Planetaki Planet Future Interactions

California City Expedition Update!

2010-03-19T21:47:51+00:00

For those of you who have signed up for the BLDGBLOG/Atlas Obscura "expedition to the geoglyphs of nowhere" trip tomorrow afternoon, March 20, part of the first annual international Obscura Day, I wanted to touch base briefly about what will actually occur out there.

First of all, I'm excited—I think this will be a lot of fun, and I look forward to meeting lots of you and exploring the abandoned geometry of a city that was never fully built in the first place (and about which you can read a bit more here). Even CNN is excited, writing that nearly "200 people have committed to a trip to California City, California, a planned city in the middle of the Mojave Desert that was never finished. It is now home to about 15,000 people, many of whom live within a surrounding network of crumbling roads, the vestiges of the abandoned city plan."

Second, it looks like at least 182 people have signed up for this, which I assume translates into roughly 75 cars making the journey—that's a substantial caravan. That being the case, our initial meet-up in the parking lot of the California City Rite Aid—as the current plan now stands—will actually be quite hard, if not impossible, to manage.

So I think we need to activate Plan B: we will still arrive via that Rite Aid (9482 California City Boulevard) at 1pm tomorrow, and you should still use it as a place to get something to drink or whatever else you might need (and there's a fast food place next door if you need a bathroom break), but if you do not actually speak to me, or to anyone else, for that matter—perhaps because you are a misanthrope attracted to abandoned cities in the desert—don't worry: just head out of the city, going northeast along Randsburg Mojave Road, onto 20 Mule Team Parkway. Here's a link to the most basic map of that road.

At that point, to be honest, you can just do whatever you're going out there to do: make films, take photographs, record sounds, write blog posts, Tweet things, interview people, do cartwheels, read Ballard and meet your future best friends. Fly remote-control airplanes with small nose-mounted cameras over the failed glyphs of a forgotten real estate dream. Build kites. Assemble simulated Iron Age tumuli in the dirt and gravel and dedicate them all to Anselm Kiefer. Establish a makeshift geothermal drilling operation and cause an earthquake. Call your mother.

This is not a guided tour, and we are not experts. This is a kind of documentarian flash mob, and together we'll produce the largest archive of contemporary California City photographs that exists anywhere in the world. We can start by filling out this Flickr group—but, again, feel absolutely free to do your own thing and save your own photographs wherever you choose to do so.

Finally, a brief bit of legalese—sorry, but I need to cover this stuff, too:

Obscura Day

So bring sunscreen, fill up your gas tank, wear comfortable shoes, don't forget some water, and I will see you out there in the middle of nowhere.

Links for 2010-03-18 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-19T07:13:24+00:00

Butterflies offer climate warning [SMH]
"SCIENTISTS have shown for the first time that man-made climate change is the direct cause of changes to the life cycle of a native Australian animal species. Researchers have found that because of a rise in temperature, caused by an increase in greenhouse gas emissions by humans, the common brown butterfly now emerges from its cocoon 10 days earlier than it did 65 years ago."
Sydney's population boom [SMH]
"WITH Sydney's population due to balloon 40 per cent in 30 years, new forecasts reveal the number of people in the south-west will more than double while those in the city centre will leap 60 per cent. A Department of Planning discussion paper on how Sydney will cope with the population explosion says that while the city's west will be expected to soak up most of the extra people, all 10 sub-regions will experience big growth. The numbers are based on new population forecasts which show Sydney will approach 6 million by 2036. Forecasts made five years ago projected a population of 5.3 million in 2031 but the latest document puts that number at 5.7 million."

Augmented Sculpture – Grosse8 & Lichtfront

2010-03-18T15:17:18+00:00

In January 2010 the Cologne based design agencies Grosse8 and Lichtfront presented their cross-media installation titled Augmented Sculpture. The core of the installation is a 2.5m tall wooden form that builds the screen for a 360° projection.

