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

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.

Mathematical and Sensual Knowledge, the Body and the City 1.2

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

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?