serial consign (10 unread)

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  Up Periscope

  Posted: 3-November-2011, 4:02pm CET by Greg J. Smith

  

  [George Watson Beach's "useful improvements in submarines" patent drawing]

  This is a brief note that speaks to the fact that this blog has fallen into a state of neglect. I won't apologize for this neglect because that would be a cliché. The reason for my extended radio silence is the usual mix of client work and teaching obligations but I also have some larger projects in development that have required sustained attention – one of which is an 'unidentified publishing object' that will be launching next spring. Here is some other stuff I've been up to:

  • This summer I took part in Tim Maly & Emily Horne's independent design studio Border Town. I worked with Jordan Hale and Cyrus Irani to produce Microfiction, a photo and text-based narrative exploring geopolitics and migration that was exhibited at the Detroit Design festival in September. Microfiction is archived here.
  • The most recent issue of Vague Terrain explores the broader implications of 'ambient' culture. I contributed an extended interview with Michelle Teran, a Canadian artist (currently based in Bergen) whose work explores experience and perception in urban environments.
  • I launched a new course on information visualization within the CCIT program. My students are just starting to hone in on their final project topics and I'm optimistic about their direction. You can download the syllabus here – I mined my entire library (and DEVONthink database) for that reading list.

  Ok, that is it for the moment – Down periscope!

  
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  DIY Cartography

  Posted: 2-August-2011, 7:05pm CEST by Greg J. Smith

  

  [PLOTS / DIY Balloon Mapping kit]

  Today the third post in my Mediated Cityscapes series was published on Creative Applications and this instalment focuses on DIY cartography. Drawing on a body of research related to the 'Technology and the City' CCIT course I developed last year, the article schematizes a few general approaches for classifying mapping projects and surveys a range of key projects. In the piece I play pretty fast and loose with what falls under the umbrella of 'cartography' as I was ultimately more interested in discussing provocative work than niggling over credentials, expertise and playing the 'just whose discipline is it?' game. One thing I don't mention in the article is how much web mapping is/has been driven by innovation within journalism – The Knight News Challenge has been awarded to so many projects relevant to this discussion (e.g. Ushahidi, Dotspotting, etc.). Finally, the piece closes out with a tangential discussion about some recent thinking by Golan Levin on 'situated visualization' – I plan on coming back to this topic in the future as I think Levin is really on to something with the related series of projects he has begun.

  As always, comments and emails related to the piece would be received with great enthusiasm.

  
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  Ontologies of the Drone

  Posted: 29-July-2011, 7:30pm CEST by Greg J. Smith

  The resulting drone crash action-adventure documentary would be geared for the everyday viewer primed for the economies of disaster, of pleasurable violence transmitted on private screens -- sites where drone games are played and drone missions consumed. Its trailer might go something like this. Ground control operators have suddenly lost control of an armed Reaper flying a combat mission over Afghanistan. A manned U.S. Air Force fighter is dispatched to shoot down the renegade drone before it flies beyond the edge of Afghan airspace. (In the world of robotic warfare, human pilots are apparently still good for something: shooting down wayward drones.) The tension builds: disciplined man against chaotic unmanned.

  The fighter plane arrives too late. The renunciant Reaper, speeding headlong into its own future, crashes into the side of a mountain. Abstracted in a shower of engine oil, smoke, lost data, and crushed metal, its dissipating fuselage drops. Amplified in a rush of sensation and adrenaline, its absorbing body elevates.

  In 2003 CTheory published an essay by Jordan Crandall on embedded reporters, predator drones and "armed perception" that pretty much knocked me out of my chair and has coloured my thinking on military technology and representation ever since. That essay is vital – go read it. Once you've done that, turn your attention to "Unmanned" (excerpt posted above), which Crandall shared on the nettime mailing list this week. This recent essay is a gloriously thorough consideration of UAVs, failure and state of the art military imaging technology ("operational media" in Crandall's parlance) and is undoubtedly my 'poolside reading' pick of the summer – fans of Virilio, Der Derian and Danger Room take note.

  
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  Rob Ager on Spatial Awareness in The Shining

  Posted: 22-July-2011, 6:40pm CEST by Greg J. Smith

  I find few things more endearing than obsessive readings of film (or game) production design, so you can imagine the glee with which I dove into Rob Ager's meticulous analysis of the spatial design of The Shining. Assorted thoughts, reactions and questions are listed below.

