Bowyer is a new company by Vadik Marmeladov, Sergey Filippov, a man known as “The Client”, and Ilya Kolganov. In this interview we talk through their first collaborations, philosophy, process, commercial projects, and future plans.

“Craftmanship is attention to details. Luxury is attention to unnecessary details.”

Typical phone games and apps retain a certain average appearance with a target on mass-market appeal. Design is usually not a priority, and as a result, often mediocre. Unlike the fashion industry, for instance, app development is young enough that nichés have not yet developed fully. Seeing this gap in the industry, Bowyer wished to target luxury markets.

“About 2 years ago while working on a commercial website we came up with a simple app for a luxury brand,” Vadik explained. The screen would be completely black, and through in-app purchases, individual diamonds could be bought and populated on the screen. The concept would be a reflection of physical diamonds: holding no real value other than the inherent scarcity and cost of ownership.

Continue reading.... An Interview with Bowyer – UIDesign + Funware + Luxury [Theory, iPad, Interview]

(This essay was commissioned by Centre national des arts plastiques for Graphisme en France 2012)

- Edited by Casey Reas and Chandler McWilliams -

Technical mastery and innovation are part of the rich history of visual design. The printing press is the quintessential example of how a shift in design technology can ripple through society. In the Twenty-First Century, innovation in design often means pushing the role of computers within the visual arts in new directions. Writing software is something that’s not typically associated with the work of a visual designer, but there’s a growing number of designers who write custom software as a component of their work. Over the last decade, through personal experience, We’ve learned many of the benefits and pitfalls of writing code as a component of a visual arts practice, but our experience doesn’t cover the full spectrum. Custom software is changing typography, photography, and composition and is the foundation for new categories of design practice that includes design for networked media (web browsers, mobile phones, tablets) and interactive installations. Most importantly, designers writing software are pushing design thinking into new areas. To cut to the core of the matter, we asked a group of exceptional designers two deceptively simple questions:

1. Why do you write your own software rather than only use existing software tools?

2. How does writing your own software affect your design process and also the visual qualities of the final work?

Continue reading.... Designing Programs [Theory]

Mitchell Whitelaw, #climatedata proposal (2009)

One of the most articulate and accessible voices within the generative art scene is undoubtedly the Canberra-based scholar/practitioner Mitchell Whitelaw. Given his relative (internet) silence over the last year, news of an interview—conducted by Paul Prudence, no less—published in the most recent issue of Neural magazine, is cause for minor celebration. Mitchell posted the transcript of this conversation to his blog last night and it is noteworthy for several reasons. First, the opening response about the utopian nature of software art acknowledges some ideological underpinnings that are seldom discussed – and Paul’s query as to “where is the dystopian software art?” is both provocative and on point. Secondly, the comments about look vs. process and how even the glossiest eye candy often embodies a “narrative of systems” is a useful means of considering the ‘performative’ capabilities of generative art. Finally, Mitchell’s description of algorithm popularity as ‘a memetic ecology unto itself’ is exactly the kind of meta-commentary that is desperately needed in (generally) uncritical software art circles.

A particularly sharp passage on system design and pedagogy:

The link there for me is a sense of “procedurality” or “processuality”. In Casey Reas’ work we can see a strong relationship between computational and non-computational procedures such as those of Sol LeWitt. In teaching programming to designers, I have students write and execute a LeWitt style procedure, with pencil and paper. Digital generative systems are just formal procedures, executed by machines. Treating processes as human-executable helps unpack the black boxes of generative systems mentioned earlier, and hopefully reveal them as contingent and hackable.

This notion of “human executable” procedures is a handy frame of reference in introducing agency into system design…

Otherwise: the joy of materiality. Generative art and design covets the lush tangibility of traditional media; and with the wave of interest in fabrication we are seeing ever more generative work realised in “off-screen” forms. The challenge then, for pasty code-artist types, is to match the craft skills of hands-on makers in realising the work.

…and serves as a perfect segue into Mitchell’s thinking about transmateriality (craft/making/material culture). Read the full conversation between Mitchell and Paul here.

