serial consign

On contextualizing the several years I've spent on the west coast, I've often remarked that while you can take somebody out of Los Angeles, you can't get the Los Angeles out of them. More than any other city I've spent time in, Los Angeles gets under your skin and alters your perception.

I spent two years studying architecture in Culver City at the beginning of the decade and a variety of internships, research projects and a fellowship at USC have pulled me back to the city time and time again. I used to joke about L.A. being the cultural black hole at the centre of the universe, and while I can't speak for everybody I can certainly attest to the mysterious force the city exerts on me. To define my relationship with the city in terms of love and hate is far too simple. Binaries are altogether inadequate for describing a city clouded by ambiguity and characterized by veneer.

I've recently been challenged to come up with my own personal "Los Angeles aesthetics" and in thinking about this daunting task I've returned to 74 nights, a photo essay tucked away in the depths of my archives and covered by a fine layer of dust. This project (and this post for that matter) is as close to autobiography as you'll ever see here so please excuse this divergence from my usual fare.

In the summer of 2005, I accepted an internship at an architectural firm in Koreatown in midtown Los Angeles. In hindsight, accepting this gig was sort of a golden parachute, a means of escape from a dysfunctional relationship that I was involved in at the time. So that June, I checked into the first of a series of Mid-Wilshire temporary residences with little more than a camera and a copy of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project.

Some combination of my chronic insomnia, post-relationship emotional detritus and a fascination with Benjamin's "indexing" of Paris inspired me to take a stab at archiving my summer. At the time I thought I was simply trying to capture my exploration of the city. In retrospect, I can really see melancholy tattooed all over the vast majority of the shots. Regardless, it was great to get beyond the whitewashed idiosyncrasies of my earlier life in West L.A. and the obligatory archi-tourism demanded by my vocation to get a broader understanding of the urban fabric and texture of the city. I went through two pairs of shoes that summer and my legs perpetually ached as each night after work I often would just pick a direction and walk for six hours straight or until my camera ran out of batteries. I named the project 74 nights, the precise duration of my sojourn, and built a flash interface to share the ever growing body of images with my friends over the course of that summer.

I recently decided to upload 74 nights to my flickr account, so I invite anyone who is interested to give it a look. I have no pretensions of aptitude in photography, and a lot of these images are completely unremarkable. That said, given the personal nature of this work I still consider this project one of my favourite undertakings. A lot of these photographs are burned in my retinas and serve as constant frames of reference in thinking about (my reading of) the essence of Los Angeles. Since I'm looking at this material at the moment it only seemed appropriate to share it here.

Over the last 18 months there has been no shortage of discussion on the death of the newspaper industry. This continually revised obituary now undermines not just the business model behind print journalism, but the methodology of news collection and reporting. As Craigslist killed the classified ad, Jay Rosen's Huffington Post experiment Off the Bus is redefining coverage of the campaign trail.

It has now been about three months since I finished Movable Parts, an architectural response to the problems facing the contemporary editorial space. The project focused on the particularly dire situation of the floundering Los Angeles Times. I'm excited to come back to the topic after stepping back for a few months, and I will begin republishing commentary and interviews here in the near future.

The new Renzo Piano-designed New York Times headquarters has provoked intelligent discussion about the intersection of media and architecture. The Times' presence in the skyline of New York, as well as its delivery of a (supposed) idealized workspace for the information economy, are both useful starting points in evaluating the project. However, the newspaper's ability to address the flow of information, combined with its acceptance of reader participation, will determine its future success as a viable means of branding a flow of information.

[image: new york times headquarters july/07 - courtesy of lasadh]

The above image tracks the front page of latimes.com from 2002 through 2006, illustrating how quickly online presence can evolve. Note how the page structure and hierarchy have changed as images (yellow) and advertising (orange) have gradually become integrated with editorial content (blue). However, the manner in which information and links are collaged across a page (or interconnected through a database) is emblematic of a deeper organizational problem with the way that newspapers have dealt with digital content. These problems were highlighted by internet developer Adrian Holovaty in a fall 2006 post to his blog:

Say a newspaper has written a story about a local fire. Being able to read that story on a cell phone is fine and dandy. Hooray, technology! But what I really want to be able to do is explore the raw facts of that story, one by one, with layers of attribution, and an infrastructure for comparing the details of the fire - date, time, place, victims, fire station number, distance from fire department, names and years experience of firemen on the scene, time it took for firemen to arrive - with the details of previous fires. And subsequent fires, whenever they happen.

Holovaty's gripe with digital news is the manner in which it clusters "stories" as nodes rather than concurrent fragments of information. He points to the need for "database journalism" and has been exploring this possibility through the highly publicized chicagocrime.org mashup and his recently launched Ellington content management system, which is designed specifically for contemporary journalism. In a 2006 interview entitled The Programmer as Journalist, Holovaty points out the types of issues the media needs to think about in presenting information online:

...in creating websites, it's necessary to account for all possible permutations of data. For example, on chicagocrime.org I had to account for missing data: How should the site display crimes whose data has changed? What should happen in the case where a crime's longitude/latitude coordinates aren't available? What should happen when a crime's time is listed as "not available"?

Cast in this light, journalism starts to sound as if it is about populating arrays of data, in addition to creating narratives and providing context.

I find this topic fascinating and I think the print media identity crisis is symbolic of much larger societal and technological shifts. Do we monetize the flow of information – if so, how? How will crowdsourcing change and supplement traditional journalism? Does the press need a headquarters, an icon in the city from which to interface with the civic realm? There are all questions that will be explored in the coming months with this series of posts entitled Paper Space.

Some recent news about news: