serial consign - design / research

Building Stories

Greg J. Smith — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 11:00:27 -0500

About a year ago I received a .zip archive of comic artist Chris Ware's entire series of Building Stories. These "funny pages" scrutinized the lives, dreams and space of a number of tenants in a varying states of melancholy and restlessness. Like all the characters in Ware's universe, these protagonists exist in a bleak and nostalgic world of missed opportunities and unfulfilled dreams. Despite this overbearing sense of emptiness, hope does glimmer in the background and subtext. Building Stories appeared in Nest Magazine, The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine between 2003 and 2006. The purpose of this post is not so much to survey the complete series but to instead consider a specific installment, Building Stories: Part 3 (pictured above).

Building Stories: Part 3 conducts a narrative vivisection of a three-story apartment complex, pulling away walls to provide an omnipotent view of the history of the space. What is interesting about the structure of this comic is rather than delve into the complex, fragmented layouts (primarily composed of small multiples) that Ware is famous for, it provides a quantified overview of events that have happened in the space of a single panel. So while "nothing is happening" the moment that this snapshot is taken, a sum total of incidents is quantified and laid bare on various architectural surfaces and in the margins. The reader is provided with lists rather than shown events.

Close examination of these lists reveals a variety of tracked values including "886 screams, 217 punches, 3 births, 74,316 newspapers, 5 spiritual crises, 64,418 orgasms, 22 pregnancies" and a personal favourite "32,655,497 water drips". Delivery of these quantities is deadpanned and major personal benchmarks are casually mixed with the trivial as if to suggest an indifference on the part of both the architecture and Ware. This depiction of domestic space as a living document (a tally sheet) and an "event-aggregator" speaks to some of the desires evident in Andy Stanford-Clark's "talking" home automation system [see previous post]. They key difference between these two models of scanning urban space is time - in Ware's fiction he can shoot with a wide-angle lens and speculate an absurd and fascinating endgame to this notion of quantified domesticity.

While spending time with this comic over the last several days I keep thinking that it is the architectural counterpoint to Tom Waits' take on meteorology on Nighthawks at the Diner. The final lines of Building Stories: Part 3 reads "This building now has to admit to feeling a little bit grateful for the arrival each day of 24 more hours" - and the events continue to accumulate.

Building Stories: Part 3 is available for PDF download as part of the excellent Acme Novelty Archive, an "unofficial directory" of the works of Chris Ware.

Visualizar Postscript

Greg J. Smith — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 10:16:54 -0500

After 18 hours of travel and an extended layover in ~~purgatory~~ New Jersey I was very relieved to finally set foot on (snow covered) Canadian soil last night. VISUALIZAR was a great experience and I am utterly impressed with Medialab-Prado as a venue and project incubator. José Luis de Vicente is not only an excellent curator and cultural critic but a gracious host, I really valued the several extended conversations we had. A big hello to new friends and drinking buddies André and Santiago from Bestario, Aaron Meyers, Fabien Girardin, Dietmar Offenhuber, Paco González, Nicholas Wright and Chris Sugrue.

We presented In the Air on Tuesday night and it was very well received (please note the charming frontis image above), I'll be posting more info about the project soon as we will be launching it online ASAP. I'm also preparing an extended summary of the visualization workshop for Nathan at FlowingData - so stay tuned for links.

Elsewhere...

Greg J. Smith — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:58:16 -0500

Digital theorist and artist Mitchell Whitelaw is the subject of an interview I recently conducted on behalf of Rhizome. The resulting conversation was posted today and it marks my first appearance on Rhizome as a contributor. I've been invited to write for the new media portal and I'm quite excited about the opportunity. In the interview, Mitchell discusses his research on datasthetics and generative art in the context of some of his recent projects which include Watching the Sky (pictured above) and The Visible Archive. Mitchell on the development of his thinking about digital ontology:

...looking at the way that formal systems - generative systems but also for example games and social web services - create specific systems of being and relation. A simple example is the various formal models of "friend" in different social services. In formal terms a Facebook "friend" is different to a Delicious "fan", which is in turn more like a Twitter "follower." These ontologies, little formal worlds, can be read critically, but crucially they also have generative implications that play out in the system.

You can check out the interview here.

In the Air: Development Snapshot

Greg J. Smith — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 06:58:58 -0500

[Visualizar Desk Crit / photo: Medialab-Prado]

We're a week into our project here at Database City and I thought I'd provide a snapshot of the work in progress. I'm working as part of a team headed by Nerea Calvillo a Madrid-based architect. Our project is entitled In the Air and we're developing a real time visualization of air pollution in downtown Madrid.

Like most major cities, Madrid maintains a network of sensors distributed throughout the city at key intersections, cultural districts and industrial areas. These sensors monitor the levels of numerous chemicals including Carbon Dioxide, Sulphur Dioxide, aerial particulate and pollen levels in order to track the quality of the air. We've obtained 12 months worth of data collected by this network and have set up a means to scrape real time updates (the system updates hourly) - we're in the midst of investigating a few strategies for potential visualization. Pictured above is an interface mockup of a particle system we've developed in Processing that registers these sensors as attractors, things get a bit tricky with this strategy as it is more of a model than a true visualization. We're currently leaning towards a particle system approach with an option to isolate the data at a sensor-by-sensor level - the only sites the data is accurate. Last week Santiago Ortiz quipped that the goal of our project is interpolation without lies.