In constant transformation over a score by Jon Hopkins, the 2:32 minute performance is described by Svenja Kubler of Lichtfront as a “mirror of changing realities… a kind of real virtuality arises to confront virtual reality.” I’m not sure what that all means but I really like it.

www.lichtfront.com
www.grosse8.de

Federation Tower Moscow City District Tour

2010-03-18T15:22:20+00:00

Below is a virtual tour of the City District in Moscow with a focus on the Mirax Federation Tower:

The Federation Tower is a skyscraper currently under construction as part of the Moscow International Business Center. Construction of the towers began in 2003 and is ongoing - see the Wiki page for full details.

Two L.A. Evenings

2010-03-18T19:13:25+00:00

This is just a quick reminder to anyone in Los Angeles that Architizer's official L.A. launch party is tonight down at the A+D Museum's new location on Wilshire Boulevard. Stop by Architizer for more details—but it should be a beautiful evening to be out and about, and things kick off at 6:30pm.

This is a further reminder, as well, that Peter Cook of Archigram and Crab Studio will be throwing open the doors for a new exhibition over at SCI-Arc tomorrow night: London Eight features work by professors and their "proteges" from the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. Tomorrow night—Friday, March 19—also includes a group discussion, moderated by Peter Cook, with Yousef Al-Mehdari, Pascal Bronner, Johan Hybschmann, CJ Lim, marcosandmarjan, and Mark Smout and Laura Allen of Smout Allen. That's at 6pm. Hope to see you at both events!

Links for 2010-03-17 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-18T07:45:25+00:00

7 of the Best #GDC Slideshows for Indie Social Game Designers ...
Good material for video game designers

London Twitter Cloud Updated Movie

2010-03-17T20:24:56+00:00

An update movie on our data collection via Twitter in association with urbantick. The data covers a weekend period from Friday evening to Monday morning containing 380,000 individual tweets. Within these 60,000 were geo-referenced, tweeted by 5,500 individual users.

The movie clip uses Google Earth to visualise the data:

Music - Becoming Visible by Xanthe on MP3 Unsigned.

Note the 'tweets' at Heathrow and how you can almost pick out London's shape via the twitter cloud alone. The original movie can be found here.

Links for 2010-03-16 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-17T08:03:54+00:00

Sic Transit Gloria Ballardi [The Atlantic]
"My specific point is simply to note the fate of one structure that has a lasting role in world imaginative history. The larger point, for ongoing discussion, is the complicated relationship between a culture very aware of its thousands of years of history, and the ever-changing forces (eons of poverty, a decade of chaos in the Cultural Revolution, the dawning of a new kind of prosperity-driven chaos now) that have made people uninterested in, unsentimental about, or unable to preserve the physical artifacts of that history. I am glad that I saw this house in the "old days" -- a full 11 months ago. "

Brands at the Point of Transaction

2010-03-17T04:50:05+00:00

Credit card brands appearing directly on this Beverly Hills parking meter.

Most of us will have grown used to parking meters being an everyday part of our urban experience: something to feed; occasionally bump into; lean on; and on occasion when the people in uniforms are nowhere to be seen - joyfully hit. Despite it taking our coins we tend not to think of it as a point of sale terminal, it's simply too mechanical, too unreliable to be thought as such. Until now.

Now, the mere presence of the credit card brands stickered to its surface brings the transactional side of its functionality into sharp focus, the pedestrian part of our streets have just become a little bit more commercial.

A couple of ways this might evolve: the credit card company logos make a break from the confines of the shop door frames and continue their assault on our urban infrastructure - eventually becoming more ubiquitous than, well the humble parking meter; over time the stickers are removed because everybody learns that parking meters accept these two brands of credit card; and/or they popularise the use of parking meters as surface on which to tag/sticker graffiti.

Most people assume that touch based payment systems such as MasterCard's PayPass simplify the purchase process - you just Tap & Go ®. Except that the user still needs to know where to tap before they go and that there are now, and nearly always will be competitors offering similar touch based payment solutions at the same point of sale. The confusion comes from knowing which to touch, and the visual polution to our urban landscapes.

Expect to see more stickers for competing services added to this parking meter in the years to come.

Enjoy it whilst you can, parking meters will eventually go the way of the phone booth.

Paint Jobs I & II

2010-03-17T04:50:05+00:00

Mapheads will no-doubt appreciate the world's largest compass etched into the Mojave desert here.