Whilst we are pretty much all aware of the implications of 3-D printing as a process of making any arbitrary object at the push of a button, it is exactly what living organisms have been up to since the invention of multicellular life.

Designers at IDEO have teamed up with scientists at the Lim Lab at the University of California, San Francisco to envision a “provocation” (that’s designer-ese for thought experiment) in which they explore the possibilities of exploiting known properties of microorganisms to literally “grow” the products we use every day.

What is particularly interesting about these future scenarios is where we once thought about computer systems that evolve through immense network of both physical and conceptual parameters, where one influence the other as in the case of Nervous System’s process of “growing objects”, the process of printing may eventually evolve into processes of actual physical growing. These two systems, of digital creation and of the biological one may eventually merge, creating an ecology of both digital and physical networks that communicate and feed of one another.

“One day if we understand how to program [living organisms,] we can encode things beyond software–we could encode materiality” says Carey. “That’s already happening in nature, but we have no idea how to do that ourselves.”

Time to move away from mimicry?

Read more on Fast Company >Training Bacteria To Grow Consumer Goods

More on this topic at syntheticaesthetics.org

Visual programming languages, languages that create programs by the manipulation of graphical elements, as opposed to specifying lines of text, have seen an increased popularity in recent years both in audio and video synthesis. Some of the more well-known environments, ones that are regularly used for projects that are featured on CAN,  include VVVV (real-time motion graphics and physical IO)  MAX/MSP (real-time music and multimedia), Pure Data (ostensibly an open source equivalent of MAX/MSP) and Quartz Composer (video synthesis for MAC).

Visual programming owes its many of its conventions for the representation of information and programs from Flowcharts – a lesser used term for these kinds of environments is Data-flow Programming. VPL’s date back to the late 60′s. A good example is the GraIL system (GRaphical Input Language) a flowchart language entered on a graphics tablet developed by the Rand Corporation in 1969.

DMX-LED Patches – Kalle Karlen

Continue reading.... Patch Schematics – The Aesthetics of Constraint / Best Practices [Theory]

I recently had pleasure of meeting and talking to Tyler Flynn of the A.N.D project about my CAN adventures. Likewise Scott Snibbe and James Alliban reveal what inspires them and how they got involved with doing what they do. It’s a long read and definitely a worthy one…

What’s being created today for the iPhone and iPad is mind-blowing. It’s a glorious realization that we are now in a place where digital technology and art together are so inclusive and generative. But who creates apps, what are they, how do they happen? The three minds below are no strangers to this glowing new phenomenon. Follow A.N.D as we converse with all three of them, tracing the expansion of this field, spotlighting the aspects that make it charged and, perhaps, the greatest recent addition to our digital world.

Here are few extracts:

There are a number of publications and online media that emphasize this concept of visual culture, which drives me up the wall. It says “it’s okay to be drawn to something visually without questioning theirposition of reference or how they’ve come about.” - Filip Vsnjic

I hope to get to the stage where people are building constructs, leaving trails in the cities they wander, where people could use the city as a generated art gallery. - James Alliban

Writing has always been my favorite medium because it’s the least encumbered by any limits. Programming is probably second because you’re still just only limited by your technical ability and imagination. But writing is even more unfettered and I think more difficult than programming. - Scott Snibbe

Read more on the A.N.D project.

[Eric Fischer / Locals and Tourists #45 (GTWA #133): Los Angeles and Pasadena / 2010]

A month ago in Minneapolis, nestled amidst the brilliant programming of the inaugural Eyeo Festival, Mark Hansen organized a panel on data visualization and social justice that brought veteran designers Laura Kurgan, Michael Migurski and Lisa Strausfeld together to discuss visual communication, representation and agency. The conversation that ensued was extremely provocative and challenged many of the basic assumptions underlying data visualization’s capacity as a polemical or exploratory medium. This critical engagement was perhaps best summarized by Kurgan when she reminded her fellow panelists and the audience that it is dangerous to confuse data with knowledge. Later, Migurski described his optimism in thinking about “people as pixels” within these representational systems whereby designers have the opportunity to highlight spatial inconsistencies and (ideally) engender engagement and civic action. Migurski summarized this question of responsibility in a blog post in advance of the session as “do we reveal new things about society by viewing data, or do we bend society into new forms by choosing data that can be viewed?” This introspection was timely, not only within the milieu of a creative coding summit, but as a reminder of the far-reaching implications of the visual representation of urban space.(1)