As if the visualization wasn't enough to keep us busy, we're also working on an physical prototype to speculate how this information could be communicated in some kind of installation or architectural context. The above video documents some of the experiments Susanna Tesconi and Nerea conducted last week. Nerea had originally envisioned a "diffusing facade" with Arduino-controlled mysters generating colour coded clouds to convey the levels of specific pollutants in the Madrid atmosphere. So far things haven't worked out with coloured dyes but we'll see where our research leads us. We're hoping to pull off a small scale "proof of concept" prototype and communicate how the system could be more ambitiously deployed through drawing. All of this is a very tall order for a two week project, luckily we've got a cast of thousands that also includes Carlota Pascual, Guillermo Ramírez, Miguel Vidal, Paco González, Raphaël de Staël, Sandra Fernández and Victor Viña.

I'll post about the project again next week - it will be interesting to see how it fills out. For anybody that is interested, we're updating our (mostly Spanish) project wiki daily.

.txt/081107

Greg J. Smith — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 16:08:42 -0500

Some choice links from the last several days:

Chris Remo at Gamasutra just conducted an interview with Nick Channon of DICE studio on the design of Mirror's Edge (pictured above), a parkour-themed first person runner (FPR?). I've been excited about this game since first hearing about it earlier this year. Channon's perspective on the design of the game and the idea of "runner vision" makes for a fascinating read.
Another great interview comes by way of Ceci Moss at Rhizome who chats with Mark Allen of Machine Project, an Echo Park art space in Los Angeles.
Joseph Flaherty at Replicator provides a hilarious and illuminating window into the tricky world of applying social constraints to mass customization. The post is cheekily entitled George Carlin Customization: 47 words you can’t use on custom NIKE sneakers and it describes the black and white world of language and footwear.
This week Michael Surtees posted the liner notes for the design of http://select.daylife.com a freshly-launched topical news aggregator developed by Daylife. Michael has even capped the post with one of his infamous sketchbook diagrams.

The Long Here, the Big Now...

Greg J. Smith — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 20:14:50 -0500

[Evan Allen & Matthew Worsnick / The Networked Omniscient / 2006]

Tonight the final lecture of VISUALIZAR'08 took place and a large, enthusiastic crowd crammed into Medialab-Prado for the event. Adam Greenfield (design director at Nokia) presented The Long Here, the Big Now, and other tails of the networked city, a talk on ubiquitous computing and urban space. Greenfield opened his talk by defining everyware, a geo-web paradigm in which "all the objects and surfaces of everyday life are able to sense, process, receive, display, store, transmit and take physical action upon information". Greenfield characterized distributed computation as being an era in which "microprocessors could be scattered like grass seed" and then proceeded to deliver a rather nuanced discussion on the networked city.

Like fellow ubiquitous computing researcher Dietmar Offenhuber, Greenfield began his presentation with a nod to the work of Mark Weiser at Zerox PARC in the 1980s. He highlighted South Korean developments such as Cheonggyecheon and New Songdo as definitive examples of augmented environments. Greenfield differentiated the here/now terminology in his talk title from that of the Long Now Foundation by offering his own reading of "contemporary" space and time as:

that which primarily conditions choice/action in the city but resides in the invisible and intangible overlay of networked information that enfold it... a persistent and retrievable history of the things that are done and witnessed there over any place on earth than can be specified with machine-readable coordinates.

To help illustrate these ideas of space and duration he delved into a very thoughtful discussion of Oakland Crimespotting by Stamen Design. Being very familiar with this project [see previous post] it was great to hear a info-culture pundit dig into the validity of the data undergirding a visualization. While Greenfield acknowledged that a site like Oakland Crimespotting could be an informative tool he questioned the validity of a data set in which rape is classified as "aggravated assault". How could this (and other questions of classification) affect the way that a user engages a visualization/mapping service? If we are going to view urban space through these kinds of filters we have to be mindful to question the perspective they provide.

The 1K Project (pictured above) was referenced as a definitive example of the "big now", an expansive layered present which contains multiple streams of information, trajectories and possibilities. Greenfield name checked twitter as a great example of this type of spatial density, a place in which all things happen constantly.

I definitely appreciated the tone of Greenfield's presentation he is obviously very well versed on the theory front but completely accessible and engaging as a speaker. It is refreshing to hear a refined, slightly critical response to the standard technology/market cheerleading that passes as web culture future-casting. My favourite line of the night? The assertion that the city of the 21st century is one that will "respond to the behavior of its residents and other users, in something like real time... underwriting the transition from browse urbanism to search urbanism."

If you're interesting in learning more about Adam Greenfield's work be sure to check out his collaborative text Urban Computing and its Discontents co-authored with Mark Shepard (the text is available as a free PDF here) - he also blogs at Speedbird.

