to see the body in real-time…. blood flow, etc.

What is the procedure for visualizing the inner workings of this body under analysis and what is the relationship of the human cycles and activities to that and as part of that larger intricate system that it occupies, uses and adjusts?
What visions for the future possibilities emerge out of these revelations?

You are to pick up from where we left of with our discussions in seminar and in studio of Urban CT-scan: The City as Body(ies) in Movement and to use this opportunity in Florence, Italy of mapping and building, experiencing and analyzing, observing and sharing for exploring future visions for “reading” and “writing” our cities which engage and understand the city and our bodies as an interconnected living organism. You are to exploit the tools at our disposal and the existing infrastructure of the city in imaginative, witty, and sensible manners.

What role does the city’s existing infrastructure play in the set up of the equipment for scanning? How do you both engage and reveal the cycles of its inhabitants in that set up? What is the visionary potential of the visualization tools at our disposal? How do you scan a city? How do you scan this city in particular? You are to take advantage of the exactitude of information revealed by some of these tools (such as GPS) and in the experiential, empirical understanding acquired by others (such as A/V).

Can this project explore the potentials at hand to take what Etienne-Jules Marey, Eadweard Muybridge were doing in the 1800s with chronophotography and what Frank Gilbreth was doing with chronocyclegraph in the early 1900s to the scale of the collective?

Can this document (a vision) reveal the intimate interconnectivity of our bodies to that of the city to help better adjust gently to that built environment that we change and affect daily. Can we more effectively be part of a working and balanced ecology. What is the potential of this? Is this healthy and is it important? How does the visualization of Florence within the space of Leopolda affect the city itself and how does the city affect its mapping?

The installation within the space at Leopolda, a mapping of the city, a CT-scan should serve as an interactive platform for participatory collective diagnosis and discussions to emerge, occur, begin… during the time of the exhibit, and to serve as a space for visions of possibilities to sharpen, to come into focus, to exist even for just a moment. … a vision, visions to exist.

Beyond Media, Visions. July 9 - 17 Florence, Italy

To Scale: Reversal, the Map as Living Story(ies) 1.4

2009-02-27T15:12:00.001-08:00

In A Universal History of Infamy, Jorge Luis Borges speaks of a map, which was the size of the territory, which it mapped. The map was so large that it had to be folded and unfolded and began to deteriorate becoming useless and irrelevant. (42) Why look at this cumbersome map when the information was also in the territory itself? Are we arriving to the full-scale map of this fiction? And is it irrelevant? Or does the map become even more relevant? The Robert Moses three-dimensional map of New York City while not full scale strove for 99% likeness in detail to the reality that it represented. As a huge and elaborate wooden object lit to compress the cycles of the day/night, it remains static and fixed to a fleeted reality. The document while it represents a historical moment in time in the physicality of that city does and did not represent the life and ephemerality of the city except for the fact that it became quickly irrelevant as a tool for urban planning which was its intent. (43) With the technologies that we have available today, we are not only able to represent the city in all of its qualities; realistic and abstract, immersed and removed, qualitative and quantitative but it is also inherent in these processes the representation also being life like, real time, moving and changing. This ease and flexibility allows for constant accuracy. In addition, the map that is produced from below and collectively is inherently and as has been demonstrated more precise. Will we get to an “improved flow of information from citizens to decision-makers, and a strengthening of the form of our built environment”? , (44) and will inhabitants participate more directly in the design of their cities. The city and the map will be ever changing and up-to-date. This document will also be analyzable in its fullness with all of its qualities and therefore the functionality of the body of city and of the human body will be continuously optimized? Does the living map become more relevant by remaining “daily and indefinitely other”? And is the static, fixed, authoritative map dead?

42 Borges, Jorge Luis. A Universal History of Infamy. E P Dutton 1972
43 Ross, Rebecca. Perils of Precision. In Else/where: Mapping New cartographies of Networks and Territories by Janet Abrams and Peter Hall, 184-199. University of Minnesota Press 2006 p. 184
44 Ross, Rebecca. Perils of Precision. In Else/where: Mapping New cartographies of Networks and Territories by Janet Abrams and Peter Hall, 184-199. University of Minnesota Press 2006 p. 186

To Scale: Reversal, the Map as Living Story(ies) 1.3

2009-02-27T15:09:00.000-08:00

The implications of the understanding of the relationship between the body of the city and the human body are immense and necessary at a time when our environment is so quickly changing and being affected by our bodies and our actions, and at a time when we are being so negatively affected by the cities that we have created which do not acknowledge the human body in need of movement and social interaction. We are deprived of our most basic needs and are mostly unaware of it. At both scales these bodies are deficient. Having just returned from a pedestrian city to an automobile city I am quite perceptive of the obesity of the inhabitants of most of our cities and of the almost impossible opportunities for the street level chance encounter and interaction, the tactile meeting of bodies is impossible when always within the confines of a car. Obviously, that same encapsulating vehicle while separating the body from the environment is also polluting the environment with its toxins and those of the infrastructures that are erected daily to deal with its expediential explosion. The convergence of video and GPS and the Internet is already occurring for documentation of extreme sports. These professional athletes want to be able to both map their experiences but also map their performance data. In MotionBased, a recently launched website, athletes are mapping a personal itinerary before a sport event and later uploading the retrieved data of their activity from the GPS device and a synchronized video camera to analyze their performance in great detail in order to improve their performance (41). Could we say that this is a multiplicious version of what Marey and his contemporaries like Eadweard Muybridge were doing in the 1800s with chronophotography. Or even the work of Frank Gilbreth of the 1900s. In this case it is the individuals themselves who are able to analyze their own data, their own movements, deficiencies, forces at work, in order to strive for their optimum performance. The technologies that we have available today empower us. We are not however taking full advantage of these opportunities if we do not engage all of the inhabitants of our cities and not just the professional athletes or sport enthusiasts. Will we understand our deficiencies if we visualize the data of both our bodies and the in relationship to the body of the city as a kind of self diagnosis? This is only possible if we visualized the interiority of our bodies, human and city in all of their qualities?

41 see http://www.motionbased.com/

To Scale: Reversal, the Map as Living Story(ies) 1.2

2009-02-27T15:07:00.000-08:00

While the Amsterdan RealTime, Cabspotting, and BiCi_N projects are speculative, and extremely suggestive at this time, currently there are already applications and life maps that are being used in our everyday. Last year Immersive Media Corp. signed a contract to license street-level images of North American cities to Google Inc. to create an experience based mapping that you move through. "Immersive's Telemmersion® System is a compact, lightweight, unified camera system. The system generates synchronized, high resolution video streams representing a full-motion spherical world that can be experienced live or in a recorded form." (40) In another case, Nokia and Google Earth are competing in the merging of GPS and Net space as both companies understand the importance of how people's physical location affects how they use Net space. Nokia has recently introduced a device (N96) which allows for videos to be shot on location and to be "geotagged" which means that they are uploaded with the their exact physical location into a website similar to Google's YouTube site where people post videos. As a kind of body/city apparatus, the newest feature of this device is a "walk" feature and an "accelometer" feature, which detects shift of direction as the body walks the city. The free internet sharing service "share on Ovi" allows uploading and sharing in a variety of formats in an interactive community similar to the online social networking site Facebook.

40 see Immersive Media Corp. http://www.investcom.com/feature/imc.php

To Scale: Reversal, the Map as Living Story(ies) 1.1

2009-02-26T19:42:00.000-08:00

While each of Auggie’s photographs in their imagery, a frozen moment of life, a sliver of time (an x-ray, a cut) they are mathematically held to a tempo of daily precision, 8:00 a.m. every morning. However, the accuracy depends in Auggie’s punctuality. In Amsterdam RealTime, the precision is certain as the GPS data is absolute and while no imagery or sounds are captured, an abstract image exposing the routines of the city is created out of the accumulation of movements (lines) through the city. NY A/V is also tied to a choreography that of the mapmaker, from sunrise to sunset for seven days, every fifteen minutes 40 feet forward and the zoom capacity of the audio/video camera. However mechanical time is absolute and it ticks forward regardless of any obstacles along the way. BiCi_N achieves its mathematical accuracy out of its basic framework as an extension of the human body living the city unencumbered by the process. Both of these projects, BiCi_N and NY A/V map, are individual and collective, and are generative and participatory. However, while attempting to be from below and at street level, NY A/V is still presenting one point of view, that of a map-maker conscious of the process, that of an authority as opposed to that of a participant in the city.

In the explorations of the reversal of from above to from below and the merging of drawing and moving image, scale becomes the body in the city as the document itself. In this discussion scale becomes full scale. But more importantly, a single point of view becomes multiple points of views. Rather than from a fixed and dominant point of view the BiCi_N project aims to understand the city from within, from below and from the informal, input of the many. The project collects multiple subjectivities as multiple users (5,000,000 users, 1,500 bikes) “cycle” the city. Cycling as the city cycles, the inhabitants read and write their stories, composing “a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator”. These multiple viewpoints “shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces” will replace the singular totalizing view from above, replacing the map of the static with a map of the ephemeral produced by its occupant for its occupants. By multiplying viewpoints a totalizing map from below is created.