Continue reading.... Mediated Cityscapes 03: DIY Cartography [Theory]

An artist with a background in DJ-ing, electronic music, and visuals for clubs in Japan and now all over the world, Daito Manabe tends to make virtual things real, rather than vice versa. One of the things that I find most compelling in the work of Daito is the materiality, the viscerality of the means of transmitting his bits. As Mitchell Whitelaw points out we can aestheticize transmateriality, that is, the coolness of the not-there, of the purely momentary electric buzz, but there’s no getting around the fundamental essence of a physical entry point. For me to be aware, I must engage my body and the material of the world that lies right beyond it.

What’s so refreshing about Daitos work, particularly in contrast to many North American computational artists, is his willingness to engage the body as a canvas, as a site of action, rather than the engine of action. He might be one of the most interesting post-screen artists working today quite simple because of the canvas on which he’s chosen to work and the playfulness with which he approaches the body as a canvas. You can’t help but notice how for a time computational art seemed to focus on the digitalization and augmentation of space and physical properties. With a rash of compelling works that focus on the rematerialization of digital space, the reverse seems to be gaining momentum. Just as we were all once surprised by the digital mimicking the analog, familiar digital tropes now surprise when revealed in analogue form: real, actuated, physical stuff, moving around.

A projection is not just a projection onto a blank screen, instead, he paints the wall with phosphorescent paint and illuminates it with a laser to paint a transient image. To write a sentence or draw a hand, he arms a robotic arm with an automatic BB gun and shoots it through a sheet of paper.

It’s an interesting thing about the aesthetics of these surfaces: they’re really about not using the traditional screen even though I’m only aware of them because they are on a traditional screen. Without Youtube, I wouldn’t even know the name Daito Manabe, and in all likelihood neither would you. But his videos that he puts up are more than just documentation, more than a simple process video to demonstrate technical considerations, background, the specifics of a set-up, nor are they the slick depth-of-field heavy mini-advertisements of so many design agencies. There’s very little hidden magic or un-necessary polish in both his performances and his videos. An electrode to the face is rather difficult to miss, its effects are unmistakable, and that’s part of the point: if you’re at all empathetic, you can feel it too, even from the audience or from half a globe away in front of your computer.

There’s another un-mistakable reference floating around in Daitos work: the club. One could imagine a dance floor as a fluid particle simulation: forces inspire bodies, particles influence one another, density and energy increase and decrease in patterns. It’s the perfect territory for a computational artist. A crowd of women with miniaturized versions of club light displays walking around Tokyo looks like a club. The synchronized bodies of Particles At YCAM resemble nothing so much as either choreographed dancers or generated flocking fireflies. The music is absent but its pattern can almost be heard, synaesthetically. What’s interesting is that these objects could very well be virtual, but they simply aren’t. Their movement could be played out in a purely virtual plane, but it isn’t, and that’s what makes them so more interesting. What’s a wave without a medium? What’s a beat in a club without people to listen? His history of working as a DJ and VJ makes perfect sense: in few places is computational technology as visceral, as embodied, as in making music.

“from hardware hacking to modular LEDs and custom software, they participate in what might be called “expanded computing”, using the malleability of digital media to reactivate its presence – and thus our presence, too – in the world of things.” – Mitchell Whitelaw

In his excellent essay “After the Screen” Mitchell Whitelaw talks to as post-screen imaging: making images on things that remind us that they’re in a single place and that, despite our illusions to the contrary, in a material sense, we are too. In Daitos bodily works and his physical works the pixels are not simply pixels, they are automata that speak to one another. His physical pixels swarm and synchronize, his human computer interfaces play their people; as in Stelarc, though perhaps in a less frightening way, the machine drives the human. Much of the early cybernetic performance art emphasized the strangeness of a human and machine co-creating a being. It was scary and weird. The lightness of Daitos work comes from his playfulness. I always get the sense that it isn’t so much that cyborgs are weird, just that his cyborgs are a little weird. When he uses the face as a solenoid of sorts, an actuated surface, it’s very similar to things that architects and material engineers design for and dream of. Just made ever-so-slightly weird. Another word might be “quirky”. But that minimizes what I think is the importance and the curiosity of the things that Daito makes. More than anything else, his work reminds us that the promise of hyper-surfaces and hyper-actuated technological skins, is at the moment only delivered by us and our bodies with all the strange, funny, and sometimes uncomfortable corollaries that implies.

