[SENSEable City Lab / New York Talk Exchange (NYTE) / 2008]

Well, three days into VISUALIZAR'08 and I feel like my head is going to explode. I can't recall the last time I heard so many great presentations in such a short span of time. I was a bit preoccupied with my talk, which was yesterday and went reasonably well - now I can get down to the business of sharing some (very abbreviated) summaries of several talks from here at Medialab-Prado over the last few days.

The curator of VISUALIZAR, José Luis de Vicente opened the seminar with an expansive overview of urban informatics: "Urban space is dynamic information... We've seen this in Calvino, the SI, Georges Perec - the secret lives of people and invisible cities"

Key questions: What is the role of networks and data structures in the city today? How can we use them to alter our perception of the city?

Key points: Visualization is a narrative medium. The crowd is a social and cultural object. Visualization can be realized as soft architecture.

Projects discussed:

• Cascade on Wheels - Madrid traffic visualization produced at VISUALIZAR'07 was instrumental in inspiring the urban focus of this edition of the workshop
• Casastristes.org - simple Google maps mashup for tracking Vacant houses in Madrid - Simple and effective mashup tracking Madrid vacancies
• New York Talk Exchange - great example of corporate entity benefitting from visualization/research.
• Million Dollar Blocks - infovis as a means to highlight sociopolitical issues
• Everyblock and outside.in - key points of reference in urban aggregation
• Sky Ear - inflatable ambient display
• Four Stories - circulation informatics
• Nuage Vert - vapour display

Fabien Girardin of the MIT SENSEable City Lab gave a very thoughtful talk about urban information design: "What we are looking at is new urban actors: mobile phones, speed cameras, pollution sensors, infrared cars, license plate recognition, wireless networks, CCTV systems, bike sharing systems, nitrogen systems, etc."

Key Question: What can we learn about urban life from the "digital shadows" that we cast when living in the city? What can we learn from the "sentience" of the contemporary city?

Key Points:

• Urban informatics can be broadly defined as being of microscopes and telescopes
• Contemporary privacy concerns are not much about "Big Brother", it is instead an era of "Little Sister" (self-surveillance)
• Data can be sourced not just from authors and service providers but activities that are fundamentally connected to the city
• Information design needs to undergo post-occupancy evaluation
• The timestamp is not to be overlooked
• We all know pagerank, get ready for placerank.

Projects Discussed:

• Real Time Rome - definitive mobile phone triangulation project.
• Digital Footprinting: Uncovering Tourists with User-Generated Content - placespotting on flickr
• The Co-evolution of Taxi Drivers and Their In-Car Navigation Systems - this title is quite self explanatory isn't it?

[Heath Bunting / Progress Through Binary Thought / 1992]

Dietmar Offenhuber gave a fantastic talk on ambient media in urban space that provided a number of methodologies for thinking about calm displays: "Ambient media needs to be read as a situation - not just as a relationship between the observer and display".

Key Points: The Kuleshov Effect is a good frame of reference when considering ambient media. Work that blurs the distinction between foreground and background warrants close attention.

Projects Discussed:

• Dangling String (aka Live Wire) - early example of calm technology
• Wind Tower - architecture as instrument
• Condensation Cube - enclosure as performance and display
• AtemRaum - breath as experience
• Suicide Stop - obituary subvertising
• Thanks Tail - device for automotive acknowledgement
• Dust till Dawn - fragile acoustic space
• Nuage Vert - an informational cloud
• Image Fulgurator - personal photographic sabotage device
• Kamerflage - personal photographic augmentation apparel

Victor Viña and Andrés Ortiz of Bestiario also talked about their creative practices, unfortunately I did not take notes during either of their presentations - hopefully I can touch on their work in the future (note: I did interview Andrés' collaborator Santiago in the summer of 2007). Despite an intense case of theory fatigue I will probably be posting a synopsis of The Long Here, the Big Now, and other tails of the networked city, a talk Adam Greenfield will be presenting tomorrow night.

I'll be posting more thoughts on VISUALIZAR'08 in the coming days - if you are curious you can tune into my twitter account for related tidbits and links. The projects have got underway and and we've launched a wiki for In the Air which I'll post about soon.