We conducted a study in Barcelona, a sketch version of the larger proposed project. This one involved six users of the city during the period of two weeks using the Bicing transportation system equipped with GPS/audio/video as extensions of their body(ies) into the city, as drawing apparatuses. A collaboration was established with interactive design media firm Zemoga and film director Roy Ettinger as a way to fully explore the potential of this drawing/movie hybrid as well as to explore the potential of the interactivity of this as a living document. We worked on a movie/drawing, on section drawings/movies and on an interactive web site/map. Our biggest discovery was the potential of setting up the framework for a different kind of movie, one that would be written and rewritten by multiple users as they organized real-life footage into their own stories of the city. These movies would generate and regenerate as the city does. It would present the details of life and the collective as fictions of city life. But is this the map? Or does this also suggest a different kind of map? One that is also multiplicious by being edited and transcribed also by real users of the city, a document to be analyzed by many whether in an architectural, urbanistic or whether in a filmic or literary way. The city would be read via “fragments of trajectories” as assembled and organized to tell stories, to compare, to analyze. In this real time, abstract and realistic, mathematical and sensual, drawing/movie, interactive representation of the city, people would enter, connect, distribute, read, draw, and write their city.

Continuous Shot- Chemical Brothers - Star Guitar

2009-02-26T19:36:00.000-08:00

Chemical Brothers - Star Guitar

The video is directed by Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), features what appears to be a continuous shot filmed from the window of a speeding train passing through towns and countryside; however the scenery passing by appear exactly in time with the beats and musical elements of the song. The video was shot ten different times during the day to get different gradients. The video was plotted on graph paper before creating the video, eventually modeling the scenery with oranges, forks, tapes, books, glasses and tennis shoes.

First Five

2009-02-26T04:59:00.001-08:00

Intriguingly and curiously the first five minutes of a film are often critical for the film and accompanied by excess complexity with regards to cinematography and audio. For the obvious, the first five minutes of film most establish not only a foundation for the film to develop on, but also bring a sense of curiosity and unknowing simply engaging the audience to the point that they will watch the rest of the film.

While all stories have three ingredients including setting, character or characters, and plot it is not a prerequisite that the first few minutes of a film must introduce these or adhere to a particular order to which they might evolve.

Not unlike an architectural procession or approach the first few minutes or steps are spatially and contextually important. Through the examination and dissection of the introduction or the entry I aim to juxtapose the first few minutes of film to architectural design gaining both spatial, narrative, and audio understandings.

The "Long Take" in a Music Video

2009-02-25T17:24:00.000-08:00

Here a video called "Oxford Coma" by the band "Vampire Weekend." The video's director was Richard Ayoade. The video is a long take that is a lot like some of the continuous camera shots in Wes Anderson's work, or Godard before him. I meant to post this earlier but it goes back to the earlier discussions of "Touch of Evil" and the Pier Pasolini "Observations on the Long Take" article reminded me of it.

Questions for Discussion 7. Geospatial Web + Redefining the Basemap

2009-02-25T15:09:00.000-08:00

What effects do Geospatial spam have on creating maps that reveal valuable/usable information?

On the other hand is there such a thing as Geospatial spam? Can this information be accepted and filtered to reveal novel informative revelations about the city.

I find tagging very interesting and useful, but what are some of the problems with tagging?
Is it that the formatting of 'tags' are not standardized?
Are 'tags' to vague? For example does turkey refer to the country or the food?

Can the defamiliarization of such mappings effect the reading and perspective we have on the city , or enhance it because of its ability to force people to view the common everyday in a more unique manner?

Pitching

2009-02-25T07:00:00.001-08:00

One in a million and a billion in one, compact and anxious, the matters are fleeting, permanence is fucked. The historical artifact is a trace, a scarred sky above a black, red, grey, or green sphere. Planes are a lie and so is color. Transparency is intimate, but sometimes cold.

Questions for Discussion 6. geospatial web + basemap response

2009-02-24T14:33:00.000-08:00

geospatial web:
How do you "tag" content? is it too subjective?

How would you go about implementing LUI in a regulated way? and would there be a way to have "standards" for geo-tagging locations, like Wikipedia?

Would/could this interface be public and available to all people, regardless of socioeconomic status?

basemap:
Is there a way to objectively define the city as event?

Space is an evolving set of relationships. Aside from the cell-phone and computer, what are some other objects/advances in technology that have defined space?

If the infrastructure of a space is being violated, is that set of roads, sidewalks, or paths, still valuable?

To Scale: Slow and Fast 1.2

2009-02-23T19:23:00.000-08:00

“How ill-equipped we are to observe this moving, changing world! Our range of detection is so narrow that we are nearly blind and must use ingenuity to extend our sight. A plant appears unconscious to us but if we visually speed up its movements by time-lapse photography, the plant seems to become a perceiving, reacting animal. Edward Steichen is currently filming the changes of a rosebush. At the other pole with still photography and extremely slow movies, Hans Jenney makes visible the rich, strange world of very rapid vibratory motions. In these previously invisible brief shudderings, we now see complex rhythms, elaborate circulations, fantastic growths, violent disturbances. Is it possible to extend our perceptual reach new artificial means, in order to sense environmental changes that are now beyond that unaided reach? A film compresses twenty-four hours of city changes into three minutes, and a new world is revealed…” Kevin Lynch In Change Made Visible. What Time is this Place? Kevin Lynch, MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England 1972 p. 187

In the case of Gordon’s harvester ants as Johnson points out, what was not understood, what was still invisible was how the ants’ colonies, the global picture of this system, developed over time. This was a problem of scales. The “phenomenon had gone unobserved because people had been thinking about ants – and watching ants in the wrong scale.” Entomologists had been studying the ants “at the scale of weeks and months” but to really understand the cycles of this system they needed to observe them at “the scale of decades”. Gordon who had been observing ant colonies year after year for fifteen years, in about five years began to see what was really happening; “like a stop-motion film of a vine winding its way around a branch, Gordon’s research transformed the way we think of ants by transforming the temporal scale with which we perceived them”. (35)

The footage that was collected in New York City along the length of Broadway Street in the NY A/V mapping project was taken back to the city four years later. This continuous zoom, CT-scan, played at three different speeds within a moving container traveling north on the same axis of the original CT-scan of Manhattan as the inhabitants entered “this encapsulated moment in time” to observe their city from afar (four years later). As they went about their daily activities, the passerby examined and reflected on their city while their presence and activity was “overlapped onto the other speeds of activity previously collected”. (36) New York resident Lorissa Clevenger noted; “this is a great reminder of time and how things seem to never change, and yet how quickly what we have seen changes”. (37) What phenomena will become evident once this document is looked at another scale? What will we see and understand about the cycles of this city in 10 years?

In speaking about the ants, Johnson continues “that larger patterns can emerge out of uncoordinated local actions” and he compares this to the city of Manchester which have “patterns of human movement and decision-making that have been etched into the texture of the city blocks” and that a dialogue that emerges between the city residents and this pattern affects “subsequent decisions”. (38) Like the ants in the Myth of the Ant Queen, he says; “All you need is a thousand of individuals and a few simple rules of interactions…. There’s no need for a Baron Haussmann in this world, just a few repeating patterns of movement, amplified into larger shapes that last for lifetimes…” (39)

35 Johnson, Steven. Emergence, The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software Scribner, New York 2001 p. 80
36 Skinner, Martha. South to North: Zoom/Section Seven Day Trajectory on Broadway Street. In South edited by Ronald Rael, 30-39. Clemson School of Architecture, 2005, p.38
37 see NY A/V guest book, day 1 Bowling Green, May 30 2005
38 Johnson, Steven. Emergence, The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software Scribner, New York 2001 p. 40
39 Johnson, Steven. Emergence, The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software Scribner, New York 2001 p. 41

To Scale: Slow and Fast 1.1

2009-02-23T19:18:00.000-08:00

Let us now return to the discussion of the merging of two vocabularies; drawing and moving image and to note that it is not moving image that is being looked at for inspiration, or that the starting point is architectural drawings but that rather the intent is to create a hybrid, a new kind of document which allows these dualities of the realistic and abstract, picturesque and analytical to coexist. In the discussion of this merging, the measuring system is related to both time and distance. Scale is described through time and duration and it is sinuous to speed. Like on a conventional architectural drawing, zooming in is about looking at details, zooming out is about seeing a larger organizational system. Conversely, with moving image zooming in is achieved by slowing down, zooming out is achieved by speeding up.

In Auggie’s story, slowing down allows one to understand the uniqueness of each moment and the many stories told with the images captured with photography over a long period of time, while looking quickly through these images (speeding up) allows us to see the repetition and sameness of these individual moments. In “this contradiction is embodied the two distinct scales that can be revealed in two different speeds” in moving image. This is evident in NY A/V. “By speeding up the footage of the entire length of Broadway Street, we see and understand the physical and ephemeral patterns of the city. We see the transformations of the configurations of the street, the light, the topography and the movements of people and cars. Slowing down the footage allows us to see the details - the activities, the populations, their clothing, what they say and look at, what they express”. (32) At both speeds, we experience the fleeting moments, the temporal. These moments are as Kracauer states in The Establishment of Physical Existence, “…imperceptible were it not for two cinematic techniques: accelerated-motion, which condenses extremely slow and, hence, unobservable developments…and slow motion, which expands movements too fast to be registered”. (33) Speeds with video, like scales in a drawing, allow for different information to be articulated. In the study of a place, extreme slow motion exposes the subtleties of what may be considered banal everyday interactions, slowing down reveals the gestures that would usually remain unseen at normal speed. Like artist Bill Viola’s video/sound installation, The Greeting, which takes the real-time 45-second encounter of two women and stretches into a slow-motion encounter of 10-minutes, this document is in a zoomed-in state, achieving a kind of possession of time. It is a moment so slow that it is “arrested, rendered, stretched, and compressed, in short articulated, we can state that we have possession of it, that we are approaching a new vocabulary of space-time”, as stated by photographer László Moholy-Nagy in Vision in Motion. (34)

32 Skinner, Martha. South to North: Zoom/Section Seven Day Trajectory on Broadway Street. In South edited by Ronald Rael, 30-39. Clemson School of Architecture, 2005, p. 34
33 Kracauer, Sigfried, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Oxford University Press, 1965, p. 52
34 Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo. Vision in Motion. Chicago: Institute of Design, 1947, p. 247

mapping "cyber" space

2009-02-19T13:02:00.000-08:00

The article I just posted made me start thinking about the internet as a real "space". Right now it seems that everything is very separated and people are isolated within their own online activities.

