serial consign

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  citySCENE: Informal Call for Work

  Posted: 29-October-2008, 1:38am CET by Greg J. Smith

  

  [Charles & Ray Eames / Powers of 10 / 1977]

  Given my post about Database City yesterday this feels like an appropriate moment to put out a feeler for an upcoming issue of Vague Terrain that I'll be curating. Vague Terrain 13: citySCENE will be published (approximately) next March and dedicated to the representation of urban space. For the issue I'll be looking to assemble about a dozen projects which map, sample, recontextualize and critique the contemporary city. Sound, image, text - any work that can be displayed and disseminated via the web is fine by me.

  While I'll be distributing a formal call in December I wanted to tap into the readers and community around this blog first. Please email me if you'd like to discuss potential participation. If you have a peer whose work might fit into the above (admittedly schematic at the moment) theme please send them my way. Our general submission guidelines for Vague Terrain are available here, although the best way to get a sense of what is expected would be to look at some of the past issues.

  One final point - we recently issued a call for Vague Terrain 12: Device Art which will be guest curated by Toronto tech-art guru Rob Cruickshank. Interactive artists, Arduino massive and object hackers take note! If you've got relevant work to share drop Rob a line.

  
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  Serial Consign at Database City

  Posted: 27-October-2008, 6:44pm CET by Greg J. Smith

  

  [Steph Thirion / Cascade on Wheels / produced at Visualizar'07]

  When I first heard about VISUALIZAR'08: Database City I couldn't believe how on point the scope of the workshop was with my research interests. The call for proposals described the focus of the event as follows:
  

  Urban environments, which are becoming increasingly dense, complex and diverse, are one of contemporary society?s largest ?databases?, daily generating volumes of information that require new methods of analysis and understanding. How can we use the data visualization and information design resources to understand the processes governing contemporary cities and better manage them? What can we learn from studying traffic and pedestrian movement flows through the streets of Madrid? What would happen if we filled the streets with screens providing information updated each moment about water and electricity consumption?

  Given that my writing here on Serial Consign explores the intersection of information, interface, design and urban experience I knew that I had to submit a proposal. Although I had hoped to develop a project proposal, I only ended up pitching a paper - one that was accepted. So this Saturday I'll be leaving for Madrid to spend three weeks at Medialab-Prado. I recently did the math and somehow I haven't been to Europe for a decade, so this is a really big deal for me.

  My paper is entitled Beyond the Edifice: Architectural Visualization Reconsidered and in it I'll outline how architectural representation could inform urban informatics. This research project is a great opportunity to consolidate my sprawling interest in architectural drawing with some of the "city thinking" evident in the work I curated for TAGallery. The seminar will only span a few days and then the focus will shift to the incubation and rapid development of several urban visualization projects, one of which I'll be working on. For the interested, here are links to the full list of project abstracts and a schedule of the seminar proceedings.

  I guess it goes without say that I'll be blogging about the proceedings as they occur. I'll definitely try to soak up as much of the seminar as possible and provide a window into the resulting visualization projects later in November. Medialab Prado will also be publishing my paper, so I'll have more news on that in the coming weeks. Hasta mañana!

  
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  .txt/081026

  Posted: 27-October-2008, 1:41am CET by Greg J. Smith

  

  Recently enjoyed:

  • Damien James' The Magic Easel is a fascinating piece in the Chicago Reader on a viewing machine by artists Ryan and Trevor Oakes. The pair (literally, they are twins) have developed the above viewing machine to aid them in creating detailed concave perspective drawings. [via metafilter].
  • On the topic of drawing, I've been revisiting Mason White's Making Plans, a speculative text on the role of the plan in architecture. This thoughtful essay contextualizes contemporary thinking about plans through concise commentary and some great precedents.
  • The Interscale: Art after Neoliberalism is a text inspired by theorist Brian Holmes' visit to The Sixth Taipei Biennial. What starts out as a critique of a several featured pieces at the politically themed Biennial quickly unfurls into a history of neoliberalism complete with nods to Archigram, commentary on the economy and observations on tension between regional and transcontinental programming.
  • Leave it to nettime to be the first place for an English translation of Paul Virilio's recent interview in Le Monde to pop up. In this discussion with Gerard Courtois and Michel Guerrin Virilio frames the recent economic meltdown in relation to his ongoing research into catastrophe aesthetics and speed.
  • From one form of bankruptcy to another, Facebook in a Crowd is a fun article by Hal Niedzviecki in this weekend's New York Times. The text documents a self-esteem train wreck whereby the the author decides to host a party for all 700 of his "facebook friends" - and only one person shows up. In these tumultuous times if we can't count on our facebook friends, where does that leave us?
  • Authors Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin just released a free PDF of their 2002 book Atlas of Cyberspace. The text was just plugged by Andrew Vande Moere at infosthetics as an "interesting overview of the early years of (more popular forms) of data visualization, including chapters about mapping Internet infrastructure and traffic flows, mapping the Web, mapping online conversation and community, imagining cyberspace in art, literature, and film."