One of the interesting cultural by-products to have emerged from the American assassination of Osama bin Laden is the public’s sudden fascination with situation rooms. As noted by Alexia Tsotsis on TechCrunch last week, the photograph of Obama and his national security team taken during the raid has received millions of page views and inspired both serious commentary and dumb meme photoshop tomfoolery. Additionally, given the gravity of the action and the secrecy that allowed it to be executed so seamlessly, the media has revelled in celebrating every minute detail of the planning and management of the operation.

I’d been meaning to plug a project proposal by the Argentine artist Gustavo Romano that will be developed at the upcoming Visualizar’11 workshop in Madrid. Considering its mandate, it is undoubtedly the perfect moment to discuss this venture and I think it will serve as a useful point of entry into a related discussion on the visual representation of conflict and power relations.

Given the theme for this year’s edition of Visualizar is “Understanding Infrastructures”, the projects that have been selected for developmentexamine a range of supply chain, consumption and finance-related topics. The above image represents Gustavo Roman’s proposed The Psychoeconomy War Room Table (PWRT), a tangible interface for exploring global economic data. PWRT will utilize the open source computer-vision framework driving theReactable Live! musical instrument to create a collaborative workspace for exploring (quantified) international relations. Roman outlines the goals for his project as

… try[ing] to display the relationship between two or more countries in the world in terms of some specific social and economic variables. The proposal builds on the metaphor of the table of the War Room, the room where are discussed possible tactical moves in a military confrontation. Using a multitouch surface,reacTIVision and fiducials, persons using the table may choose to place different flags on stage of the global economy and they can visualize the relationships between these countries. We will use data related to flows of assets (goods and financial capital), human flows (migration and tourism), energy flows (fuel and food), information flows (corporate media and alternative media). We will collect the data from public websites like the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, the CIA, etc.

I think this is an utterly brilliant idea and look forward to seeing the proof-of-concept interface that Roman and his team prototype next month. Imagine being able to manipulate the contents of the World Bank data catalogue and browse the interdependencies between nations – it would be both engaging and illuminating. Given the project is currently only an elevator pitch, I’ll make a point of mentioning the work that emerges when the results of the Visualizar workshop are posted online later this summer. It is worth noting that PWRT is part of Roman’s larger Psychoeconomy project, an artistic platform for exploring global issues.

For those within striking distance of Madrid, you might consider applying to work on PWRT or any of the other selected projects. Medialab-Prado is accepting applications through June 12, the workshop runs over the second half of June.

The still of Dr. Strangelove in the lower right corner of Roman’s PWRT collage gets me thinking about how depictions of these strategic ‘command’ spaces have evolved over the decades. The above image is a still from Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s opulent 1963 film Cleopatra that hypothesizes what ‘real time naval imaging’ might have looked like during the Battle of Actium (31 BCE). For those unfamiliar with the downfall of Mark Antony, the military leader sailed his flotilla into a trap set by his nemesis Octavian (who had obtained vital intelligence from a defecting general). As Antony’s naval forces were decimated the strategists remotely monitoring the battle at their ‘war room table’ set the appropriate ship models aflame. The interesting thing about this fictional case study is—as it is pre-screen—it functions as a tangible interface…

…and the scale models of Cleopatra bring us back to the inescapable reference of wargaming. The cleverest of the anonymous internet situation room photo edits was a tight crop of the intensely-focused Obama wielding a Playstation controller alongside a Brigadier General hunched over a laptop; drone mishaps notwithstanding, perhaps this is our caricature of warfare for 2011? The absurd addition of a gaming controller brings to mind a 2006 sound bite by Henry Kissinger where he described the (pre-makeover) White House situation room as “uncomfortable, unaesthetic and essentially oppressive” – in this image, wargaming is pure playbour.