This thought has risen a few questions for me:

In the future, what could the "space" of the internet become?

What would the "space" feel like? Could there be an architecture to the space?

Will people someday be able to experience connections with an environment online like we can in "real life"?

And, what would this mean for people like us, who think very tangibly about space?

internet as a brain

2009-02-19T06:28:00.000-08:00

Here is the article I was referring to at the end of class today: http://www.slate.com/id/2208676/

Questions for Discussion 5. Space-Time Problems / Change Made Visible ?

2009-02-17T04:53:00.000-08:00

Interpreting the writings purely by their titles one could interpret these articles to be contrary. However, both articles discuss a retooling and a rethinking of our design and environments simply stating that the speed of things has changed. “Another is the futurists who tried to portray the inner life of things, both animate and inanimate, and to show how it connected to its surroundings” (Change Made Visible, 164). Both articles site futurists and discuss the environment in relation to change, time, and speed. “A new viewpoint in the visual arts is a natural consequence of this age of speed which has to consider the moving eye” (Space-Time Problems, 246). While both articles discuss juxtaposition, layering, montage, inversion, contrast, transparency and light, Change Made Visible optimistically narrates opportunity for intervention within our environments, while Space-Time Problems portrays and architectural ignorance to the changing nature of our lives. Change Made Visible was part narrative fiction and part advocacy for passive environmental stimuli.

Speed

Did humans speed things up?

Did nature have trouble relating to nature before we sped it up?

Did the invention and implementation of the internet, automobiles, trains, and planes ultimately manifest our sped up lives and cities?

Is there a problem with the way we relate to our environments?

Should environment or city stimuli be designed passively or actively?

While Change Made Visible gives suggestions on ways to design such as sequence design as a layering of historical artifacts what other ways might we design juxtaposition, contrast, and layering into an environment?

Is awareness of environments complexities one the most critical departure points for the design of environments? This is to say do we need to understand that a very old baroque building looks interesting when juxtaposed against a modern minimalist buildings made of contrasting materials or is that inherent?

Who wrote these articles?

Is motion a derivative of speed and time?

Is speed the derivative of distance and time?

light sketching

2009-02-16T20:50:00.000-08:00

Upon reading the "Vision and Motion" article, I remembered this image and wanted to share it. In this photograph, Pablo Picasso is "painting" a Centaur with light. Light sketching is an interesting visual concept to me and one that I intend to explore in my final project.

The following is extracted from "light painting", a Wikipedia article.

The light can either be used to selectively illuminate parts of the subject or to "paint" a picture by shining it directly into the camera lens. Light painting requires a sufficiently slow shutter speed, usually a second or more. Like night photography, it has grown in popularity since the advent of digital cameras because they allow photographers to see the results of their work immediately.

Light painting can take on the characteristics of a quick pencil sketch. Pablo Picasso was photographed in 1949 doing a quick sketch in the air.

Flash lights or light pens can also be used to create Full Bleed images. Different colored lights can be used to project an image on the CCD.

J.R. Carpenter's Contemporary Art -Mappings-

2009-02-15T16:57:00.000-08:00

Art Selector Contemporary Fine art is a great website of artist J.R. Carpenter and his work in mapping. All 4 websites cover a broad range of topics, from mapping sleeping conditions in different areas of Montreal in "Les huit quartiers du sommeil" to mappings of the surrounding neighborhood in "Entre Village" as well as the mapping of fragments of history in Rome and the different categories they fall under. You can visit each of these fully interactive websites by following their links from the website listed below. I especially enjoyed "Entre Village," there is a hand-drawn building on a piece of lined notebook paper, you run the mouse of each of the windows and doors and there is a link to a video of different places within the neighborhood. The colors and textures are rich and well-filmed. It is a simple set-up but contains much information. The last work featured is titled "The Cape." It is a fictional mapping, it contains photos, videos, maps and sounds. It is beautifully laid out.
Enjoy!!!

http://www.artselector.com/keyword/mapping

eat me

2009-02-12T08:41:00.000-08:00

This notation was an investigation of our daily lives and eating habits. Using the GPS as a way of revealing our pedestrian travels across campus, we were able to map and analyze our total exercise put forth in the time period of one week. Ironically these brief segments of walking were usually to a destination where we would eat, or get a snack. By recording also what was eaten, we were able to compare the data of the amount of calories consumed to the amount that was burned. From this research we both realized that we should probably pay more attention to what we eat or start walking a lot more.

Living House: idea for final project

2009-02-12T07:41:00.002-08:00

I consistently have appreciated housing. I think most architects share a regard or a love for the house. I suppose this is because we sit around our place of residence and scheme and dream of ways we can intervene or manipulate our own little piece of habitat. The house, and our love for it, is probably genetic, further evolved with each generation. Thinking of an office building does not exactly invoke a sense of intimacy or nostalgia. The roots and conceptions of the house are deep and multi-generational. Thoughts. . . . .
-capture: intimacy and individual personality
-translate: the range of economic, social, cultural, ethnicity, and contextual idiosyncrasies of possibly (Pickens, County)
-document: as a style, question, interview, data, quantitative and qualitative
-negotiate: in between, threshold, space outside of the house, relationships, connections, emergence

2009-02-12T07:41:00.001-08:00

What is the difference between mapping and diagramming?

Obsessed with Complexity

2009-02-12T07:35:00.000-08:00

1896: First public motion picture in United States at Koster & Bials Music Hall (adapted from Wikipedia)
4,000: number of television sets produced in America in 1947 (Koolhass, Mutations, pg513)
14 million: number of television sets produced in America in 1953 (Koolhass, Mutations, pg513)

The moving image or video and its inherent complexities are exponentially dominating the scene. Two weeks ago my roommate and I sat down to watch the film Rope by Alfred Hitchcock. Interrupting the movie because of his boredom my roommate said, “I wonder if this film was completely riveting and action packed in 1948 when first viewed in theaters; I bet this was a really exciting film for the time.” He could not even finish the movie; it lacked excitement, action, speed, and overall complexity. In fact, he did not finish the movie; he left and went downtown for some real action. I wonder if he is right though, were the films of the 50’s riveting for people in the 50’s? If the answer is yes, then it is fair to assume that as a society we have evolved; and now we garner for more; more action, drama, movement, speed, etc. However, I believe that many of us still find entertainment, suspense, and complexity in very simple and static things. The question is not so much which is a better means of portrayal and narrative; sculpture, painting, 2d mapping, 3d mapping, motion picture, or stills? But rather, how do you bring excitement and compel and dynamics to the format you have decided upon as a means of conveying your idea or narrative? Entertainment is non-discriminative of format. Complexity is inherent in everything. It is portraying and depicting the qualities of, that matter.

Mathematical and Sensual Knowledge, the Body and the City 1.3

2009-02-11T15:45:00.000-08:00

Returning to the moving image aspect of this mapping, historian and architecture critic Anthony Vidler poses the question of whether Walter Benjamin had suggested such a map in his life-long unfinished Arcades Project. In The City as Film in Kracauer, Benjamin, and Eisenstein, Vidler states that Benjamin in his writing of the Arcades Project “opened the possibility of yet another way of reading this work: was it not perhaps the sketch of a screen play for a movie of Paris?” (28)

“Could one not shoot a passionate film of the city plan of Paris? Of the development of its different forms [Gestalten] in temporal succession? Of the condensation of a century-long movement of streets, boulevards, passages, squares, in the space of a half an hour?” Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project

We do not know if that was Benjamin’s intent and we do not know what such a map would have been like, however as has been so far demonstrated, we must explore this filmic potential in the making of our maps. And that of much importance are these filmic, real life experiences in the relationship between the human body and the city body. Film critic and former architect Siegfried Krakauer in Once Again the Street, states that “the flâneur is intoxicated with life in the street” (29) suggesting that he, in this case the strolling inhabitant is obviously affected by the sensory experiences triggered by its immediate environment, the city it travels. In this case, “intoxicated” as if the body has been overdosed by phenomena and the complexity of activities of the city as if substances now moving within the blood flow of the human body.

Krakauer recalls the first film he saw as a child; “What thrilled me so deeply was an ordinary suburban street, filled with lights and shadows which transfigured it. Several trees stood about, and there was in the foreground a puddle reflecting invisible house façades and a piece of sky. Then a breeze moved the shadows, and the façades with the sky below began to waver.” (30) And even though this description comes from his observation of a film, something that had been choreographed by a director, the observation is a typical representation of an everyday moment in the life of any city. Let’s imagine this as a real life perception, something ephemeral and intangible. If captured, is this something that we can chart and even analyze? Could we not calculate the exactitude of those vibrations as mapped by the size, frequency and speed of the ripples in the water?

In that same essay, Krakauer speculates; “perhaps cinema helps us to move form ‘below’ to ‘above’?” (31) and while this is the opposite of what I have been proposing, does it suggest the potential of the below returning us to the above. Does it suggest what the observation of the individual ants interacting tells us about the overall system?