  
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  Visible Memories: George Legrady

  Posted: 23-October-2008, 5:54pm CEST by Greg J. Smith

  

  As a follow-up to my post on the Digital Aesthetics panel discussion at the Visible Memories Conference at Syracuse University earlier this month, I'd like to post a brief synopsis of George Legrady's presentation. For those unfamiliar with his work Legrady is a pioneer in information visualization and new media art and a Professor of Interactive Media in Media Arts & Technology at UC Santa Barbara. Legrady is renowned for projects like his
  data visualization of the ebb and flow of the holdings of the OMA designed Seattle Public Library as well as archival installations such as Pocket Full of Memories (related screen capture pictured above). Legrady's scheduled talk was entitled Aesthetic & Cultural Perspectives Through Data Visualization, but for better and worse when he realized he was sitting in a room full of visual culture historians he decided to improvise and give a more autobiographical talk about the origins of his creative practice. The resulting presentation yielded an interesting window into his relationship with computation and memory.

  

  Legrady started out as a photographer in the early 1970s with a self-described interest in how "photographer and subject could be mediated by technology and cultural points of view". Pictured above is an image from a documentary project on life in four Cree settlements around James Bay in Northern Quebec. This ethnographic endeavor saw Legrady documenting the struggle of Quebec First Nations communities in coping with the environmental and cultural repercussions of a new hydroelectric dam in the area. The statement for the project reveals that even as a young artist he had a keen interest in taxonomy:
  

  My approach to the production of this archive of 2800 photographs was to provide a cultural overview based on personal experience: Portraiture, architecture, indigenous events/artifacts, social events, labor, the relation between the traditional and the new. There are approximately 650 portraits of young to old including nearly every elder in Rupert's House. There are 300 architectural images of tract houses, shacks, tipis and other structures... There are 500 images of 6 weddings including feasts and some other gatherings.

  This desire to classify and archive would continue to be a primary area for investigation in his later work.

  

  As much as I wanted to hear Legrady dissect his recent projects, given the crowd I think he made the right choice to personalize the presentation and discuss more auto-biographical work. Figuring quite prominently into his talk was An Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War (installation pictured above), a "personal excavation" that catalogued many of Legrady's childhood memories. Initiated in 1981, the project had no viable means of execution until 1988. By 1992, his father had died, the Berlin Wall had fallen and Legrady was invested in consolidating a significant portion of the ephemera from his family history. An Anecdoted Archive from the Cold War was developed as an interactive, personal museum for Legrady to store and categorize memories pertaining to his family's early life in Eastern Europe under Communism. The installation organizes photographs, documents and narratives through a number of categories including propaganda, signage, travel diaries, interviews socialist iconography, etc. He describes his rational for the project as follows:
  

  I am not a historian, sociologist, archivist or museologist but made use of methodologies borrowed from these disciplines to produce this interactive archive. It is not intended as an official history. It is rather about a way to situate stories through technological media. For instance, to create a platform where one's stories can engage in discourse with official history since one of the capabilities of the digitization process is that it reshapes information, erasing differences traditionally easily identifiable as belonging to official or personal documents.

  The installation was exhibited widely between 1993 and 1998 and it is quite curious to look back on the interface at the heart of the piece. Legrady talked about not even having a technical means to realize this project until the late 1980s and what he developed more or less approximated a time based interactive movie, something the new media community has taken for granted for the better part of the last decade.

  

  [George Legrady / Cell Tango / 2007]

  What was so refreshing about hearing Legrady discuss his work was the fact that he made it very clear that he is an artist trying to make sense of the world. I won't call his visualization polemical, but many of his projects have a "personal" quality, one that transcends style. In looking at his portfolio you get the sense that he has a deep investment in exploring memory, nuance and the order of things.

  A quick note about the project links in this post, unfortunately George Legrady's interest in "the order of things" does not extend to the realm of web design. I linked to specific projects and in doing so compromised the frames based interface to his site. The best way to examine his work is to browse from the base site.