Museum Plaza - Louisville, Kentucky

2010-03-16T16:48:17+00:00

The video below was produced for an exhibition featuring the proposed Museum Plaza building for Louisville, Kentucky.

Museum Plaza from Brooklyn Digital Foundry on Vimeo.

We like the integration of the digital into the model footage, especially with the traffic. That said, the pixelated faces of the workers in the background is perhaps slightly concerning, especially for a clip to be used in an exhibition.

Building design by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture; video direction and production by Brooklyn Digital. Music by Mouse on Mars (via O.M.A.).

Urban Research

2010-03-18T19:13:25+00:00

[Image: San Francisco, as seen from the cockpit of a 747; photo by Olivier Roux].

The last few days have been pretty awesome. We've been road-tripping up from Los Angeles to Reno for a dinner with author William Fox, Matthew Coolidge of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, landscape activist Lucy Lippard, Land Arts of the American West co-founder Bill Gilbert, cultural programmer Dorothy Dunn, Steve Wells of the Desert Research Institute (DRI), Libby Robin from the National Museum of Australia, and the staff of the Nevada Museum of Art's Center for Art + Environment; we spent the day yesterday on a tour of the DRI's ice core research facilities, its micro-atmospheric testing rooms (like characters in a Borges story, they once used their equipment to test the metal content in the ink letters of a Gutenberg Bible in order to identify those letters' near-millennium-old liquid chemistry), and the DRI's full-scale virtual reality room.

I have some hilarious and amazing photos of Matthew Coolidge wearing black VR goggles, holding remote controls in each hand, while Bill Gilbert and Lucy Lippard look on, equally engoggled and optically stunned, flying helter-skelter over virtual terrains to chase simulated forest fires up canyon walls, the replicant ground dropping out from beneath them as we ran straight off a cliff, and I hope to post those here soon.

We had amazing conversations, as well: we're all gearing up for a big conference next year in Reno, hosted by the Center for Art + Environment at the end of September 2011. That will definitely be something to keep your eye on if you're at all interested in landscapes, the hydrosciences, water rights, mythology and the American West, archaeoastronomy, the contested history (and future) of weather modification, offworld exploration, the anthropology of mining, nature writing in its broadest possible sense, and much more. We're putting together something really fantastic, to be honest, and you have 18 months to make plans to be there.

Even better, Nicola Twilley from Edible Geography and Mark Smout of Smout Allen were also on hand, winning stuffed animals together in the Circus Circus casino (Mark quipped that the casinos were simply "giant, ugly buildings with jewelry stuck on them, like earrings"), and so the three of us are now down in San Francisco, where we'll be picking up Sarah Rich tomorrow to drive down to LA—and I can hardly imagine a better group of people to hit the Californian road with. The roads outside Reno were eight-foot canyons of plowed snow till we hit the Bay Bridge and drove past Alcatraz blinking in the darkness.

[Image: Photo by George Steinmetz/CORBIS for National Geographic; via @stevesilberman].

In any case, if you're near San Francisco tonight, Tuesday, March 16, I'll be giving a talk at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) starting at 6pm. It costs $5, unfortunately, but it should be fun, and I'm looking forward to seeing a lot of old friends and colleagues again; as all of those friends and colleagues know, I wasn't a huge fan of San Francisco when I lived here, but it's good to be back in this rolling city of fog lines, abandoned bunkers that look like hills, tectonic trembling, lost ships, ghost streets, buried dunes, vinicultural microclimates, chemical weapons, a suicide bridge, and its artificially shrunken bay. I'll be talking about quarantine, The BLDGBLOG Book (which I'm thrilled to say has just gone into a second printing), the "Glacier/Island/Storm" studio and its accompanying blog-week experiment, blackouts, and more.

Links for 2010-03-15 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-16T08:52:50+00:00

Harmony - Procedural drawing tool
Very nice [via Marcus Trimble]
Goldberger [Studio 360]
Nice piece on the High Line in NYC
Lunch with the FT: Jacques Herzog [FT.com]
"I think we may be able to learn from China, Brazil and India, to see how society is able to transform." Interesting interview, not least about democracy. And football.