Yes possibly, but what Krakauer is referring to as the ‘above’ in this case is celestial and even spiritual, this being the opposite of sensual and of the body and while contradicting my main argument it also supports it. It emphasizes the flaw of this sole superior point of view as totalizing, abstract, removed and disconnected from the tactile realities of the below experiences and interactions that make up the reality of the city. It is important to also note that Krakauer’s recollection also describes something very physical and sensual; the reflectivity, transparency, movement…the physical aspects of place as affected by each other and as perceived by an inhabitant of the city in that particular moment and space. Let’s now bring the potential of the GPS into this and speculate on the potential also of it deciphering the multiple forces defining that fleeting moment… the wind, the rain, the time of the year, the passing resident and his particular placement on earth in relationship to these elements bringing us back to the importance of looking at these devices, GPS/audio/video, as interrelated and capable of combining the “mathematical” and the “sensual” of these bodies.

28 Kracauer, Sigfried, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Oxford University Press, 1965, p. 52
29 Vidler, Anthony. Warped Space, Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England 2000. P. 115
30 Kracauer, Sigfried, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Oxford University Press, 1965, p. 52
31 Kracauer, Sigfried, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Oxford University Press, 1965, p. xi

Mathematical and Sensual Knowledge, the Body and the City 1.2

2009-02-11T15:37:00.000-08:00

The Chronocyclegraph of bricklaying by Frank Gilbreth of 1912 are uncannily similar to the GPS drawings generated by these various city mapping projects. The visualization of the “fine details of hand movement of an assembly worker over time” in the chrnoncyclegraph resembles the accumulation of movements of the city’s individual users in the Amsterdam RealTime, Cabspotting and BiCi_N GPS drawings (26). Both of these types of documents as x-ray looking images reveals ephemeral details of a body in movement. One extreme looks at the activity as related to the human body, the other as related to the body of the city. In the same way that information such as weather, time and topography is derived and graphed from the longitude, latitude location, and altitude information of the city users as marked by the GPS device, the chronocyclegraph, from the Greek term Chronos (time), is itself a graph of cycles in time. This method/device, which continues to be used today in industrial engineering, charts and examines this information in order to improve ease of movement and efficiency. What does this suggest for the potential of the GPS as a device/method between the human body and the city body? Could it lead to the optimal functionality of this intimate relationship? Could it lead to optimal functionality of the city body and to optimal functionality of the human body?

The photographs by scientist and chronophotographer Étienne-Jules Marey are also important references in the discussion of this relationship. His photographs, which also look like x-rays in motion or Cine CT scans and GPS drawings, were significant contributions to the development of cardiology, aviation and moving image. As disparate as these areas seem, they refer to the extreme of scales and fields that I am proposing we merge here and of their latent relationship. Marey started his research by examining the movement of blood in the human body and in 1863 he improved a device from the mid 19th century, which measured blood pressure. He made the Sphygmograph, which was originally designed by German physiologist Karl von Vierordt in 1854, portable as well as able to chart graphically the beat of the heart. He was able to amplify this repetitive internal rhythm of the human body of pulse waves into a drawing. While a version of this device continues to be used today as the “blood pressure cuff” (27) that we all know, the portable GPS is very similar yet it is capable of measuring both the human heart as well as the beat of the city. It is possible to write, measure and analyze both of these drastic scales simultaneously and in relation to each other.

26 see chrnoncyclegraph in wikipedia
27 see chrnoncyclegraph in wikipedia

Mathematical and Sensual Knowledge, the Body and the City 1.1

2009-02-11T15:34:00.000-08:00

Let us now return to the cycling term and look at it as an idea of time but also as an activity. Let’s look at it in time as a collector of the routine of the city and let’s look at it as the activity of [bi]cycling and return to the BiCi_N project which collects the cycles of the city via the bicycling activities of its many occupants as they cycle the city. The project writes the movements of the city in time and in movement as the numerous inhabitants of the city live their lives while it also maps the individual rotations and data of each user as they displace themselves within the city. Again, these inhabitants as body(ies) on bikes are equipped with GPS and audio/video extending into the city as mobile GPS/A/V drawing apparatuses drawing the city and their own bodies at full scale and in real time.

With GPS we get the absolute, certain information of the trajectory such as location, altitude, weather, heart rate, cadence, speed, duration... while audio/video captures the perceptive, bodily characteristics of the space such as imagery, ambiance, texture, light, activity, conversations, sounds, expressions, etc. Cycling as the city cycles, the inhabitants read and write their stories vividly and precisely in the BiCi_N project. Described and narrated through the imagery of the scenery and conversations caught on the A/V device and grounded with the details of the data inscribed by GPS, the city is revealed qualitatively and quantitatively as a system of routines and interactions. The city is captured in all of its qualities as “pictorial and sensual, intellectual and mathematical”. The relationship between the human body and the city body become an important point of departure for further exploration, something that has not been explored in the previously mentioned GPS projects, Amsterdam RealTime and Cabspotting.

What do calories burned, heart rate, and body mass mean as related to length and speed of travel, weather, and topography?
And what does latitude and longitude of user, distance to destination, and time, and latitude mean as related to track, bearing and heart rate?

Can we analyze this data of the human body and city body as interrelated an intimately connected? Can we analyze this data the way that a radiologist analyzes a CT-scan?

notation 3 - Body in movement as defined by space and activity

2009-02-11T15:25:00.000-08:00

You are to draw your body in motion. using GPS and audio/video. Your notation will describe the activity of the body and the space that it occupies, defines, is defined by. You are to choreograph the set up in a way that allows you to be analytical.

References for inspiration:
Photography; Chronophotography by Marey and Muybridge, Stereoscopic photography by Gilbreth, Photomontage by Matter....
Painting; Nude Descending the Staircase by DuChamp...
Drawing; Traject Pendant un an d’une Jeune FIlle du XVIe arrondisement by Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe
Moving Image; Bullet Time (The Matrix)
Sculpture; Apollo and Dafne by Bernini, Unique forms in the continuity of space by Boccioni, the Walking Man by Rodin...

You may depart and/or reinterpret these examples. They are meant to get you thinking. Keep it simple, yet exploratory. Be rigorous in your thinking. Consider the potential of the tools you will be using and of your body as both a drawing instrument and the subject under analysis. The notation is to be around 30 and 90 seconds but as related to the length of the activity/ movement.

Specialization

2009-02-10T08:22:00.001-08:00

Increasingly we are becoming a society of specialization. The wealth of information and complexity of situations has lead to a necessary specialist. It is difficult if not impossible for one individual to comprehend and be literate in the multi faceted issues that affect nearly all subjects of interest in contemporary society. Because of this we have employed the specialist. We can all agree that information and technology plays a more critical role in all areas of interest and study. How has technology manifested a specialist in architecture? We can clearly see specialization within architecture; architect as programmer, architect as geographer, architect and producer, architect as film maker. While the specialist in many circumstances is very valuable they may be designing themselves for obsolescence. As brought up today in discussion, specialization in fields such as medicine and architecture can be a bit problematic and introverted.

Analysis

2009-02-10T08:20:00.000-08:00

What about pure and simple over analysis? It is one thing to be inquisitive and question ourselves and the world from ourselves or around ourselves and another to over analyze and fixate to point of complete retraction. This is to say that we must be careful when analyzing or dissecting our environments, bodies, and relationships. We lose sight of the beauty and abstraction in our world when we become over analytical. The more we literate our world it seems the more we blind ourselves of the tensions and idiosyncrasies of place and body, we dissolve our curiosities into sciences, and we make literate events that are only perceptible during a fleeting moment. This may seem simple, but simple can be interesting and informative, while retaining complexity. How can we be inquisitive and specific without destroying the very reason most of us love architecture and design. Why do we love architecture and film? Is film specific? So often film is jam packed with audio (music and dialogue), visual (material and place), and emotional interaction it is difficult to imagine a film as explicit? Do we forget that at the root of our interests and passions for film is its preoccupation with entertainment? In many ways it would be exciting to see a bit of return to haphazard entertainment within the arts and architecture. Is our rigor displaced?

Questions for Discussion 4

2009-02-09T22:19:00.000-08:00

The Establishment of Physical Existence - Kracauer

Kracauer states that, "films are different in two ways: first they respect reality as it evolves; and do so with aid of cinematic techniques and devices." Their is much talk in the article of the idea of 'realism'. What makes film interesting as an art form is its ability to capture reality, even realities that we may never have the ability to experience.

Can reality possibly become problematic because of the capacity of film is to frame, interpret and shape the reality it depicts?

He goes on to state that, "not all films are realistic (filming someones activities for 24 hours) would be neither interesting nor artistic." This makes me think of current themes in television that deal in the realm of Reality TV. Though they undergo an editing process, they tend to have this 24 hours reality to them.

How is our cultures depiction of realism over time skewed from his interpretation, due to what we are subjected to (reality tv), and the fact that we do find these things interesting?

Film has the ability to inform us of everyday life and serve to document time and place and make connections between aspects of experiences that are often now thought together. "Film ought to proceed like a tourist who, in strolling through the landscape, lets his eyes wander about so that his ultimate image of it will be composed of sundry details and vistas."

What is it about the camera that when behind it begins to reveal the material world in a different perspective, that would otherwise go unnoticed?

If the camera is a tool for recording place, time, movement and event. Are there elements that become skewed and lost information due to the eye behind the camera and the editing process? Does the vision of the person filming begin to take over, in a way to get a specific message across (a 'lie')?

"Unlike paintings, film images encourage such decomposition because of their emphatic concern with raw materials do not get consumed." Kracauer could not of foreseen what the computers abilities and role it would have on film editing and how it is used to view the physical world.