  
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  Design Whimsy

  Posted: 21-October-2008, 8:22pm CEST by Greg J. Smith

  An interesting blog post that showed up on my radar over the last few days was Whimsical Interaction Design, a short text by Dave Cronin at Cooper Design. In this post, Cronin sketches out several great examples of humour, dry wit and mischief across several design disciplines. A variety of examples of work done in this spirit are highlighted including Droog Design, Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers' Bloom and the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button on Google.

  

  Also discussed is the "funky" skin for the Ohmboyz delay VST, a digital audio production plugin developed by OhmForce (pictured above). This alternative interface is a hyper-stylized, sci-fi reconfiguration of the more modest "classic" GUI for the software tool. The post concludes with the following statement:
  

  In some ways, playfulness is at odds with the efficiency, but in other ways, these things are the basis of the experience. The small animations in the iPhone interface make it feel more responsive and enjoyable, even when in actuality they burn CPU cycles and actually delay response. As modernist architects eschewed all ornamentation in the name of mechanical function, only to later find a vernacular of "modern" style, I hope we're on the way to finding a vocabulary of ways to add a little joy to interactive experiences.

  I won't contest that the desire to craft joy into interactive experiences is a noble goal, but I would like to add two observations regarding the Ohmboyz example:

  • Tattooing the surface of a virtual instrument with robot decals isn't going to make it a better instrument, especially when said stickers are eating up real estate that could be dedicated to additional knobs and sliders.
  • If OhmForce were really invested in providing users with a "stylized GUI" they'd allow users to select the images that appear on the VST. We've all seen the kits and laptops of road warrior musicians that are completely covered in decals documenting past gigs, affiliated record labels and preferred hardware. What is so interesting about this pockmarked graphic-heavy gear is the manner in which these signs and symbols have accumulated. What could be more inauthentic than an instrument that arrives from the factory with a prescribed set of images permanently set in place?

  I'm not humourless, but when it comes to this kind of play in design I am pretty finicky about where fun stops and bad design starts. In regards to the example above, I've worked with OhmForce plugins and know them to be powerful and unique, so I suppose they can get away with a little interface noodling since they have got the goods to back it up. In general, I agree with the tone of Cronin's piece and wanted to use his perspective on interaction design to point out a few other examples of effective, transformational and disastrous applications of whimsy in design.

  

  Pictured above is an annotated drawing of Pleasurecraft, a recent project by Marisa Jahn and Steve Shada. This well accessorized vehicle is a "kit for any klutz who wishes to woo a potential lover". The vessel combines comfort, gesture, landscape and ritual into a playful meditation on the many clichés of seduction. Jahn and Shada have not only produced a working prototype of their lovecraft but also penned a detailed "operators manuel" - please note the cute "score" of the Pleasurecraft Serenade. You can view full documentation of Pleasurecraft here. [via architectradure]

  

  An example of what might be described as "transformational" design whimsy is at play in twitterMotion, a type focused viewer for examining recent activity for a twitter account. This application was obviously not developed as a full UI for twitter, but instead takes the content of the popular web service and turns it into the basis of a type-driven, animated adventure. It is fun, dizzying and completely alien compared to the scores of identical twitter applications out there. Since there is no input a user can only sit back and watch the content fly by reverse chronologically. TwitterMotion was designed by Geoff Hinchcliffe as part of his PhD research on interface design.

  

  Ok, we've seen the good and the quirky - now for the ugly. 3D Mailbox is a baffling 3D interface for email management. The original iteration of this application can only be described as a "Beach Blanket Bingo in Second Life meets a sexist Microsoft Outlook". The PR for the project reads as follows:
  

  3D Mailbox turns your emails into people: In the first level, Miami Beach, beautiful models represent good email, and goofy Sumo guys represent spam. Chill with your email poolside and in private cabanas, and feed your spam to the sharks! The beautiful locales and Brazilian background music make you feel like you're on vacation any time of the day.

  3D Mailbox was lambasted as the "worst. app. ever." on TechCrunch in July 2007 and has since gone on to release air traffic control and zombie themed email interfaces. In watching the hilarious trailer for the first "level" I can't help but wonder what the designers were thinking. I'm not even going to say anything beyond that, just watch the trailer and be wary of too much whimsy.

  Have any great or atrocious examples of whimsy in design you'd like to share? Please leave a comment! Thanks to Peter Kirn at Create Digital Music for pointing out Dave Cronin's post which inspired this rambling.

