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

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

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

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

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.