With a few exceptions has film disintegrated into our culture, and in a way stopped exploring physical reality, and a world that is unknown? Or has the use of CGI and other digital technologies allowed us to have the opposite effect.?

It might be safe to say that film is the art of our generation, but with this in mind what if any are the problems with this? Is it causing social disconnect or manipulation and misinterpretation of our cultures?

Kracauer does not discuss the idea of mixed or hybrid medias. How can these types of mixed medias add to the linage of expanding the pictorial field?

How can using film techniques as a process make us (architects) multidimensional thinkers in search of new possibilities for cultural and environmental design?

How do you begin to translate and communicate moving image of space, inhabitation, perception, and experience that unfolds over time? (Creating 2 dimensional drawing systems)

Berger suggests that in the beginning of the camera age, people that were subjected to the camera were unaware of the images purpose, and the capacity with which the image would have over time, that is why old photographs are more telling then they are now.

Why is this? Is it because of our consumer driven society, and our relentlessness to pound product driven imagery for the sole purpose not for art but for selling us products?

Cycles: From Accumulation to Accuracy 1.1

2009-02-06T08:40:00.000-08:00

Amsterdam RealTime and Cabspotting demonstrate the possibility of understanding the city from the accumulation of individual acts. Through the multiplicity of itineraries, the collective order of the city begins to emerge, a map defined not from above but from below, from the interactions of individual inhabitants of the city. Geographer and graphic designer Rebecca Ross in Perils of Precision posits the question; is such a collective map in its accumulative “fuzziness” and x-ray quality even more precise than the maps “presented behind a façade of precision and expertise”. She argues that master builder Robert Moses’s Panorama project, a detailed 3-dimensional model of New York City while being “the most detailed physical map ever made” and while attempting to be used as a “tool for the future of social planning… by being kept up-to-date over time and referred by city leaders as they thought through changes to the city’s master plan”, is not only static, inflexible, quickly irrelevant, but also inaccurate. (22)

“This paradox of representation—in which summary is valued more highly than the experience to which it refers—enables official maps to become information-spaces within which power is accumulated and maintained. Highly detailed maps are presented to culture as if they were flawless reflections of space. In fact, they are more typically accumulations of the maker’s own experience from a single point of view, subject to the limits of space and time.” Ross, Rebecca. Perils of Precision. In Else/where: Mapping New cartographies of Networks and Territories by Janet Abrams and Peter Hall, 184-199. University of Minnesota Press 2006 P. 185

Amsterdam RealTime and Cabspotting instead of becoming quickly irrelevant and of the past, regenerate and are constantly up-to-date. They present the potential of a different kind of accuracy, where the map is made accurate out of the accumulation of their users activities in the space of their city in time, they are made accurate and real out of the accumulation of the real life of the cit. Likewise, ants will adjust their behaviors based on their local ground level interaction and its repetition over time as a way of achieving accuracy. Johnson states that “because the decision-making process is spread out over thousands of individuals, the margin of error is vanishingly small… for every ant that happens to overestimate the number of foragers on duty, there is one that underestimates.” (23)

The accurateness in the “fussiness” that Ross speaks about in the Amsterdam RealTime project is what emerges out of accumulation. It is like the blurry yet definite triangle revealed by the routine of the young’s girl in Paris over a year. However in this case the “fussiness” is the collective accumulation of the numerous users of the city and not the accumulation of one single user. More importantly it is the accumulation of ground level reality and not the abstract reflection of an authoritative single mapmaker. The authoritative map in its stillness and inflexibility is stagnant and irrelevant. The authoritative map does not breathe, change or adjust. Is the authoritative map more akin to a dead body?

Ironically, Ross notes that this fussy quality is x-ray looking. (24) It is important to note that it is x-ray acting also as it reveals to us the true inner-workings of the city as a body under analysis. This interiority is visualized through the markings of activity that accumulate as GPS lines that emerge, move and flow like the life of the city and like the systems of a living body under analysis. But are they x-ray acting in that it provides us with a view inside? Are they really sectional views into the interiority of the city and are they analytical?

The Cabspotting project is experimenting with the analytical potential. The site is open for proposals and several artists have already begun analysis of the material in an attempt to understand the social, economical and cultural tendencies that are revealed by such a drawing. (25) While the studies featured on the site gives us a fore view into the possibilities, are these two projects, Amterdam RealTime and Cabspotting really looking inside?

While these two innovative projects are incredibly interesting by attaining the multiplicity of the city and of the multitude of trajectories happening daily and in being temporal and changing as the city does, these documents are still views from afar, they are planometric and flat, and from above and do not possess the picturesque “evoking of lifelike images” aspect of the city. Is it possible to return to the balance between the “intellectual and mathematical” and the “pictorial and sensual knowledge” of the early maps that Lucia Nuti describes?

GPS undoubtedly has the mathematical accuracy and as demonstrated by these two projects, GPS also has the potential of revealing a kind of sensuality of the city through the emerging temporal lines that are suggestive of body movement and activity. However the documents remain mostly abstract and distant and the balance is not yet achieved.

22 Ross, Rebecca. Perils of Precision. In Else/where: Mapping New cartographies of Networks and Territories by Janet Abrams and Peter Hall, 184-199. University of Minnesota Press 2006 p. 184
23 Johnson, Steven. Emergence, The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software Scribner, New York 2001 p. 77
24 Ross, Rebecca. Perils of Precision. In Else/where: Mapping New cartographies of Networks and Territories by Janet Abrams and Peter Hall, 184-199. University of Minnesota Press 2006 p. 186
25 Cabspotting website http://cabspotting.org/

Amsterdam RealTime website
Cabspotting website

Layers*

2009-02-05T07:27:00.000-08:00

The city is composed of objects and events, arguably many more things, but also arguably only two inseparable entities, the bodies of, and the events that unfold. To explain, a tree is a body and a logger is a body. The act of the logger cutting down the tree is the event that changes or alters the place. I have been using the word layers to describe my work. However, I have yet to personally qualify what the layers are, or what the respective layers mean. What are the layers of place? I suppose the layers of place are subjective and personal, possibly scientific or poetic? How can you demonstrate the layered quality of a place with video? How do you bring poetics and science to the logger cutting down the tree? What are the layers of that specific event?

Emergent Systems and Technology

2009-02-04T09:01:00.000-08:00

As Steven Johnson makes clear emergence happens at local level. Emergence is a process. The product of this process can be seen as the manifestation of a “bottom up approach”. More than likely emergence is a process that results in a process. To explain, if the localized interactions of people within in a given environment result in a specific and particular place, inherently complex and intricate, distinct with unique idiosyncrasies, it is hardly static, but rather is dynamic and will continue to morph or change with time.

How has technology disturbed emergence? If emergent systems are the result of local interactions and technology is increasingly making us more global and withdrawn from our wild, organic, natures, is the threshold between behavior and system increasing? Basically, I am wondering if technology and our over exposure to information is forming a gap with our genetic or biological intuitions. I and a few other designers were recently asked by our professors to play and not to over think while designing. I assume they mentioned this because they wanted emergent qualities to surface from the underlying ideas that we had already procured and researched. In the past did designers have to be reminded to play?

Questions for Discussion 3

2009-02-02T21:14:00.000-08:00

Working from the following articles: The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention by James Corner and The Myth of the Ant Queen by Steven Johnson.

"In this active sense, the function of mapping is less to mirror reality that to engender the re-shaping of the worlds in which people live." (Corner 213)

"Mapping is perhaps the most formative and creative act of any design process, first disclosing and then staging the conditions for the emergence of new realities" (Corner 216)

"Rather than engineer a solution to the trail-following, the two UCLA professors had evolved a solution; they had created a random pool of possible programs, then built a feedback mechanism that allowed a more successful program to emerge...The tools of emergent software had been harnessed to model and understand the evolution of emergent intelligence in real world organisms." ( Johnson 62-63)

Questions:

If a consensus of the city shifts from a framework of 'disorganized complexity' to an 'organized complexity,' does even the act of foresight or planning may become an irrelevant exercise?

Is it possible to view the city as analogous to a bottom-up system?

If the city is viewed as a 'real-world organism' and mapping is thought of as a conceptual 'tool of emergent software';

1) how can mapping aid in understanding the evolution of emergent intelligence in the city?

2) is it possible to design a feedback loop (mechanism) to evaluate collected mapping information?

3.) it it possible that this feedback mechanism could allow more successful programs (in urbanization) to emerge?

4) what would any and/or all of this look like?

notation2: CT Scan of a House

2009-01-31T15:55:00.000-08:00

This notation exlores the relationships between the CT scan, a house and the experience inhabitants may have with both. The motion of the video along with the audio overlay portrays the emotional turbulance a person might experience during a medical CT scan. This scenario is superimposed onto a private dwelling place that may at one time or other encase the same sense of anxiety or tumult. The process of taking exploratory images of a house gives the viewer accumulated information that can be emotional as well as analytical because of the human imprints left on their surrounds. This additional emotional information gives the viewer an mental impression perhaps as well as a layout or plans.

A Day in Flight

2009-01-31T07:48:00.000-08:00

Aaron Koblin's
Animation of flight traffic patterns and density.

Koblin's Flight Patterns reflect one day of air travel as they transcend to, from, and within the U.S. I think in a way it is obvious that you can see the relationship between these aerial taxis and the taxis of San Francisco, in how they both generate a network or framework that reveals patterns of density. Flight Patterns becomes an established infrastructure, the air is in a way completely free of obstruction, but the patterns begin to reveal an aerial infrastructure that links a series of nodes (major cities).