  
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  Interface as Landscape

  Posted: 19-October-2008, 1:05am CEST by Greg J. Smith

  

  Being a sucker for a good pun, one of my favourite projects that I've seen over the last few weeks is Jean Shin's TEXTile. Created for a 2006 exhibit at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, this "cobblestone fabric" is crafted from some 22,000 recycled computer keycaps. Within the world of this work individual characters are not only considered modular elements with which to construct landscape, but combine to form a transcript. The length of TEXTile is an archive of the extensive email correspondence between Shin and her fabricator collaborators - the sculpture documents its own development.

  

  TEXTile is bookended by a functional custom keyboard and display so that viewers may engage the sculpture and "continue the dialogue". Everything about this piece reminds me of Jay David Bolter's text Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext and the History of Writing. In that book Bolter describes the distinction between topical and topographic texts as follows:
  

  The word ?topography? originally meant a written description of a place, such as an ancient geographer might give. Only later did the word come to refer to mapping or charting ? that is, to a visual and mathematical rather than verbal description. Electronic writing is both visual and verbal description. It is not the writing of a place, but rather a writing with places, spatially realized topics. Topographic writing challenges the idea that writing should be merely the servant of spoken language. The writer and reader can create and examine signs and structures on the computer screen that have no easy equivalent in speech.

  TEXTile is very much about electronic writing. The piece renders the daily experience of exchanging emails as a non-verbal, haptic space of collaborative construction. The sculpture also playfully problematizes the form of an interface apparatus that is so ubiquitous that is is often overlooked. [via notcot]

  
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  .txt/081015

  Posted: 15-October-2008, 2:53pm CEST by Greg J. Smith

  

  Links of the moment:

  • Statistician Nathan Yau's Great Data Visualization Tells a Great Story is a timely post on the value of narrative (and personality) in information design. The text touches on the New York Times, Jonathan Harris and Hans Rosling's Gapminder project (pictured above).
  • On the topic of the New York Times, yesterday Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read Write Web posted about the arrival of the New York Time's API. Marshall astutely points out how this is a benchmark development in the ongoing retooling of the newspaper industry - "The newspaper is far better prepared to organize raw information, and perhaps offer complimentary content, than any individual blogger or small news publisher".
  • Earnest Cavelli's Life as a Disabled Gamer summarizes the author's experience gaming in light of his Cerebral Palsy. This illuminating text highlights how this disability has influenced the genres of games Cavelli has gravitated towards, his interfacing with controllers and his experience socializing in game space.
  • Jimmy Stamp just posted a great interview with writer (and now director) Charlie Kaufman on Life Without Buildings. The discussion provides a great sneak preview of Kaufman's forthcoming Synecdoche, New York.
  • A September post I keep coming back to is Hello World! by William J. Turkel at Digital History Hacks. The text speculates what the physical manifestation of a "Hello World" program might be in light of emerging fabrication and prototyping technologies.

  
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  Hit and Run

  Posted: 9-October-2008, 3:42pm CEST by Greg J. Smith

  
  

  [Jonathan Schipper / Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle / 2008]

  I'm still spending a lot of time in Liberty City. It is a peculiar addiction that I can't quite shake and it utterly confounds my girlfriend (she hates the cascading gunfire). There is some intangible quality to GTA IV, an aesthetic pleasure that emerges from the combination of the clunky controls, the velocity and the spot on specular reflection - I just can't stop playing. I haven't seen the surfaces of automobiles so lovingly rendered since David Cronenberg's 1996 film Crash, which is of course based on the 1973 novel of the same name by JG Ballard. On the topic of Ballard, please note the following:
  

  Ballard saw cars as the signifying symbols of the 20th century. James Dean, John F. Kennedy, and Lady Di are just three of the many pop culture figures that died in car accidents. Ballard even renders the assassination of JFK as a car race in the essay "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race". Class differences in Grand Theft Auto IV mostly manifest in car brands. The vehicles Niko drive get better and better throughout the game. Yet the great efforts Niko Bellic undertakes to further his status only push him deeper and deeper into a swamp of corruption and violence. Towards the inescapable crash. The city is in a state of downfall, ridden by corrupt police forces, street crime, poverty, mentally deranged inhabitants and unscrupulous politicians. A sign at the highway reads: "The world needs a strong America to tell it what to do". GTA is a synonym for cynicism, Liberty City the antithesis of the American Dream.