I still contend that the most engaging game mechanics that I’ve encountered is the visualization of empire in Sid Meier’s Civilization series. The above screen capture is the city management interface from Civilization V, where you see the players’ borders butting up and flowing around those of their neighbours as well as detailed informatics that reveal the yield of the landscape and chart out where expansion will occur. There is sufficient depth in Civ that competing nations are required to develop extremely nuanced trade and diplomatic relations to acquire needed luxury items and natural resources while forging strategic alliances. However, the game kind of falters in failing to represent these complex flows of goods, materials and capital visually – at times it can be quite difficult to determine exactly what is going on. This is why I’m so fascinated by the PWRT as it aspires to provides a handy interface for exploring the global economy as a field of vectors rather than relying on stale geographic representations of borders and trade routes. In Newsgames, Ian Bogost, Simon Ferrari and Bobby Schweizer describe this kind of open engagement as an exploratory graphic that

…shows data that is meant to be synthesized by the user independently of the creator’s expectations. Both [Edward] Tufte and Benjamin Shneiderman encourage the use of information graphics to offer multiple levels of granularity for maximum flexibility. Tools or controls allow the reader to arrange, filter, or zoom data.

Can the complexity of international relations be distilled down to a work surface or game environment? Presumably, but exploring this kind of data can only be as revelatory as the interface it is delivered in.

–

About this article: The Psychoeconomy War Room Table (And Other Situational Awareness Vignettes) first appeared on serialconsign.com on 2011-05-11.

About the Author: Greg J. Smith a Toronto-based designer and researcher with interests in media theory and digital culture. Extending from a background in architecture, his research considers how contemporary information paradigms affect representational and spatial systems. Greg is a designer at Mission Specialist, blogs at Serial Consign, writes a column on emerging technology for Current Intelligence and is a managing editor of the digital arts publication Vague Terrain. He currently teaches in the CCIT program (University of Toronto/Sheridan College) and at OCAD University.

In 1978 Rem Koolhaas (wiki) published Delirious New York, a “retroactive manifesto” that wildly reframed Manhattan through a rigorous analysis of the street grid, the skyscraper and congestion while excavating the history of the “mythical island”. A few years later Ridley Scott’s film adaptation of Blade Runner (wiki) explored the limits of the human condition against a backdrop of decaying art deco, flickering neon and unchecked corporatism. Syd Mead’s legendary production design for this film induced a sense of speculative nostalgia that simultaneously demonstrates bleak skepticism towards the promise of the future while pining for a romanticized vision of the Los Angeles of yesteryear.(1) Delirious New York and Blade Runner clearly illustrate how scholarly research and cinema can selectively engage broad historical trajectories and recompile new narratives from fragments and ephemera to fundamentally alter the mythos surrounding particular urban environments – it is rare that we get to enjoy meditations on ‘the city’ that are so capably crafted.

In thinking about creative projects that explore memory and the city, one would be hard-pressed to find a more influential (or ambitious) work than Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. This masterwork was a meticulous examination of 19th century shopping arcades and Parisian city life largely driven by urban exploration, a reverence for the aesthetics of the poet Charles Baudelaire and countless hours spent at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Benjamin obsessed over the project from 1927 through his untimely death in 1940 and when his unfinished manuscript was published in the 1980s, it was widely heralded as both a comprehensive documentation of the cultural and economic changes caused by the industrial revolution and a prototype for free form historical research.