Flight Patterns

notation2: hallway

2009-01-29T19:24:00.000-08:00

In this notation I explored the traditional hallway as an architectural condition. The lack of natural daylight and dependency on artificial lighting leads to a displaced sense of time. This notation is influenced by CT scans by transitioning through different "slices" of activity (represented by light) over time. Throughout the notation, lighting alters the space as activities occur, thus changing how it is perceived.

notation 2 - CT-scan

2009-01-29T15:09:00.000-08:00

You are to reference projection drawing (architecture), moving image (cinema) and radiology (medicine) to create CT scan as a dissection of both time and space.

Use your idea of notation 1 (section) as a point of departure by reinterpreting it or developing it. Focus on the revealing of the interiority of a space and its activity.

To consider (you don’t have to consider all, choose one or two):
qualitative and quantitative
Place and event
Physical and ephemeral
Abstract and realistic
Objective and subjective
Static and active

Keep it simple, yet exploratory. Be rigorous in your thinking. Reference CT scan as multiple “slices” (axial step and shot acquisition, cine acquisition, multislice…). The notation is to be between 30 and 90 seconds but consider length and time break down carefully. Time is a measuring system. Structure the notation in a measured manner adding graphics that mark data specific to each slide.

CT-scan?

2009-01-29T06:35:00.000-08:00

What are the inherent qualities of the CT-scan? What properties must be expressed through mapping and imaging to be considered a thorough or appropriate analysis? The city is a conglomerate of flows, manifested as a multitude of entities literally constructed by atoms and elements. While the city as an event is constantly in motion, differentiated by the speeds and collisions of its parts, the traditional CT-scan is a rarefied moment, a frozen image, negating various qualitative characteristics. For instance, a CT-scan does not tell us if an individual is moody, creative, happy, open minded, or enjoys sunsets. CT-scans are inherently ambiguous, portraying a series of parts, but making little reference to the character or catalyst of the parts. CT-scans lack a personification of the elements that make the entity. A city is very much a collection of personalities or traits that begin to define the whole. We attribute traits of being upfront and outspoken with "New York", well mannered, shy, sweet, and conservative, with "Charleston", or hippie and liberal, with "San Francisco". Are cities personified? How does personification play a role in the way we synthesize and draw the city?

Cycles: Collective and Individual 1.4

2009-01-27T10:36:00.000-08:00

Cabspotting, by The San Francisco Exploratorium and Design and Technology Studio Stamen Design, is a project in which the city of San Francisco is mapped via the trajectories of individual cabs moving through the city. These cabs are already equipped with GPS devices to orient the driver through the city but in this case they are also used to capture in real time the cycles of the city. The Cabspotting web site is a living map of the city of San Francisco which regenerates as the cab rides change, stop, pause, repeat, as passengers are dropped off, picked up and transported through the city day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute. In looking at this document, in looking at the intersecting lines and markings representing cab with passenger, pause, exchange, empty cab moving and throbbing on the black screen of the website one can begin to imagine the life and activity held within, around and about the cabs of San Francisco. Like the taxi rides in director Jim Jarmush’s 1992 film Night on Earth as described by literary theorist Trui Vetters in ‘Night on Earth’: Urban Practices and the Blindness of Metatheory; these moments transmit and contain networks of relationships and each is a “paradoxically mobile point of stability”. Vetters continues, “The random encounters that take place in this confined space between places, which is usually invisible to all but its occupants, are fleeting and transitory, yet meaningful and in some cases life-changing”. (21) Is it “life-changing” like the effect that the single interaction of two ants in the colony while focused and contained is transmitted one by one to have a significant effect on the overall system? In that essay, Vetters like de Certeau and Nuti argues for a more immersed experience of place and against the all encompassing view from afar, as removed, singular and totalizing.

21 Vetters, Trui. ‘Night on Earth’: Urban Practices and the Blindness of Metatheory.

Cabspotting website

Cycles: Collective and Individual 1.3

2009-01-27T10:35:00.000-08:00

Recently with the ability of GPS instruments to record human movement in utmost precision, a couple of studies have taken what Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe did with Trajects pendant un an d’une jeune fille du XVIe arrondissement to the scale of the collective. In these experiments the routine of multiple inhabitants of the city are documented. These experiments have the potential of revealing what was discovered by the Gordon’s ant studies that Johnson refers to. The “ants think locally and act locally, but their collective action produces global behavior”. (19)

In 2002 Amsterdam's Waag Society and Artist Esther Polak provided several inhabitants of the City of Amsterdam with these portable (GPS) devices to create Amsterdam RealTime, a plan drawing of this city that emerges out of the movements of the participants as they go about their routines during the period of two months (Fig.). This drawing, like the Louis Kahn example, “does not register streets or blocks of houses, but consists of the sheer movements of real people". (20) In this case it is the pedestrian movement that is captured but not as a frozen moment in time as in Kahn’s studies but as an alive document, moving and changing. Here the document also embodies the temporality that it represents. Here the streets and sidewalks do emerge as white lines, human traces of different densities and qualities as defined by the specifics of city dwellers’ routine and their movement through their city in time. In their abstraction, they visualize the cycles of the city (fig. 4)

19 Johnson, Steven. Emergence, The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software Scribner, New York 2001 p. 74
20 See Amsterdam RealTime website http://realtime.waag.org/

Amsterdam RealTime website

Cycles: Collective and Individual 1.2

2009-01-27T10:32:00.000-08:00

In 1957 the urban sociologist Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe who was interested in understanding the city through the activities of the citizens collected the trajectories of one young girl in Paris’s 16th arrondissement over the period of a year in a document called exactly that; Trajects pendant un an d’une jeune fille du XVIe arrondissement. The drawing, an accumulation of lines in a triangular pattern revealed that her movement through the city during this long period of time was actually quite simple and repetitive. The blurry triangle marked her movements from home, to school, to piano lessons. The abstract diagram of repetitive lines in a closed geometric formation revealed her cyclical use of the city, it visualized her routine in time (fig. 4). In 1953 Architect Louis Kahn did a series of drawings of Philadelphia, which illustrate the city through the movement, speed, and flow of its vehicles rather than by its physical configuration (fig. 4). In these documents, an inversion occurs in which the physical and static (the building blocks) are simply suggested, becoming residual space against the accumulation of marks which define the traffic flow of the city. However while these documents suggest the importance of the ephemeral activity of the city (moving car traffic, in this case) it does not capture or explain the patterns in time of the city, it does not illustrate the cyclical aspects that these movements define. The potential is clearly visible in the 1983 film Koyaanisqatsi by experimental documentary film director Godfrey Reggio where a series of stationary moving image views of the city are sped up visualizing the city in movement and revealing the infrastructure of the city in time. The throbbing of car and pedestrian traffic that stops and goes in a rhythmic pattern as coordinated in two directions by the traffic lights. In watching these moving image segments one imagines the pumping flow of blood in a body to the beat of a heart.

Cycles: Collective and Individual 1.1

2009-01-27T10:29:00.000-08:00

Cities are not static or fixed but rather dynamic and ever changing entities. As landscape architect James Corner states in The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention; “The experiences of space cannot be separated from the events that happen in it. It is remade continuously every time it is encountered by different people, every time it is represented through another medium, every time its surroundings change, every time new affiliations are forged”. (16) Cities like bodies move, change, evolve, repeat, cycle. As physicist and novelist Alan Lightman writes in one of his fictional theories of time in his novel Einstein’s Dreams, “And just as all things will be repeated in the future, all things now happening happened a million times before”. (17) In the film Smoke, by Wayne Wang and Paul Auster, the character Auggie photographs his corner cigar store at exactly 8:00 a.m. every day. It is “his life’s work” to be there and to capture the cycles of life, the changes of light and of people in his small corner of the world. Repetition and change become evident against the consistent time/place as a reference point (fig. 4). In his photographs he finds “sometimes the same people, sometimes different people, sometimes the different people become the same, and the same ones disappear as the earth revolves around the sun”. A friend of Auggie’s who is flipping through the thousands of photographs remarks that they are all the same. Auggie agrees but also corrects him, pointing out that each interaction is the same yet it is unique. (18)

16 Corner, James. The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention. In Mappings, edited by Denis Cosgrove, 211-252. London: Reaktion Books, 1999, p. 227
17 Lightman, Alan. Einstein’s Dreams. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993, p. 11
18 See Smoke by Wayne Wang 1995

Questions for discussion 2

2009-01-26T05:36:00.000-08:00

Subjective Vision and the Separation of the Senses in Techniques of the Observer, by Jonathan Crary.

What are some instances in 21c. art and architecture where the combination of science and art, the subjective and the objective, sensory and logical is necessarily used?

How is the “visual infantine” theory important today? Is it even an objective among today’s artists and architects to view our surroundings as well as our art as if we were seeing it for the first time? Is this important in our culture?

Is our present culture more focused on the dissection of the senses or the conglomeration of the senses?

Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino

How could this combination of philosophy and architectural description affect your work?

On page48 Calvino talks about the changes of language that occur from city to city, he states “I realized I had to free myself from the images which in the past had announced to me the things I sought: only then would I succeed in understanding the language of Hypatia.” What are some of the “language” differences faced today when considering new architecture in a new city?

Artist R. Justin Stewart

2009-01-25T17:08:00.000-08:00

R. Justin Stewart is an artist who focuses on mappings in his work and how they can be represented three dimensionally. This is a link to his work "Bus Structure 2AM to 2PM".
I think his work is interesting in regards to Living Sections and how they can be represented in many different ways.

http://www.rjustin.com/portfolio/2008/2am-2pm.html

Notation 1

2009-01-25T16:48:00.000-08:00

This video represents an architectural section that is influenced by the activities and actions that occur within the space. These activities occur because of the personal priorities, hobbies and habits of the occupants as well as the interactions with the physical environment that contains them. This living section documents the ephemerality of life and the comparisons between the more fleeting nature of human beings to the more constant nature of the surrounding architecture . It also shows how the ebb and flow of the human life affects the nature and mood of the unwavering, established surroundings and make it more transitory.

notation 1 - A Section

2009-01-23T14:58:00.001-08:00

A Section

You are to reference Architectural projection drawing and moving image and create Section as a dissection of both time and space.

To consider (you don’t have to consider all, choose one or two):
qualitative and quantitative
Place and event
Physical and ephemeral
Abstract and realistic
Objective and subjective
Static and active

Keep it simple, yet exploratory. Be rigorous in your thinking. Reference the meaning of section as an idea… a section, a segment, a fragment, a view within - physical and temporal. The notation is to be between 30 and 90 seconds but consider length and time break down carefully. Time is a measuring system.

Multiple Sections : CT-scans of the City 1.4

2009-01-23T12:34:00.001-08:00

GPS (drawing) and audio/video (moving image) provide an interesting hybrid at the scale of the city. What is the potential of this fusion? The attempt is to approach the balance of the mathematical and picturesque that Nuti describes. The portable GPS, which uses satellite data to calculate exact geographical position of its users, is able to in utmost mathematical accuracy register the direction, speed, pauses, rhythm, density, rate, delay, detour, and so on of the inhabitants of the city as an abstract system of changing lines of various qualities and densities as well as provide charts of information about the city like altitude, weather, time, etc. and about the human body in the city such as calories burned, heart rate, etc. at that particular moment in time. While audio/video has the potential to capture and reveal the various activities happening along these trajectories as a series of life-like moving views and sounds into the interiority of this complex system, GPS reads and writes the quantitative while audio/video reads and writes the qualitative aspects of the city.

Multiple Sections : CT-scans of the City 1.3

2009-01-23T12:32:00.000-08:00

In a more recent one of my studies of cities, the exploration of the merging of the vocabularies of drawing and moving image which aims to read and write the city simultaneously through its abstraction and its reality came closer to defining the city as a “manifold story that has neither author nor spectator”. BiCi_N (fig. 5), examines the city of Barcelona through the CT-scan idea but not from one single point of view or axis but from a multiplicity of views. As a Multislice CT-scan, in this case, images are not restricted to one axial plane but can be adjacent, distant and overlapped. (15) The project utilized the recently instituted Barcelona open public bicycle transportation system Bicing, in which individual users of the city can pick up a bike at any of the 300 stations in the city, ride it and drop it off at another location, as the framework by which to collect the information. In the BiCi_N project the bikes are equipped not only with audio/video cameras but also with GPS (Global Positioning Systems) devices. What is collected, “fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces” writes the city from within and from the multiplicity of the routine of the city as individual users displace themselves within the city on the moving bikes as they go about their individual routines. With the body(ies)/bike(s) as extensions of the human body into the city body and as drawing apparatuses, numerous itineraries are collected. As individual slices of a body under analysis these are reassembled to describe the city as alive, moving and changing - as “daily and indefinitely other.”1

5 See CT-scan in wikipedia

See the Bicing bike station map
Visit Bicing

Multiple Sections : CT-scans of the City 1.2

2009-01-23T12:29:00.000-08:00

In NY A/V, one of my audio/video mapping explorations of cities, (fig. 3), 636 stationary video shots zooming north on Manhattan on Broadway Street were taken from sunrise to sunset for a period of seven days. The ubiquitous Broadway Street, the only street deviating from the grid of the city while traversing the entire island, served as the axis by which these slices of the city were collected and assembled. “In axial ‘step and shoot’ acquisitions” CT format, each take, each zoom, each section-cut of the city was collected as a series of slices walking the length of Broadway Street; (9) “between each shot there is a 15-minute wait that involves the walk north [one third of a city’s bock length] and the set-up of the next shot. By walking the city slowly—minute-by-minute, block–by-block—over the period of seven days, one is consumed in a process that clearly observes, a process that discovers the city”. (10) Like the axial CT scan format in which “each slice/volume is taken and then the table is incremented to the next location” and later connected, these numerous section-cuts were connected in post-production editing into one continuous zoom through the city, a seemingly continuous take which fades in and out of days into nights while collecting the life of the city during that particular week in July 2001. (11) In particular the project uses the cine acquisition method of CT-scans in which temporality is important. In medical terms, this method evaluates “blood flow, blood volume and mean transit time. Cine is a time sequence of axial images…” where “xray is delivered at a specified interval and duration”. (12)

In looking at the tomography of this city, as we inhabited and traveled this line, “we understand the city in its entirety as a physical entity that lives, throbs, changes”. (13) It like a human body is composed of “dynamic processes and flows” of activities and interactions which define the interiority of the city. In the process of collecting the information, “each day, the investigator, through the view-finder, was entranced by a different story, by a different place as the various personalities of the city were experienced. Like novelist Italo Calvino’s recount of Venice in Invisible Cities, each day along this line, as we traveled the city, was as if a different place – as if a different story has taken place. By this trajectory, we inhabited seven places in seven days, yet remained in once place”. (14)

9 See CT-scan in wikipedia
10 Skinner, Martha. South to North: Zoom/Section Seven Day Trajectory on Broadway Street. In South edited by Ronald Rael, 30-39. Clemson School of Architecture, 2005, p. 32
11 See CT-scan in wikipedia
12 See CT-scan in wikipedia
14 Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities, Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1972, Skinner, Martha. South to North: Zoom/Section Seven Day Trajectory on Broadway Street. In South edited by Ronald Rael, 30-39. Clemson School of Architecture, 2005, p. 32

Multiple Sections : CT-scans of the City 1.1

2009-01-23T12:27:00.000-08:00

In order to understand the city as a living body under analysis one must look at the city the way a CT-scan looks at the human body. CT scans (Computed tomography scans) is a medical imaging tool, which visualizes the inside of the human body and its “dynamic processes such as blood flow and function”. The method employs tomography, which is based on basic principles of projective geometry and “is derived from the Greek tomos (slice) and graphein (to write)”. (8) In a CT-scan multiple x-ray “slices” or section-cuts of the body are combined along a central axis of rotation to generate cross-sectional or three dimensional views, the computerized axial tomography of the inside of the human body, the accumulation of written slices of the city.

8 See CT-scan in wikipedia

Inauguration - from above and from below

2009-01-21T08:32:00.000-08:00

These two timely projects are examples of quantitative and qualitative aspects of yesterday's event and records of a significant turning moment in time.

In the project by GeoEye a high resolution image of Washington D.C at 11:19 a.m. January 20, 2009 is collected from above by satellites "at 41 centimeter ground resolution" as stated by Mark Brender from GeoEye to mathematically calculate the numbers of people present at the event. Steve Doig, a journalism professor who specializes in crowd counting said; "It's actually fairly simple math, getting the square footage and dividing that by some number of feet per person".

See cnet news article Satellites, balloons, and math used to count inauguration crowd at cnet news

In the project Picturing the Inauguration by the New York Times a multitude of qualitative moments (photos of individuals) globally are submitted composing a vivid, textured matrix of events big and small, intimate and collective of this transformative moment in time. As a collective from below mapping, you may contribute to its making by submitting your own photo to pix@nyt.com

See New York Times Picturing the Inauguration: The Readers’ AlbumJanuary 18, 2009 at NYTimes.com

What is the potential of combining these two types of data?

Questions for discussion 1.2

2009-01-20T19:36:00.000-08:00

In “Night on Earth”, it speaks about Michel de Certeauʼs experience of “Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the WTC.” It talks about a “migrational city” that “slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city.” Even from the birds eye view, there are parts of the city that cannot be seen, movements that resist rationalization. The article then compares this to the different vantage points as seen by a cab driver and the mayor of NYC.

Compared to a set of construction documents for a building, this is not all that different from looking at an overall plan and then a set of detail drawings. Could the vantage point of the cab driver be a detail of how the city works and is put together?

Can the city be mapped or built by the inside view or vantage point of the cab driver alone, or does there still need to be some kind of overall comprehension of the city?

In “Walking the City” it is said that the operations of people walking can be traced on city maps as a way of transcribing their paths and trajectories. However, the reading says this kind of mapping is missing the act of passing by: the operation o walking, wandering, or window shopping.

Is it possible for this activity to be mapped or shown as some kind of trajectory?

Is the architecture or the people informing the mapping, or both?

In “Mapping Places” the some of the examples described seem to explore the limits of our visual realm. We can only see an comprehend to the limits of what are eyes can contain. If we want to see more we must turn our head, leaving other things out of our sight. Even if we could see 360 degrees, are our brains built to be able to comprehend what we are seeing?

If you think about this in the concept of mapping, is there a limit to what we can comprehend?

If you try to map everything, will it get to a point to where things be come to much or unclear?

Questions for discussion 1.1

2009-01-20T13:38:00.001-08:00

These are some quotes I found significant from Michel de Certeau's "Walking in the City", along with some response questions:

"The city becomes the dominant theme in political legends, but it is no longer a field of programmed and regulated operations. Beneath the discourses that ideologize the city, the ruses and combinations of powers that have no readable identity proliferate; without points where one can take hold of them, without rational transparency, they are impossible to administer."