  This excerpt is culled from Grand Theft Auto IV Considered as an Atrocity Exhibition, a text on GTA IV by Martin Pichlmair in the most recent issue of Eludamos, an online journal for computer game culture. Although categorized as a "review" Pichlmair's text reads more like a minor aesthetic treatise, a qualitative summation of the game in light of Ballard's Atrocity Exhibition. The brief text is worth a read as it contextualizes the game quite expertly. It also hints at what game reviews could be if the medium wasn't (primarily) written about with the same pizazz as consumer electronic reviews. If you're interested, here is a link to Pichlmair's text.

  
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  Visible Memories: Digital Aesthetics

  Posted: 8-October-2008, 4:19pm CEST by Greg J. Smith

  As promised, I'm going to recap a few of the highlights from the Visible Memories Conference held at Syracuse University this past weekend. Due to the magnitude of the proceedings, and the multiple breakout panels presenting at any given time, I only was able to attend a portion of the talks. However, the dozen or so presentations that I saw were of a very high calibre and I'm now somewhat intoxicated by the many exciting multidisciplinary research projects that I was able to taste test. Leading up to the event, the panel that I was most looking forward was Digital Aesthetics and Mnemonic Interfaces and what follows are brief synopses of two presentations from that session.

  

  David S. Heineman is faculty in the Communications Studies department at the University of Pennsylvania. David presented a talk entitled Collective Memory and Digital Aesthetics: Redefining Democracy in God of War, 300 and HBO's Rome, which explored specific representations of Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire in gaming, film, and television. I wasn't so surprised to hear that Heineman was scrutinizing the CGI-constructed aesthetics of Zach Snyder's gorgeous 2006 film 300 (pictured above) and SCE Studios' God of War franchise - as both have been benchmarks in production design in their respective mediums. What did catch me off guard about Heineman's research was that he was using these precedents and the HBO series Rome to think about contemporary conceptions and representations of democracy.

  

  Heineman's presentation really clicked when he showcased various scenes of legislation and governance in Rome and 300 alongside some examples from the contemporary American political arena (like the podium and stage-set for the 2008 Republican Convention pictured above). I appreciated the manner in which his research combined media and cultural studies while keeping an eye on representations of the past - in the present. I only wish David unpacked God of War a little more as it didn't seem to get as much attention as the other precedents.

  

  Kevin Hamilton and Ned O'Gorman's presentation Nuclear Memory at the Interface was undoubtedly my favourite of the entire conference. Diving right into the thick of the Cold War, the two researchers sketched out the "interface aesthetics" of the nuclear age. The duo started out by introducing military theorist Bernard Brodie's famous assertion that the arrival of the atomic bomb rendered most military theory obsolete. They then proceeded to catalogue numerous instances of interface technology being used as the key image to facilitate communication about nuclear arsenals and protocols from military command centres out to the general public. Evidently the military assumed the blinking lights of a sterile control panel coupled with the figure of an educated technician tending to it conveyed a sense of machine precision and infallibility. This conversation is definitely poignant and maps quite nicely on to contemporary discussions about bomb/interface politics and aesthetics when you consider mobile, low-tech contraptions like Richard Reid's (aka the Shoe Bomber) kit above.

  Also discussed (and something I'm planning on looking into) was the output of Lookout Mountain Laboratory, a Los Angeles-based military facility responsible for the production of a number of films and images for the U.S. Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission between 1947 and 1969.

  Kevin Hamilton and Ned O'Gorman are based at the Art and Design and Communication Departments at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I'm definitely interested on catching up with this research once it is published.

  
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  Visible Memories / X Avant 2008

  Posted: 2-October-2008, 7:53am CEST by Greg J. Smith

  Here are two events that I'm involved in that I'd like to give a little plug...

  

  I am currently scrambling to put together a presentation for the Visible Memories Conference at Syracuse University this weekend. I'll be demoing my (hopefully) soon-to-be-launched Critical Sections project as part of a panel entitled Urban Memory. The conference programming looks quite strong and I'll definitely be posting about some of the proceedings as there are several presentations on archives, visualization and digital aesthetics that I am particularly keen on (including a lecture by George Legrady who I recently mentioned in my post on the IMA Dashboard).

  

  Vague Terrain will once again be co-curating an evening at the X Avant festival with our pals at the Music Gallery. The show will take place on Thursday October 23rd and feature multimedia performances by Sebastian Meissner (aka Klimek), Keith Fullerton Whitman and NAW. Full event details are available here and if you are in or around Southern Ontario please considering joining us at the festival - where else would you hear the Sun Ra Arkestra AND Tim Hecker? You can check out the Music Gallery site for info on the rest of the programming and it is also worth mentioning that I interviewed Sebastian Meissner about his work last year.