Built during the 1820s and 30s, the Parisian shopping arcades were exciting and progressive spaces. Utilizing state of the art glass and iron construction technology, gas lighting and heating, these ‘interior avenues’ reconstituted the complexity of street life as an architectural project. Never before had such a variety goods and services been under one roof, and this density of stimulus must have been utterly intoxicating. Anne Friedberg has described the significance of this visual overload as follows:

“Hats, umbrellas, gloves, and cloth materials were displayed in shop windows and vitrines as if they were antiquated objects in a natural history museum. The passage was not a museum or a warehouse, but a sales space where the purchase was a transaction endowed with near-philosophic significance. Commodities were transformed into souvenirs, memory-residue of the already passé.”(2)

The Arcades Project was a sustained investigation of this ‘theatre of purchase’ that uses these retail districts as a lens through which to consider the history of aesthetics, economic and social relations, technology and urban design of Paris. Given this contextualization, an inevitable question arises: in an era of increasingly mediated urban experience, what strategies and tactics can we glean from Benjamin’s preoccupation with the arcades? This query is best answered by turning our attention to the structure and organization of his manuscript.

[The Arcades Project, overview]

It only takes a few moments of leafing through the Arcades Projects to realize the text is far from a standard historical treatise. Acting as an archivist rather than an essayist, Benjamin examined Paris through collecting short fragmentary thoughts and ‘filing’ them according to a broad thematic taxonomy. Iron construction, flâneurism, photography and fashion were all used as ciphers for understanding the day to day street life and broader architectural and economic transformations that occurred during the 19th century. Many of these snippets of text were romantic, enigmatic observations penned by the author, but the vast majority of this content were excerpts culled from literature and poetry, journals, newspapers, social theory and historical documents. Benjamin’s experimental technique was bold and nonlinear and could be considered as anticipating the rhetoric of hypertext and speculating how a sampling-based approach to historical scholarship might play out. Sifting through the hundreds of entries in the tome is a revelatory experience, in many ways Benjamin created what can only be described as a meta-guidebook.

The Arcades Project is a key precedent for thinking about the passage of time and the city because it so capably leverages bits of granular content to delineate a broad range of interrelated social phenomena. Benjamin created a system that demands a data miner rather than a reader, and while this kind of media artifact was an anomaly at the time, it is now completely commonplace – look at how services like EveryBlock schematize news and events. A contemporary city dweller might use the new foursquare recommendation engine to find a restaurant to meet friends at for dinner, plot directions on a GPS device for the drive across town, use a RFID passcard to access a toll highway, dine under the watchful eye of a CCTV network and then upload geotagged photographs of the proceedings to flickr. In varying degrees, we are all now authoring these inventories of interactions across public and mediated space – this is before we even broach the topic of open municipal data and the transparency and the civic engagement it engenders. The generation and management of metadata and media libraries is now routine and this is the backdrop against which artists, designers and scholars develop tools to represent and call into question the nature of urban experience. Everyday ritual and ephemera, emergent narratives, archive-induced anxiety and the ubiquitous timestamp – the Arcades Project is practically a user manual for codifying personal and shared urban experience and tracking how the city changes over time. The following topical sketches describe three Benjamin-inspired discourses pertaining to memory and the city in the age of big data.

[4Gentleman / Tiananmen SquARed, Tank Man in situ]

History as overlay

Not every urban trauma ends up being ‘permanently acknowledged’ as a brick and mortar memorial, an emotional fixture embedded within the cityscape. For every event that is commemorated through architecture, public space or ritual ceremony, the recognition of many others are ignored or suppressed. One of the more infamous debates about the role and how memorials should perform was the controversy that erupted over Maya Lin’s proposal for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Although now revered, the manner in which Lin’s angled wall gently cut into the earth was widely panned as being “too abstract” or a “black gash of shame” when her design was selected in 1981. Concessions were eventually made and a more traditional figurative statue, Frederick Hart’s The Three Soldiers was added to the site in 1984. Although most events don’t have the the same emotional weight (or nationalist implications) of the Vietnam War, these kind of contentious dialogues prove how invested the public in how remembrance is expressed in the urban realm.

The above image is an illustration of 4Gentleman’s Tiananmen SquARed overlay for the Layar augmented reality (AR) browser. The application allows users to view 3D models of iconic scenes from the 1989 student uprising through their smartphones when visiting the appropriate Beijing sites. Given that the Chinese government continues to blot this revolt from the public record, this is a subversive albeit subtle intervention that will permanently alter the experience of the site for some visitors. In a supporting blog post, the authors describe their motives:

“Although it has been more than twenty years since [the] Tiananmen Protest took place in 1989, the authority persistently uses all means erasing the facts that Chinese people pursued democracy in this democratic and anti-corruption movement. In China, nowadays, young people are not aware the courageous actions, such as ‘Tank Man’ and erecting ‘Statue of Democracy’ facing Mao’s portrait on Tiananmen Tower, emerged during [the] student movement of 1989. Nonetheless, history should not be forgotten.”