G.Basalla: The Evolution of Technology

2010-03-14T20:40:02+00:00

George Basalla’s book called “The Evolution of Technology” (Cambridge University Press, 1988) is another important resource for the game controller project. In this volume, the authors describes his theory of technological change based on the history of technology, economic history and anthropology. The whole book is driven by a strong theoretical perspective: the analogy between the evolution of technical objects and the evolutionary metaphor in order to show to that this metaphor can give insights otherwise unavailable to the history of technology

Basalla uses the term “evolution” as a metaphor “at the heart of all extended analytical and critical thought” and highlight it as useful to apply this concept from biological evolution to evolution in technology. Initially this analogy was used from technology to biology (to describe living organisms in mechanical terms) and then the other way around, as a way to arrange technical objects into “genera, species and varieties and proceed from this classificatory exercise to the construction of an evolutionary tree illustrating the connections between the various forms of mechanical life”. To him the difference is the following:

“the evolutionary metaphor must be approached with caution because there are vast differences between the world of the made and the world of the born. One is the result of purposeful human activity, the other the outcome of a random natural process. One produces a sterile physical object, the other a living being capable of reproducing itself. (…) Technological evolution has nothing comparable to the mass extinctions that are of interest to evolutionary biologists. History does not record any widespread, cataclysmic extinctions of entire classes of artifacts, although something similar might occur on a local level in remote communities or on isolated islands”

(The evolution of aboriginal weapons by Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers)

His theory of technological evolution is rooted in four broad concepts: diversity, continuity, novelty and selection.

Continuity
Based on a fair amount of examples, Basalla debunks the notion of “technological revolutions” and the mere existence of “heroic inventors”. To him, both are wrong and “key artifacts such as the steam engine, the cotton gin, or the transistor, emerged in an evolutionary fashion from their antecedents“. Of course some changes are more important than others but: (1) There’s always a continuity between techniques, (2) sometimes artifacts iteration is not based on other artifact but what Basalla calls “naturfacts”: artifacts created after the analogy with natural elements (see the example of Barbed Wire based on thorny fence made of short trees).

He explains the origins of the discontinuous argument with the following notions:

The loss or concealment of crucial antecedents: “the first automobiles were little more than 4-wheeled bicycles. Henry Ford called his car a “quadracycle”,
The emergence of the inventor as a hero: “Because heroic deeds are most often linked with revolutions, evolutionary explanations of technological change did not have a broad appeal. Nationalism also played a part in the 19th Century (…) The same exhibitions that glorified industrial progress, and the men who made it possible (…) A bizarre situation thus developed in which the heroic inventors of one country were scarcely acknowledged in another land”
The patent system: “All of patent law is based on the assumption that an invention is a discrete, novel entity that can be assigned to the individual who is determined by the courts to be its legitimate creator. (…) Such dissimulations are the result of a system that attempts to impose discontinuity on what is essentially a continuous phenomenon“
The confusion of technological and socio-economical change: the term “Industrial
“Revolution” seems to imply the technological artifacts that made it up was revolutionary. Instead, it was evolutionary!

(Evolution of spark catchers for train locomotive smokestacks)

Novelty
This chapter aimed at understanding how to account for differences and diversity in technological artifacts. In this part, the author substitutes the notion of “Homo Faber ” (”Man the maker”) to “Homo Ludens” (”Man the Player”) to show the role of play in innovation. He then describes various sources:

Fantasy and Play: technological dreams: “the machines, proposals and visions generated by the technological community (…) epitomizes the technologists’ propensity to go beyond what is technically feasible“, technological extrapolations: “conservative ventures well within the bounds of possibility, perhaps a step or two beyond current practice“, patents, bold and fantastic technological visions or popular fantasies: sci-fi, cartoons, fantastic machines…
Knowledge transfer by borrowing some aspects of a technology outside: cultural contacts because of imperialism, migration, trade, technology missions, industrial espionage, war.

In another chapter, he highlights how “human intervention can guide the variations toward a new artifact” and described the notion of skeuomorphs: “An element of design or structure that serves little or no purpose in the artifact fashioned from the new material but was essential to the object made from the original material“.

