serial consign

[david rokeby / seen / 2002]

I'm excited to announce the launch of TAGallery 21: City of Nodes, a selection of geographic and cartographic work that I've curated for the fine folks at CONT3XT.NET. City of Nodes is a collection of twelve new media projects from the last decade that reconsider the representation of urban space. Broadly speaking, the work deals with mapping but some projects also address narrative, the simulated city and the process of archiving. An excerpt from my introduction to the work:

City of Nodes is a collection of works from the last decade that explores the everyday domains of street, neighbourhood and the entire city as platforms for mapping, movement and communication. These projects adopt a bird’s-eye view of urban space and storyboard the city towards a number of idiosyncratic ends. In these augmented and annotated cities, space and context are interrogated, surveillance technology exposed, fleeting histories archived and the role of the body reconsidered.

It was quite exciting for me to research this project as it will serve as the foundation for a venture that I'll be working on later in the year. Beyond my enthusiasm about this body of work, I was an early fan of the use of delicious as a tool for curation (see my post Tagging as Curation from last summer); contributing to TAGallery felt right on point with my research interests. What follows is a brief introduction to a few of the projects included in City of Nodes.

Aram Bartholl is German artist whose work explores the intersection of web culture and everyday life. 256² was an exercise in delineating a parcel of land from NewBerlin (a reproduction of Berlin in Second Life) in Berlin proper. For this 2007 project, Bartholl used chalk to trace the bounding box of a 256 square meter area in Alexanderplatz reinforcing the connection between this public space and its virtual counterpoint.

One Block Radius was a 2004 project by Christina Ray and Dave Mandl founded on archiving the ephemera of a Manhattan city block (now the site of the New Museum). The work utilizes a web interface to store a variety of entries which catalog photographs and experience via categories such as rules/regulations, daily life and sounds/noise. I really enjoy the rigor of this project and in many ways it seems prescient of sites like Everyblock, a web service that I've written about several times in the past.

City of Nodes was also an opportunity for me to finally pay homage to Amsterdam Realtime, a 2002 project by Esther Polak, Jeroen Kee and The Waag Society. The work equipped volunteers with GPS devices to track their movements over a two month period. The resulting "personal" maps were compared and composited as part of retrospective exploring 100 years of cartography in Amsterdam. Amsterdam Realtime is as a benchmark locative media project and an ancestor to later, influential work including Polak's MILK project (2005), the MIT SENSEable City Lab's Real Time Rome (2006) and Stamen Design's Cabspotting (2006).

TAGallery 021: City of Nodes also contains work by Tuur Van Balen, Gordan Savic, Tom Carden, the Insitute for Applied Autonomy, John Geraci, Mushon Zer-Aviv + Dan Phiffer + Kati London + Laila El-Haddad + Thomas Duc + Ran Tao + Charles Pratt, Shawn Micallef + James Roussel + Gabe Sawhney and David Rokeby.

You can view the full list of projects and annotations via this link.

This weekend I've been exploring my archived del.icio.us bookmarks in hopes of inspiring a new research project. In my perusal, I came across Occupation Game, a very clever installation by STEALTH.unlimited, a Rotterdam and Belgrade-based design collective. Part of from_&_to, a 2007 group show, Occupation Game took the exhibition history of the kunst Meran Merano arte gallery space (in Italy) and mapped the entire "spatial history" of the venue as a colourful, composite floor plan. STEALTH.unlimited reviewed a range of video and photographic archival material to determine the various configurations of the gallery over the entire history of the venue. An excerpt from their statement:

The documentation from different mentioned sources has been used to detect positions of artworks in the gallery spaces during its six year existence, and 24 exhibitions. Their outlines are 'drawn' with tape on the floor, each year in a different colour and each exhibition within one year with another line thickness (2002 - white,... 2007 - red, line thicknesses 9 mm to 75 mm). These accumulated ‘shadows’, or horizontally layered projections, map the total ‘history’ of artistic occupation of this space.

Between the flooring and the colourful line-work, Occupation Game almost reads as some kind of demented basketball court, no doubt accompanied by an unintelligible rule book. The piece speaks to the process of mapping, interrogates the architectural plan as a drawing convention and highlights the manner in which we can occupy the same space in different ways.

Occupation Game does not only engage the floor as a surface of demarcation but supplements this graphical information with related annotation on the walls of the gallery. This text provides a legend with which to read the intervention as a comprehensive text which documents the history of the space.

STEALTH.unlimited is comprised of Ana Dzokic and Marc Neelen and the duo has been collaborating since 2000. Their portfolio contains a range of provocative work dealing with the representation of space in a variety of different contexts.