Tiananmen SquARed clearly illustrates how platforms like Layar can be leveraged to archive historical information. In addition to foregrounding suppressed narratives and battle erasure, AR overlays (or map layers) can also be used to browse unrealized futures. The iPhone app Museum of the Phantom City: Other Futures (2009) allows an explorer of New York City handy access to images and information regarding a selection of unbuilt speculative proposals including Frank Lloyd Wright’s St. Mark’s Tower (1931) and Superstudio’s Continuous Monument (1969). In engaging this tool, a user equips themselves with what Geoff Manaugh succinctly described as an “architectural dowsing rod” and is drawn into the tension between the city that is and that which might have been. Furthermore, a user must travel to the sites of the various proposals in order to ‘unlock’ related content thus forcing participants to excavate rather than simply consume.(3) Although relatively constrained in scope (and admittedly smartphone-centric), these examples highlight how various media platforms can be deployed as time capsules to provide ready access to historical information that future urbanites might seek out, sift through or stumble across.

[Cassidy Curtis & Stamen / Graffiti Archeology, Bluxome St. wall in San Francisco - 2005 and 2007]

Ephemera/inscription

By focusing on the flow of commodities and bodies through Parisian arcades, Benjamin was able to carefully parse the ephemeral nature of urban experience. One only need watch the movement of a crowd on a busy street to understand that public spaces have a ‘refresh’ rate and their use and occupation varies tremendously depending on the season, weather or time of day. The city is rife with these kind of fluctuations and they happen so quickly or discretely that we often overlook them. In the same way that media can be used to commemorate historically significant events, it is also equally adept at logging at (comparatively) inconsequential changes. The above image is a composite of two screen captures from Graffiti Archaeology (2003), a project produced by Cassidy Curtis and Stamen that provides users with an interface for tracking graffiti activity on a number of key walls in San Francisco over the last decade. Once a wall is selected, a viewer can ‘scrub’ the timeline of available images to note the incremental addition of tags and partial or complete cover-up of a piece with a fresh mural – it is a fascinating example of vernacular ‘media architecture’ that seems straight out of Stewart Brand’s 1994 text How Buildings Learn. Beyond one-off photo archives, street art owes a tremendous debt to universally accessible web-based photo sharing services and blogs that allow the documentation of relatively short lived murals and stencil art to be archived, distributed and resonate internationally.

There are of course many other examples of media being used to inflect our inscriptions on and utterances across the urban landscape. Christian Marc Schmidt and Liangjie Xia’s Invisible Cities is a recently launched social media browser that geolocates and aggregates twitter and flickr activity. The application provides users with a first-person vantage point for exploring the narrative cartography of Manhattan through the delineation of nodes of content and “topic vectors”(4). If we were to expand the breadth of this project it starts to resemble some of the developments forecasted by Jeremy Hight in “Writing Within the Map”, an essay published on NeMe last year. In this text Hight offers a thorough and imaginative consideration of how publishing is becoming an increasingly spatial project:

“Publishing and distribution will soon also be in maps. Yes. The news stand is to also be within that red dot. You are here. But what is here? How many stories have been set in Chicago? How many essays have been written on the crumbling cores of cities like Detroit? … These places and all other places have many faces, aspects, and these speak to many voices, investigations and (re)iterations. So why not publish in these places? Why not in their maps as well?”

While Hight’s predictions are opaque, his outlook is invaluable when thinking about an endgame for the types of spatial narratives that emerging technologies (AR, increasingly accessible mapping APIs, etc.) might engender and how they may extend and complement more traditional notions of authorship. The city is a space of not only substantial but fleeting discourse: what tools are at our disposal for tapping into and exploring this chatter?