Selection
As defined by Basalla:

“Because there is an excess of technological novelty and consequently not a close lit between invention and wants or needs, a process of selection must take place in which some innovations are developed and incorporated into a culture while others are rejected (…) evolution by natural selection has no preordained goal, purpose or direction. This is not true for artificial selection as practiced by animal and plant breeders. Here criteria are established by the humans who select characteristics they consider worthy of preservation. (…) Variant artifacts do not arise from the chance recombination of certain crucial constituent parts but are the result of a conscious process in which human taste and judgment are exercised in the pursuit of some biological, technological, psychological, social, economical, or cultural goal.“

Some additional quotes about the notion of “needs”:

“According to functionalist anthropologists and sociobiologists, every aspects of culture, material and nonmaterial, can be traced directly to the satisfaction of a basic need. (…) Critics of the biological theory, however proposed a number of strong counterarguments. (…) We cultivate technology to meet our perceived needs, not a set of universal ones legislated by nature (…) the artifactual world would exhibit far less diversity if it operated primarily under the constraints imposed by fundamental needs. (…) a skyscraper is not simply a structure to protect people from the vagaries of the weather“

Why do I blog this? I was drawn to this book thanks to several discussion threads. Mostly the recurring chat about circulation of design choices with my neighbor Basile, as well as an exchange of tweets with Antonio Casilli who recommended the book. The material in there was highly useful in general and relevant to our project that aims at mapping the evolution of joypads. Given our interest in studying a “lineage” of technical artifacts, I was wary of using the “evolution” metaphor because of the underlying idea of progress that I did not want to imply.

Overall, three quotes about the use of the evolutionary metaphor are important for our investigation of artifacts evolution:

“I use the evolutionary analogy because of its metaphorical and heuristic power and caution against any literal applications, not the least, the process of speciation (…) On the most general level the evolutionary analogy serves as a useful organizing principle for studying technological change (…) A workable theory of technological evolution requires there be no technological progress in the traditional sense of the term but accepts the possibility of limited progress toward a carefully selected goal within a restricted framework“

The Dark Cities

2010-03-14T17:07:19+00:00

26 years ago, the Guggenheim hosted an exhibition of work by Will Insley, focusing particularly on Insley's project ONECITY.

[Image: ONECITY by Will Insley; image via The Nonist].

The New York Times described it at the time as depicting an "imaginary labyrinth 650 miles square." It is "'situated' between the Mississippi and the Rockies and consists of many 2 1/2-mile-square structures, each divided into an 'Over-building' and an 'Under-building' and each containing nine arenas."

[Images: ONECITY by Will Insley, via The Nonist].

The artist described his own interests as having "very little to do with advanced planning theories of the present" and no relation really at all to the ''utopias of the future, but rather with the dark cities of mythology, which exist outside of normal times in some strange location of extremity.''

[Images: ONECITY by Will Insley].

Courtesy of a comment left a while back on the sorely-missed site The Nonist, we learn that Insley once quipped: "what was absent from the ruin is often less marvelous than we imagine it to have been. The abstract power of suggestion (the fragment) is greater than the literal power of the initial fact. Myth elevates.’" These mythic fragments of a city that never was thus take their artistic power more from suggestion—of possible archaeologies and future extensions, impossible events this civilization of the plains might yet undergo—rather than any sense of intended realizability.

[Images: ONECITY by Will Insley].

Continuing from the New York Times, meanwhile:

It's clear, however, that the city's inhabitants are segregated into day people, wholesome types who study at home with their children by means of electronic devices, and night people. "Tattered ghosts in phosphorescent clothing," the night people sound a lot like the more Felliniesque denizens of the Lower East Side, being given to masks and elaborate makeup; they "mutter a lot" and "often carry around personal abstract structures" that they exchange "according to mysterious rituals." And while they have homes in the Over-building, they frequently sleep in the cubby holes of the Under-building, ignored by day people going about their business.ONECITY is a "masonite labyrinth," the article concludes, complete with "Wall Fragments" that have been "gridded with white or yellow lines and shaped like garment sections waiting to be sewn together." It's the city as dystopian clothing that we tailor to fit our future selves. Imagine a dusty third-floor walk-up in the Garment District of Manhattan, where precise plans for megastructures are produced on massive looms, needles and yawn moving to a hypnotic drone in semi-darkness. Architectural invention by way of sewing diagrams.