  • Leave it to the FPS-modding community to have discovered anomalies in the production design of film from 1980. What would you call porting the Overlook Hotel into gamespace anyway, fictional spatial archeology?
  • The primary catchphrase that Ager keeps dropping during his analysis is "spatially impossible" and—as evidenced by the plans he's drawn up—he is correct in his identification of numerous errant windows and doors, but I'm left wondering what his goals are with this cataloguing. Ager's rigour alerts us to enough inconsistencies that it appears these dizzying design decisions are indeed intentional. However, these kind of set tweaks and sly editing are completely commonplace – perhaps Ager and his intended audience are emotionally invested in the notion that Kubrick is a master craftsman rather than grossly negligent.
  • Would any of these 'spatial inconsistencies' actually register for anyone but a fireman, architect or contractor on a first viewing of the film?
  • With this thorough overview of how the psychological space of the Overlook Hotel inflects its architectural configuration in mind, what other examples of manipulative productive design might deserve similar scrutiny? I know there has been an abundance of scholarship on Hitchcock's set design for Rear Window, and perhaps the contemporary counterpoint is Charlie Kaufman's Synchedoche New York but (German expressionist cinema notwithstanding) what other fictional spaces might we look to here? I wish I could ask Anthony Vidler his thoughts on this question.
  • The second video winds down with a great quote from Vincent Lobrutto's book Stanley Kubrick wherein the author describes the frequent occurrences of film crew members losing their way within the iconic hedge maze set: "Garret Brown, steadicam inventor and operator, recalled that if you got lost and called out "Stanley!", Kubrick's laughter seemed to come out from all directions inside the maze."

  I'm a little unnerved by Ager's obsessiveness, but I'm thrilled to reap the fruits of his labour. This commentary is essential watching for cinephiles and would be of great benefit to game designers as well – be sure to watch the second video as that is where Ager 'zooms out' and provides some context.

  
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  .txt/110715

  Posted: 16-July-2011, 5:59am CEST by Greg J. Smith

  

  Several links about technology and urbanism:

  • Joshua Noble and I hammered out a text on interaction, cities and space earlier in the year and we've posted the fruits of our labour at Vague Terrain. The short essay sketches out a typology of approaches to 'softening' the city and touches on related work by Usman Haque, Michelle Teran and Woods Bagot (pictured above is a rendering of their Icbergs NYC), amongst others.
  • Interview fever – smart people interviewing other smart people: Jeff Watson chats with Mark Shepard at Remote Device and Nicholas Nova discusses 'smart cities' with Saskia Sassen for Lift Lab.
  • Christian Marc Schmidt considers cognitive mapping, figure ground drawings, Aldo Rossi and Stamen's Map=Yes in a thoughtful post that reveals some of the influences behind his recent work. Schmidt: "The real potential of the combined framework that Stamen and MapQuest have created is the capability of generating personalized maps, displaying places with personal significance. What would it mean if, instead of resorting to generic, ?swiss army knife? maps, we could explore and navigate our environments through personalized maps?"
  • On the homefront, tech/culture thinker Nav Alang wonders out loud if Toronto is 'technophobic' in a great piece for the Toronto Standard

  I post .txt dispatches bi-weekly to highlight noteworthy content from across the web (and beyond). Feel free to subscribe to my Google Reader shared items.

  
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  Everyday Life Reviewed (Elsewhere)

  Posted: 2-July-2011, 1:42pm CEST by Greg J. Smith

  

  Several weeks ago, Toronto's stalwart media arts venue InterAccess hosted a strong group show to compliment a workshop on digitally mediated surveillance that was held at the University of Toronto. The show contained work by David Bouchard, Bruno Lessard & Pierre Tremblay (a screen capture from their Meta Incognita - variations is above), Jon Rafman, David Dunlop, Kristen Atkins, Tomer Diamant & Matthew Hannam – check out my review of Cyber-surveillance in Everyday Life over at Current Intelligence.

  
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  MUTEK 2011 A/Visions

  Posted: 21-June-2011, 4:42pm CEST by Greg J. Smith

  

  [Sculpture's Reuben Sutherland / photo: basic_sounds]

  Another year, another MUTEK. I've posted my review of the most recent edition of the Montreal festival at Creative Applications and, as was the case in 2009, I've focused on the A/Visions program. A/Visions is dedicated to showcasing integrated audio visual performance projects and given that these collaborations are usually realized as visualizations or forays into post-cinema experimentation, this is really where my heart is within the festival. While Murcof and Simon Geilfus's (of AntiVJ) realtime graphics were utterly stunning, I found it a bit curious that my other favourite acts this year were crafted with tape loops and zoetropic discs (Sculpture) and an automated piano (Seth Horvitz) – truly innovative/groundbreaking work that was hardly new media (let's jettison that term already). Cruise on over to Creative Applications to check out my overview, I was able to compile a pretty thorough selection of videos of the work presented and some of these endeavours are truly remarkable.

  
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  Border Town

  Posted: 16-June-2011, 6:58pm CEST by Greg J. Smith

  

  [Illegal immigrants appear on a night vision monitor screen of Hungarian border police / photo: Bela Szandelszky/AP]

  I'm excited to have signed on to participate in Tim Maly and Emily Horne's "independent research and design workshop" Border Town this summer – the first session is tonight. I've been mired in large client projects for the last year and while that is going pretty swimmingly I can't actually remember the last time I did research outside a writing project (we worked on a Wikileaks timeline last summer with Tim Groves – but that was commissioned.) So, it goes without say that I am really keen to dive into gloriously complicated exploratory research – especially as I now know that the answer to all design problems is not to, er, build a building.