[Left: Police kettle citizens during the G20 Summit in Toronto, photo: Eldar Curovic / Right: Sukey]

Refuge in the crowd

This last discussion is not so much about the passage of time, but the evolution of power relations. The image on the above left documents one of the more widely publicized moments during the security debacle that accompanied the 2010 G20 Summit. In this picture, police have surrounded 200 citizens whose decision to visit a major downtown retail district during a global trade summit resulted in their being kettled for several hours. Kettling is an increasingly common police tactic where lines of officers surround and intimidate crowds into submission by containing them for extended periods of time. While the detainment minimizes bodily harm, it is a flagrant violation of civil liberties and effectively transforms tracts of the city into temporary open air prisons. In response to several instances of kettling conducted by the UK police during the student protests last fall, Sam Gaus and Sam Carlisle used Google’s My Maps functionality to provide real-time updates about police activity in London so that protesters could remain “safe mobile and informed”. A related suite of tools named Sukey was released two months ago to extend this functionality by providing demonstrators with the ability to interact with the service through various smartphone and SMS protocols. Users now have range of options for reporting and receiving information about which nearby road junctions are clear and obstructed and where police actions are occurring. Given that policing strategies for managing organized demonstrations have become increasingly draconian over the last decade, it only follows that we’d see a new breed of tools emerge that harness locative media and citizen sensors as a form of non-violent resistance.

Tim Maly wrote a brilliant summary of mediated resistance to G20 police violence that focused on the ubiquity of recording devices and sensors. The following particularly glib excerpt highlights the ‘disposability’ of individuals within a crowd:

“At highly documented events, the rate at which recordings are made far outstrips the rate at which we can view them. Any given photo or video can be lost but the loss is not that great. Any given observer can be beaten, arrested, even killed, and the loss is not that great. At least not that much greater than if it was any other participant.”

Although depressing to dwell on, this is the logic of Sukey – through presence and feedback, individuals work to increase the safety and decisionmaking capabilities of the collective. Conversations regarding citizen action against militarized urban space are hardly new, Benjamin dedicated an entire section of The Arcades Project to Baron Haussmann’s 19th century urban renewal program, which cut wide swaths through Paris in the hopes of sculpting an urban fabric that was more retail friendly and revolution-resistant. To paraphrase and expand on Benjamin: The mighty seek to secure their stature with cunning (fashion) and blood (police), the crowd responds with a many-eyed gaze (surveillance).(5)

Epilogue

While the streets of Paris don’t figure that prominently into the layered narrative of Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010), they do function as kind of a staging ground where the base rules of the film’s dream logic are established. Conversations between protagonists Cobb and Ariadne lead into several bombastic CGI-driven scenes which culminate in the Parisian street grid folding in on itself, the city reimagined as giant setpiece. Right before this sequence the young architect Ariadne wonders out loud about the implications of her total control: “My question is, what happens when you start messing with the physics of it all?” Benjamin often described technology and progress as creating a universe (and city) of ‘phantasmagoria’ – an endless montage of illusion and desire. That definition still stands, so those of us thinking about how the presence of history might figure into new forms of representing urban experience had best heed her question.

The next post in this series will deal with DIY Mapping and Counter Cartography.

Notes:

(1) Mike Davis’ perfectly describes Rick Deckard as a “postapocalypse Philip Marlowe” in the concluding chapter of Ecology of Fear.
(2) Friedberg, Anne. “The Passage from Arcade to Cinema” in Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Pg. 50.
(3) A detailed overview of Museum of the Phantom City: Other Futures is available here.
(4) See the related “Invisible Cities: Representing Social Networks in an Urban Context” in the Parsons Journal for Information Mapping (Volume 3, Issue 1) for thorough documentation of this project.
(5) A rejigged [E5a,8] from the Arcades Project

–

About the Author: Greg J. Smith a Toronto-based designer and researcher with interests in media theory and digital culture. Extending from a background in architecture, his research considers how contemporary information paradigms affect representational and spatial systems. Greg is a designer at Mission Specialist, blogs at Serial Consign, writes a column on emerging technology for Current Intelligence and is a managing editor of the digital arts publication Vague Terrain. He currently teaches in the CCIT program (University of Toronto/Sheridan College) and at OCAD University.