In any case, you can see a few more images of Insley's Michael Heizer-like creation of excavations and voids over at The Nonist.

Links for 2010-03-13 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-14T10:29:48+00:00

Thank You [Newspaper Club]
"Wow. Tonight the category winners of the Design Museum Designs Of The Year awards were announced. We’re surprised and delighted to announce that we won the award in our category, Graphics." Fabulous, well done.

Empty Paris

2010-03-12T21:38:32+00:00

Pruned posted an image the other day by artist Nicolas Moulin (more of whose work can be seen over at Vulgare). Looking into Moulin's work further, however, I came across another series he produced a little more than a decade ago called Vider Paris. Here, we see Paris transformed into an abandoned maze of lifeless streets. Every building is sealed shut behind a seamless, Berlin Wall-like concrete monolith.

[Images: From Vider Paris (1998-2001) by Nicolas Moulin, courtesy of Galerie Chez Valentin].

Vider Paris "is a series of computer-altered images of the streets of Paris," we read in a PDF portfolio of Moulin's work. "All traces of life are removed from the images: vegetal, urban furnishings, pedestrians, cars, etc." Further, "all the buildings are sealed with sheets of concrete up to the second ﬂoor."

[Images: From Vider Paris (1998-2001) by Nicolas Moulin, courtesy of Galerie Chez Valentin].

The effect is oddly exhilarating; whether because these images have the appearance of being stills pulled from a much longer video, or simply because of their haunting, Ballardian overtones, Moulin's vision of an empty Paris seems tailor-made for Hollywood art directors or even for someone sketching out ideas at Thunder Game Works.

A dream of apocalypse, twelve centuries from now, when you wander into the concretized canyons of a Paris with almost no signs of life, its skies grey, the barest trace of weeds growing up through cracks in rain-filled gutters. There are sounds of distant animals rustling, the city's rhomboid geometries now animated by unpredictable acoustic effects. You see smoke somewhere, but it could be miles away. Looking for clean water, and a place to sleep before the sun goes down, you walk onward into the city core.

(This is now the second post I've written from an airplane... flying somewhere over SW Nebraska).

Open

2010-03-18T23:14:42+00:00

Now that Landscapes of Quarantine is up and open for view—and will be until April 17—we're off for a quick vacation. The opening night was amazing; thanks to everyone who came out, to everyone who helped set up, and to everyone whose work appears in the show. Thanks, especially, to Glen Cummings of MTWTF for a fantastic exhibition design, and to Josh Hearn and César Cotta for sticking around all week for 3am vinyl installations, multiple coats of paint, and more.

[Image: Outside-in: looking into Brian Slocum's panel installation (left) and Jeffrey Inaba's/C-LAB's temporary sidewalk pavilions, built from Tyvek and blown air, at Storefront for Art and Architecture; photo by Nicola Twilley].

I'm obviously biased, as the show's co-curator, but the works on display are awesome. They are:

Pages 179–187

Joe Alterio

Q-CITY: An Investigation

Front Studio

MAP 002 QUARANTINE

David Garcia Studio

Did We Build The Frontier To Keep It Closed?

Scott Geiger

Field Notes from Quarantine

Katie Holten

Hotel III

Camp II

Lab IV

Cell V

Mimi Lien

Cordon Sanitaire

Kevin Slavin

Context/Shift

Brian Slocum

Containing Uncertainty

Smudge Studio

NYCQ

Amanda Spielman

Quick

Richard Mosse

Thermal Scanner and Body Temperature Alert System

Daniel Perlin

Precious Isolation: A Pair of Invasive Species

Thomas Pollman

And, for the opening night party only, Suck/Blow, a pair of sidewalk pavilions constructed from Tyvek and pressurized air, by Jeffrey Inaba/C-LAB with former director of Storefront for Art and Architecture, Joseph Grima.

[Image: Photo by Emiliano Granado].

The show is already getting some great press, such as these articles and previews in Azure, Dwell, Artinfo.com, Fast Company, and SEED. Pruned, mammoth, dpr-barcelona, and Life Without Buildings have also all added interests of their own.