"What spatial practices correspond, in the area where discipline is manipulated, to these apparatuses that produce a disciplinary space?"

"...spatial practices in fact secretly structure the determining conditions of social life"

How do you construct a "disciplined" space? Is it ethical or even possible to try and control space and structure the conditions of social life?

Quotes and questions from "Night on Earth" by Trui Vetters:

"...to put all partial views together not simply as composite vision but as a cognitive map that shows how each view can itself be explained by and integrated into some grander conception of what the city as a whole, what the urban process in general is all about."

How important is it to have an all encompassing view of a space as a whole? Can it be more meaningful to emphasize certain moments as parts of this "whole"? Which view is more accurate in understanding a city?

For example:
Giuliani's pictures (iconic and controllable) vs. Cabby's pictures (moments and uncontrollable)

Living Section 1.4

2009-01-20T13:17:00.001-08:00

While Across-Section, by student Mason Edge, is a moving section traversing the city with the speed of a car. The driver takes a segment of the strip city with it at the plane (the cut) that coincides with his own placement within the car as he drives. He, the (car/city body/car occupant), appears near the middle of a horizontally elongated document of parallel vanishing spaces as a silhouette figure vibrating to the motor of the vehicle while pushing the strip city with it forward at 35 miles per hour. The study is actually constructed by walking the city exhaustibly four times, each time covering a segment of the strip; two vast and empty sidewalks, a linear network of unconnected drive-through zones and parking lots, and a railroad track that runs parallel to the street. Through video editing, the individual views, which are next to each other yet imperceptible during a normal drive, were connected. In this case as is the role of a conventional section-cut drawing, adjacent yet disjointed spaces alongside each other were revealed. However, in this case the section-cut is a moving plane as informed by the act of driving and the activities flashing past the driver in that particular body/car/city space, a condition that we so often inhabit.

Living Section 1.3

2009-01-20T13:15:00.000-08:00

Mike Stopka, another one of my students’ studies, presents us also with the familiar section drawing; in this case to scale, with exact dimensions and placement of windows and doors and with appropriate wall thicknesses, yet suddenly a video window appears animating the static drawing with the activities of the user within the space (fig. 2). As we watch, we see and hear the user moving from one domestic activity to another as he crosses from room to room space the drawing and across the section-cut. At points, we are zoomed into the video leaving behind the drawing, as it exists the frame of the document. We find ourselves immersed into the story held within this drawing and presented as moving image. In this case, the section-cut fluctuates between being a drawing and being a movie while being both. In this drawing/movie the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the place are presented in their intimate relationship.

Living Section 1.2

2009-01-20T13:13:00.000-08:00

In Living Section, by former student Christopher Lanzisera, we are able to view and understand the adjacencies of spaces, their configurations and relative proportions, etceteras yet more importantly because of the ability of the camera to record activities in time, we are able to understand the fluctuation of programs that are happening across this section-cut of the city over a period of time (fig. 1). This study achieves what architect Bernard Tschumi refers to as the “tripartite mode of notation… (events, movements, spaces)…for all inevitably intervene in the reading of the city”. (5) However in this case it is drawing which is influencing our understanding and use of the moving image. And while the inspiration for this study comes directly from a common drawing convention, a similar condition can be found visually in the film; The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover directed by Peter Greenaway where the camera pans slowly across adjacent spaces and between walls revealing the activities happening within and along the indiscriminate line that traverses the building from a parking lot, through a kitchen to dinning room. (6) Similarly this occurs with audio in the film Delicatessen by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro where we hear the various spaces of a building playing against each other as sounds that originate in different spaces permeate each other or disappear into wall cavities. (7)

5 Tschumi, Bernard. The Manhattan Transcripts New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994 p.9
6 See The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover directed by Peter Greenaway 1989
7 See Delicatessen by Jeunet and Caro 1992

Living Section 1.1

2009-01-20T13:07:00.000-08:00

To be immersed is to look at the city in section, to be inside, to look at the inner workings of this body, as a kind of x-ray vision. The section drawing as we know it allows us to understand the adjacencies of interior spaces, their configurations and relative proportions, etceteras. While they are revealing of this static, and abstract characteristics of space, they do not provide us with the representation or the analysis of what is happening inside, how often it is happening, what are the variations, the rhythms and patterns, the ephemeral, what is the life of that which is being investigated. To be immersed is to be inside but it is also to look at the city moving, to look at the city in time, to look at the city changing.

I have been involved in a series of dissections of time/space studies which take the conventional section-cut drawing as we know it and combine it with video to create a new kind of document, a document which is immersed, picturesque, yet also abstract and analytical, a document, or rather a thinking tool which allows us to reveal, study and communicate both the qualitative and the quantitative, and the fixed and temporal aspects of place. These projects include a series of my studies of cities as well as a series of studies done by my students. These explorations, which merge the vocabularies of drawing and of moving image started with the idea of exploiting the readily available audio/video camera as an investigative tool in our practice and has evolved to include other readily available time based tools at our disposal.

Urban CT-Scan: The City as Body(ies) in Movement

2009-01-20T13:04:00.000-08:00

Philosopher Michel de Certeau in Walking the City argues that the plan-like image of a city as seen from above is nothing else but a “viewpoint… a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices”. He argues for the experience of wandering through the city as a “process of appropriation of the topographical system” (1). Urban historian Lucia Nuti in Mapping Places: Chorography and Vision in the Renaissance, states that before the renaissance, maps were pictorial, vividly describing the qualities of a place and that then maps became views from above, and, eventually, a chorography which is planometric (which in Latin means Flat) and in scale. She describes the ongoing attempt during that period to balance the qualities of the “intellectual and mathematical” with the “pictorial and sensual knowledge” (2). Steven Johnson in Street Level states that; “The city is complex because it overwhelms, yes, but also because it has a coherent personality, a personality that self organizes out of millions of individual decisions, a global order built out of local interactions” (3). In Street Level he compares this to the research that biologist Deborah Gordon is doing on ants stating that a queen does not organize ants, as one might think, but that rather ants communicate and organize via their individual interactions at the ground level, at the street level. Johnson continues, “There are no bird’s-eye view of the colony, no ways to perceive the overall system—and indeed, no cognitive apparatus that could make sense of such a view…” (4).

To look at the city from below, to look at the city from within, means to consider the rituals of its many inhabitants. I, like de Certeau and Nuti, believe that an immersed reading and representation of place would reveal relationships otherwise imperceptible in these more conventional mappings. Can we create mappings where the current condition of the below being orchestrated from the above is reversed? Can we read and “write” “manifold stories” from within to define the above? Through the thoughtful rethinking of the technologies available today we can evolve our existing analytical methods to more accurately engage the complexities of our cities and have the potential of making documents that are both realistic and abstract, picturesque and analytical, immersed as well as removed? What is the potential of this merging?

1 de Certeau, Michel. Walking in the City. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Trans. by Steven Rendall. California: University of California Press, 1988, p. 93
2 Nuti, Lucia. Mapping Places: Chorography and Vision in the Renaissance. In Mappings, edited by Denis Cosgrove, 90- 108. London: Reaktion Books, 1999, p. 91
3 Johnson, Steven. Emergence, The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software Scribner, New York 2001 p. 33
4 Johnson, Steven. Emergence, The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software Scribner, New York 2001 p. 75

Introduction

2009-01-20T12:43:00.000-08:00

“The experiences of space cannot be separated from the events that happen in it. It is remade continuously every time it is encountered by different people, every time it is represented through another medium, every time its surroundings change, every time new affiliations are forged” James Corner, The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention in Mappings, edited by Denis Cosgrove,

“The ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below’, below the thresholds at which visibility begins. ... whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms. The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility. It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness. The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other.” Michel de Certeau, Walking in the City in The Practice of Everyday Life.

Working from a series of texts and discussions on temporality, public space and representation, this seminar/lab will use audio, video and GPS (Global Positioning Systems) to explore the potential of a new kind of drawing. a mapping which is temporal and ever-changing and which looks at the body of the city in its intimate relationship to the mapping of the human body. What do calories burned, heart rate, and body mass mean as related to length and speed of travel, weather, and topography? And what does latitude and longitude of user, distance to destination, and time, and latitude mean as related to track, bearing and heart rate? Can we analyze this data of the human body and city body as interrelated an intimately connected? Can we analyze this data the way that a radiologist analyzes a CT-scan? In addition the merging of drawing (GPS) and moving image (audio/video) will be explored as a hybrid tool capable of capturing place in all of its qualities. With GPS we get the absolute, certain information of the trajectory such as location, altitude, weather, heart rate, cadence, speed, duration... while audio/video captures the perceptive, bodily characteristics of the space such as imagery, ambiance, texture, light, activity, conversations, sounds, expressions, etc….. The city will be mapped as a temporal system with documents that are both realistic and abstract, picturesque and analytical, immersed and removed. With these mapping technologies as wearable and as extensions of the human body into the city, the students will “draw” their cities from “below” producing a collective subjective map of the interactions, movements, pauses and events that make up the daily life of their cities.

The seminar will use historical references in architecture, film, cartography, photography, drawing, literature, urbanism, biology, sociology, science, physiology… as well as contemporary visualization examples in graphic design, art, architecture, medicine, aviation... The students will be presented with examples weekly as well as given reading assignments and short weekly exercises to exploit the possibilities. Part of class time will be used for lively discussions on the topics explored and presented. Students will also define, present, and write a seminar topic of their choice to fit under the course thesis and which will provide the basis for an independent student project. Recording equipment may be borrowed from the professor, checked out from the university or provided by the students.