  Tim and Emily have outlined the M.O. for the studio as follows:
  

  We believe that a great deal can be learned by investigating the strange edge cases of the world. Border towns are the extreme edge of where geography and politics collide. They throw the abstractions of governance into sharp physical relief. They are a fertile site for investigation into questions of security, freedom, architecture, immigration, trade, smuggling, sovereignty, and identity. Border Town is a 10-week, multi-participant collaborative design studio that will investigate the conditions that surround life in cities situated on borders, divided by borders, or located in conflict zones. By investigating these strange specimens of political geography, we can being to think and design about the interaction of legal and physical architecture and how these forces shape the built environment and the lives of the people living in it.

  … and that mandate is rather nicely summarized in the below teaser video.

  I am fortunate to be able to count my partner-in-crime Jordan Hale amongst the studio participants and the inclusion of our talented peers Cyrus Irani and Jay Hurtig Fraser (and new chum Andrew Lovett-Baron) will in my opinion make for a dynamic multidisciplinary production environment. Also, now that I'm teaching regularly I have to admit that I'm thrilled that this whole enterprise is happening outside of the parameters of a formal institution. Although I'll undoubtedly share some news about whatever we cook up soon, consider keeping tabs on the studio blog if this milieu is up your alley.

  One of our assigned readings for the first week was Eyal Weizman's recent classic "Walking through walls: Soldiers as architects in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict" – check it out if you've never encountered this revelatory/disturbing text on contemporary military strategy before.

  
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  .txt/110615

  Posted: 16-June-2011, 5:15am CEST by Greg J. Smith

  

  Recently noted:

  • Joshua Noble presents a brief overview of the work of Japanese media artist Daito Manabe (pictured above) for Creative Applications. Noble: "What?s so refreshing about Daito's 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."
  • Much less playful: Charli Carpenter and Lina Shaikhoun debunk the entire suite of stock anti-UAV sentiments for Foreign Policy – a sobering read.
  • Tom Armitage explores buttons as a facet of 'the game design of everyday things' for Kill Screen.
  • Facial recognition, real time data and customer metrics – together at last. Dan Rowinski discusses a new startup called SceneTap for ReadWriteWeb in what is undoubtedly a glimpse of the near future of business analytics.
  • Nathan Jurgenson dissects 'the faux-vintage photo' phenomenon as an offshoot of his dissertation research. Jurgenson: "The quickest way to invoke nostalgia for a time past with a photograph is to invoke the properties of the physical, which is done by mimicking the ravages of time through fading, simulated film grain and scratches as well as the addition of what appears to be photo-paper or Polaroid borders around the image."

  I post .txt dispatches bi-weekly to highlight noteworthy content from across the web (and beyond). Feel free to subscribe to my Google Reader shared items.

  
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  Re-Drawing Boundaries

  Posted: 14-June-2011, 5:32pm CEST by Greg J. Smith

  

  [Stanza / Sensity / 2004-09]

  Those that have been reading this blog for a while know that I tend to keep an eye on the work of artist/theorist Jeremy Hight (interviewed on Serial Consign here), an individual who has undoubtedly defined his practice by keeping his ear to the ground when it comes to location, narrative and media. Re-drawing Boundaries is an online exhibition hosted on the Leonardo Electronic Almanac web portal curated by Hight (with Lanfranco Aceti and Christiane Paul) dedicated to cataloguing the work of key-innovators in locative media and the nebulous constellation of related practices that has emerged over the last decade. The exhibition will unfold over the course of the summer by showcasing selected works from an impressive roster of artists including: Kate Armstrong, Mez Breeze, Jonah Brucker Cohen, Douglas Repetto, etc. The selected practices are quite incisive and varied enough that I anticipate the final body of work could serve as a handy crash course in the recent history of media art and—as far intergenerational mashups are concerned—it is great to see Natalie Jeremijenko and Buckminster Fuller's names in such close proximity.

  I'm particularly interested in the high percentage of Re-drawing Boundaries participants whose work deals with mapping and representing urban space. Work from the archives of Carlo Ratti (SENSEable City Lab) and Stanza has already been posted with more to come from Esther Polak, Christian Nold and Sarah Willams (Spatial Information Design Lab). Also, note the interviews (PDF'd) with many of the practitioners conducted by Hight – I like this statement by Stanza where the UK-based artist encapsulates the context of his work:
  

  The patterns we make, the forces we weave, are all being networked into retrievable data structures that can be re imagined and sourced for information. These patterns all disclose new ways of seeing the world. The value of information will be a new currency as powers change. The central issue that will develop will be the privilege and access to these data sources. Uses of this information and data should allow rich new interpretations of the way our world is built, used, and designed.

  …that is definitely a mission statement I could get behind. Consider tuning into Re-drawing Boundaries this summer as I anticipate the attention will be well rewarded. I plan on posting an essay response to several of the featured works so I'll revisit this curatorial project later in the summer.