I've included a few photos here, meanwhile, but will be posting more about the show once the next few days of travel are done.

I should also briefly add that this is the first post I've ever written while flying in a Wifi-enabled airplane—in this case, over the American midwest—riding through invisible geographies of air, turbulence bobbling us side to side in an experiential, transparent plate tectonics of the sky.

[Image: Photo by Emiliano Granado].

So thanks again for coming out for the exhibition opening. Regular posts will resume soon.

[Images: All photos, except the last five (two of which are by Nicola Twilley and Stacy Fisher), by Emiliano Granado (who appears, with tripod, in the final image)].

Links for 2010-03-11 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-12T17:04:34+00:00

Detroit: the last days [The Guardian]
"Like The Passenger, it's hard to believe what we're seeing. The vast, rusting hulks of abandoned car plants, (some of the largest structures ever built and far too expensive to pull down), beached amid a shining sea of grass. The blackened corpses of hundreds of burned-out houses, pulled back to earth by the green tentacles of nature. Only the drunken rows of telegraph poles marching away across acres of wildflowers and prairie give any clue as to where teeming city streets might once have been."

Paris metro interactive map

2010-03-11T13:15:33+00:00

On the most interesting “static” map I’ve ever seen is the “indicateur d’itinéraires” located on some of the metro station in Paris (this one is close to the entrance of Ligne 1 in Paris Gare de Lyon). You press the number of the metro station that you want to reach with the keyboard below and the suggested route appears displayed on the lights on the board.

Although some folks think there’s a small person in there, the inner mechanism is closer to “Operation” with lights. Very low-bandwidth and based on electricity.

This device is actually called PILI, which stands for “plans indicateurs lumineux d’itinéraires” (Light-Based Indicator Plan for Itinerary”) and has been implemented in 1937. A simple and straight-forward way to get both a general overview as well as information about where you want to go. It’s intriguing to see how people from these times designed a map-based system without any complex display technology, and it’s very efficient.

Why do I blog this? Going to the French capital quite often, I love to spend some time observing how people interact with these machines. There are lots of things to notice, see for example:

User’s proximity to the device, which depends on their purpose (getting and overview, looking for a specific route).
The flexibility of usage: the device is very big and it allows people to use it in various ways altogether. If a person looks for a route, it doesn’t prevent others to observe the map and look for their information (without necessarily using the buttons).

Interestingly, I found it much more efficient than the 21st century version that you can see below. Even though it has different features, this new version is rather small (intended to be used by only one person) and I generally rarely see people using it.

Unity 3.0 Announced

2010-03-10T14:24:38+00:00

Hopefully we are about to dive back into the Unity game engine for a truly exciting project, as such the glimpse of Unity 3 opens up a number of possibilities:

Dark Unity from Unity3D on Vimeo.

As soon as we are back using Unity we will of course post the usual update movies and tutorials. Keep an eye on http://unity3d.com/ for full details.

Thanks go to Chester of http://associated-architects.com/ for the link.

London Twitter Cloud

2010-03-09T11:00:29+00:00

Regular readers will know we have been logging data in 12 cities via our Tweet-o-Meter, its still early days but the results for a weekend in London are intriguing.

The data covers a weekend period from Friday evening to Monday morning containing 380,000 individual tweets. Within these 60,000 were geo-referenced, tweeted by 5,500 individual users.

In terms of density the focus is on central London with local hotspots as the weekend progresses, around Kings Cross and Old Street. There is also a noticable trace along the main transport routes into and out of town, noting that we seem to be tweeting while on the move. The clip below details the visualisation in Google Earth:

Music - 'Social Awkwardness' by Xanthe over on unsigned bands.

The clip reveals a message cloud rising and hovering above London as a time-space aquarium where the time is plotted as the height information. Interestingly Google Earth is becoming the visualiser of choice for such data sets, the combination of location, imagery with the ability to view by time makes it a formidable engine for data visualisation.

Thanks go to urbantick who converted the data via a custom VB script.

