I just watched Dan Hill's Soft Infrastructure Superpowers presentation from Lift09 and between that and a recent second reading of Lev Manovich's Software Takes Command I feel a little bewildered. Now I know watching videos from technology and design events are supposed to fill viewers with hubris and instill a misguided sense of actually understanding the trajectory of the near future, but bear with me. What is so likable about Hill's talk on tech-urbanism is that he grounds his musings by acknowledging a series of failed or only partially realized visions of the city from the past. He opts for a more sober strategy for futurecasting by tethering new ideas to old ones, and these historical references are not necessarily those that most readily compliment his outlook. The same "precedent archaeology" is at play in Software Takes Command, where, in reading Manovich's unpacking of "metamedia" you can expect to work through a mini-treatise on Alan Kay and multimedia in the 1990s. What I like about about these examples of design research is that their respective instigators employ the rear view mirror as an essential tool for surveying the present.

The above said, I have two semi-antiquated precedents that I want to highlight. Neither of these projects have been discussed on Serial Consign before but I consider both quite important references of urban representation that feed into one another quite nicely.

Given the ascent of Rem Koolhaas' AMO, a studio that thinks "beyond the boundaries" of architecture and urbanism, some of the early research of MVRDV has become a bit of footnote to the 1990s architecture scene. METACITY/DATATOWN (pictured above), a 1998-1999 video installation and publication was founded on the notion of an expansive, statistics-based study of urbanism in the Netherlands as reconsidered in light of globalization and connectivity. MVRDV proposed DATATOWN, a new hypothetical city that was "built" of information and characterized by economic and spatial possibilities that were "so complex" that statistical techniques were the only means of representation and analysis.

MVRDV described the project as follows:

DATATOWN is constructed as a collection of data. This information has been sorted and gathered in sectors, relative to the percentages of existing use in the Netherlands. Initially ordered alphabetically within a barcode field, the information was transformed for practical reasons: some zones need wider measurements in order to function properly. The barcode thus became a Mondrian-like field, compressed by its square outline into the most compact city thinkable.

This homogenous utopia, a dotcom era concentration city, was further described as being "free of topography, ideology and context". Could we assume that it was unburdened by ethnicity and social inequalities as well? In his 2004 essay "SimCity2000. Urban Crisis: Past, Present and Virtual", Julian Bleecker suggested that one of the primary reasons that the SimCity franchise had been so successful as a petri dish for generating "utopic urban space" was through "the explicit erasure of the category of race". This same charge could be levied at METACITY/DATATOWN and countless other delineations of "urban futures" of both the paper architecture variety and those that play out in gamespace.

METACITY/DATATOWN speaks to the optimism of the 1990s and embraced both globalization and information technology. The project was also somewhat prescient in reading data as the raw material of, or to use Dan Hill's language, the "hard infrastructure" of urban space. There is one specific comparison in the quotation cited above that is worth zooming in on, the idea that the barcode, "a Mondrian-like field" could become a cipher for a new digital urbanism.

Piet Mondrian's fascination with the frenetic pace of New York City (and jazz) are extremely well documented. The energy of the American metropolis was no doubt received with extra enthusiasm by the painter given his flight from Paris (and London) for America at the dawn of WWII. Mondrian is said to have fallen in love with NYC immediately and the brilliance of his iconic Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-1943) riffs on and geometrically abstracts the Manhattan street grid. If the keyword for the New York that Koolhaas would describe decades later was delirious, Mondrian's was rhythm. In The New Art—The New Life: The Culture of Pure Relationships (1931) Mondrian identified "the exact expression of the rhythm of equivalent oppositions" as an endgame in his painting, a mean to recognize the "value" and "true content" of life. An excerpt from MoMA Highlights (1999):

...Broadway Boogie Woogie omits black and breaks Mondrian's once uniform bars of color into multicolored segments. Bouncing against each other, these tiny, blinking blocks of color create a vital and pulsing rhythm, an optical vibration that jumps from intersection to intersection like the streets of New York. At the same time, the picture is carefully calibrated, its colors interspersed with gray and white blocks in an extraordinary balancing act.

Broadway Boogie Woogie is more than just a plan, the colour grammar and strips of "pure" syntax suggest codification - perhaps an urban DNA. The 2004 art game Pac-Mondrian reappropriated the geometry (and proto-pixels) of Mondrian's famed painting and fused it with the equally iconic aesthetic and play of Pac-Man. In addition to the standard "Manhattan" level the designers (Prize Budget for Boys - PBFB) also created levels for Detroit, Toronto and Tokyo. While you could dismiss Pac-Mondrian as relying on a singular visual pun (or worse, as kitsch) it is useful as a reference because it explicitly considers the spatial implications of Mondrian's work.

I remember chatting with Neil Hennessy of PBFB in 2005 about the unlikely possibility that the Pac-Mondrian cabinet would ever be exhibited beside Mondrian's masterpiece at the MoMA. Jump cut to last year when the MoMA acquired Stamen's Cabspotting: New Years Eve 2007 - a new question emerges: Will we see the MoMA exhibit Cabspotting (pictured above) beside Broadway Boogie Woogie anytime soon? Should they? Are these works even of the same species?

This entire line of thought is admittedly quite erratic. That said, I think it is important to acknowledge how quickly the means and methodologies for representing urban space are changing. The precedents cited in this post exhibit a desire to translate the experience of the city and related flows into a new aesthetics and readings of urbanism. Ubiquitous computing, distributed sensors and open data are all coming into focus as a tool kit that is beginning to be implemented. The "sentience" of cities isn't so much a vague idea on the horizon but an active hypothesis being tested in countless prototypes throughout the world. Curator Michelle Kasprzak wrote a short essay examining crowdsourcing and curation for Vague Terrain last year and her key question was "for what and for whom?" - I think that question also applies to urban representation. Who produces these models? In what context do we display or interact with them? What is their intended purpose? The maps, visualizations and interfaces generated through soft infrastructure will certainly not be confined by the white cube of the gallery nor exist as simulations in gamespace - the stakes are much higher.