Edit: I just found a video of a shorter version of this lecture that was presented at LIFT Asia two weeks ago.

Database City: notes/linkbombing

Greg J. Smith — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 20:47:57 -0500

[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 Bestario 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.

citySCENE: Informal Call for Work

Greg J. Smith — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:38:00 -0400

[Charles & Ray Eames / Powers of 10 / 1977]

Given my post about Database City yesterday this feels like an appropriate moment to put out a feeler for an upcoming issue of Vague Terrain that I'll be curating. Vague Terrain 13: citySCENE will be published (approximately) next March and dedicated to the representation of urban space. For the issue I'll be looking to assemble about a dozen projects which map, sample, recontextualize and critique the contemporary city. Sound, image, text - any work that can be displayed and disseminated via the web is fine by me.

While I'll be distributing a formal call in December I wanted to tap into the readers and community around this blog first. Please email me if you'd like to discuss potential participation. If you have a peer whose work might fit into the above (admittedly schematic at the moment) theme please send them my way. Our general submission guidelines for Vague Terrain are available here, although the best way to get a sense of what is expected would be to look at some of the past issues.

One final point - we recently issued a call for Vague Terrain 12: Device Art which will be guest curated by Toronto tech-art guru Rob Cruickshank. Interactive artists, Arduino massive and object hackers take note! If you've got relevant work to share drop Rob a line.

Serial Consign at Database City

Greg J. Smith — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 13:44:25 -0400

[Steph Thirion / Cascade on Wheels / produced at Visualizar'07]

When I first heard about VISUALIZAR'08: Database City I couldn't believe how on point the scope of the workshop was with my research interests. The call for proposals described the focus of the event as follows:

Urban environments, which are becoming increasingly dense, complex and diverse, are one of contemporary society’s largest “databases”, daily generating volumes of information that require new methods of analysis and understanding. How can we use the data visualization and information design resources to understand the processes governing contemporary cities and better manage them? What can we learn from studying traffic and pedestrian movement flows through the streets of Madrid? What would happen if we filled the streets with screens providing information updated each moment about water and electricity consumption?

Given that my writing here on Serial Consign explores the intersection of information, interface, design and urban experience I knew that I had to submit a proposal. Although I had hoped to develop a project proposal, I only ended up pitching a paper - one that was accepted. So this Saturday I'll be leaving for Madrid to spend three weeks at Medialab-Prado. I recently did the math and somehow I haven't been to Europe for a decade, so this is a really big deal for me.

My paper is entitled Beyond the Edifice: Architectural Visualization Reconsidered and in it I'll outline how architectural representation could inform urban informatics. This research project is a great opportunity to consolidate my sprawling interest in architectural drawing with some of the "city thinking" evident in the work I curated for TAGallery. The seminar will only span a few days and then the focus will shift to the incubation and rapid development of several urban visualization projects, one of which I'll be working on. For the interested, here are links to the full list of project abstracts and a schedule of the seminar proceedings.

I guess it goes without say that I'll be blogging about the proceedings as they occur. I'll definitely try to soak up as much of the seminar as possible and provide a window into the resulting visualization projects later in November. Medialab Prado will also be publishing my paper, so I'll have more news on that in the coming weeks. Hasta mañana!

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Greg J. Smith — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 20:41:58 -0400

Recently enjoyed:

Damien James' The Magic Easel is a fascinating piece in the Chicago Reader on a viewing machine by artists Ryan and Trevor Oakes. The pair (literally, they are twins) have developed the above viewing machine to aid them in creating detailed concave perspective drawings. [via metafilter].
On the topic of drawing, I've been revisiting Mason White's Making Plans, a speculative text on the role of the plan in architecture. This thoughtful essay contextualizes contemporary thinking about plans through concise commentary and some great precedents.
The Interscale: Art after Neoliberalism is a text inspired by theorist Brian Holmes' visit to The Sixth Taipei Biennial. What starts out as a critique of a several featured pieces at the politically themed Biennial quickly unfurls into a history of neoliberalism complete with nods to Archigram, commentary on the economy and observations on tension between regional and transcontinental programming.
Leave it to nettime to be the first place for an English translation of Paul Virilio's recent interview in Le Monde to pop up. In this discussion with Gerard Courtois and Michel Guerrin Virilio frames the recent economic meltdown in relation to his ongoing research into catastrophe aesthetics and speed.
From one form of bankruptcy to another, Facebook in a Crowd is a fun article by Hal Niedzviecki in this weekend's New York Times. The text documents a self-esteem train wreck whereby the the author decides to host a party for all 700 of his "facebook friends" - and only one person shows up. In these tumultuous times if we can't count on our facebook friends, where does that leave us?
Authors Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin just released a free PDF of their 2002 book Atlas of Cyberspace. The text was just plugged by Andrew Vande Moere at infosthetics as an "interesting overview of the early years of (more popular forms) of data visualization, including chapters about mapping Internet infrastructure and traffic flows, mapping the Web, mapping online conversation and community, imagining cyberspace in art, literature, and film."