Links for 2010-03-08 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-09T10:42:12+00:00

The battle of Britain's libraries [The Guardian]
"Why should we save local libraries? For me, it's because they do something cherishable yet utterly incomprehensible to the cost-cutters. Like public parks, libraries are particularly valuable in capitalist cityscapes, where you are incessantly encouraged to keep moving, keep spending – and don't even think about doing anything economically unproductive. (Figures released by the Valuation Office Agency last month showed that since 1997 there has been a 1,150% rise in the number of lap-dancing clubs in Britain, and a 6% decline in the number of libraries.)" Snitty article, though his heart's in the right place occasionally. 'Saving' libraries is easy cf. State Library of Queensland. Absolutely straightforward, and they're more important than ever.
The Library as Digital Creation Center and Urban Informatics Processor [Spatial Sustain]
"The new digital resource center at the State Library of Queensland envisions the future library as a place for creativity for, “art, design, gaming, engineering, sound, science, craft and architecture.” The idea of the new facility called the Edge is to foster connections for multidisciplinary design work and to foster innovation. The $7.9 million construction project has created a multipurpose space that includes sound and image recording labs and meeting and function rooms, all equipped with high end digital equipment. The director of the center has an idea for the center to become a hub for urban informatics – the study of how people interact with urban spaces by tapping information and data of our digital lives." This is the building I've been doing the strategic design on for the last 18 months.
North Tyneside high street 'revived' by fake shop front [BBC News]
"Fake businesses are to be used to lessen the impact of the recession on high streets in North Tyneside. With 140 empty shops in the borough, council bosses think they have come up with a unique way of ensuring shopping areas remain as vibrant as possible." This is pathetic. Freeing them up for some productive use other than retail would be the thing to do.
Convergence at the Edge |[The Australian]
"THE 21st-century library will not just be a repository for information, but also a place for "creating, experimenting, connecting", a place where you can go not only to find out about but also use digital technologies to create "art, design, gaming, engineering, sound, science, craft and architecture". The State Library of Queensland recently opened its new digital resource centre, the Edge, an Australian first and one of only a very few such public-access, government-funded spaces in the world." And here's more on the new building I've helped create over the last year or so.
Residents take control of bays rebirth [SMH]
"BARANGAROO is being hailed as Sydney's biggest urban renewal project but just one bay to the west is a maze of harbourfront land four times its size and almost as ripe for development. As Sydney's shipping fleet has migrated south to Botany Bay, it has left behind more than 80 hectares of largely disused waterfront; long sweeps of emptying wharves, an old power station and the Rozelle marshalling yards. Sharing four kilometres of harbour foreshore, White Bay, Rozelle Bay, Blackwattle Bay and Johnstons Bay await an inevitable rebirth now that their past life is fast ending and the harbour is moving to its post-industrial future."

Flash Quarantine

2010-03-09T18:23:53+00:00

[Image: Landscapes of Quarantine opens tonight, March 9, at 7pm in New York City].

With the help of César Cotta and Joshua Hearn, and based on a design by Glen Cummings, we installed a massive, reflective vinyl wall graphic last night at 2am outside Storefront for Art and Architecture—and it looks amazing. Flash photographs make the city disappear and giant vinyl letters float in space.

[Image: Landscapes of Quarantine in New York City].

Ready or not, then, and half-covered in paint, our jeans ruined, in need of new shoes, dehydrated, our exhibition participants recently returned from Uganda and the eastern Congo with photographs and a film, mounting illuminated comic book manuscripts on the wall, exploring nuclear-waste repositories as symbolic geological centers of a future world, diagramming parallel split cities with quarantine spaces merely an arm's length away, and opening the facade panels of the gallery to allow bubbles and bulges and Tyvek screens to confuse the outside line with the street, and more, we will be there tonight, unloading dozens of cases of beer donated by Brooklyn Brewery, to celebrate this long project coming together at last in an exhibition space for everyone to see.

Stop by at 7pm tonight, March 9, if you're around and say hello—or drop in on Storefront for Art and Architecture during its regular opening hours any time before April 17. Orange will after-image through your brain for days to come...

Wasted Lhasa Youth

2010-03-09T07:12:52+00:00

But at least they're on target. Fairground target practice on the outskirts of Lhasa.