Space & Culture

Liberty City is inspired by New York, but not beholden to it. While there are many parallels, Liberty exists in its own universe and rightfully so. Many open-world games have cities that feel as if they existed only from the moment you first turned on your console, but Liberty City looks lived in. It’s an old city and each block has its own vibe and its own history. Drive around Liberty City and you’ll be able to identify each individual block. Though Liberty is filled with brownstones and a myriad of similar brick buildings, you can tell one from the other, just as you can in New York. Go to an affluent neighborhood and the street is likely to be newly paved, the pedestrians better dressed, the cops more plentiful. But head to Dukes or Bohan and you’ll find streets nearly stripped of asphalt, homeless people wandering about aimlessly and criminals preying on the weak. [Grand Theft Auto IV Review: This is the American Dream]

[T]he real star of the game is the city itself. It looks like New York. It sounds like New York. It feels like New York. Liberty City has been so meticulously created it almost even smells like New York. From Brooklyn (called Broker), through Queens (Dukes), the Bronx (Bohan), Manhattan (Algonquin) and an urban slice of New Jersey (Alderney), the game’s streets and alleys ooze a stylized yet unmistakable authenticity. (Staten Island is left out however.) The game does not try to represent anything close to every street in the city, but the overall proportions, textures, geography, sights and sounds are spot-on … [L]ike millions of other players I will happily spend untold hours cruising Liberty City’s bridges and byways, hitting the clubs, grooving to the radio and running from the cops. Even when the real New York City is right outside. [Grand Theft Auto IV: Dystopian Liberty City]

It’s important to stress though that we never limited ourselves in keeping faithful to the real city … It’s a distilled, exaggerated New York, a caricature of a city and not a brick for brick recreation. We exaggerated the best and worst bits, twisted the real city to suit our needs and left out whatever we felt wasn’t necessary … I keep seeing game worlds of sprawling futuristic metropolis or whatever and the first thing that occurs to me is where the hell do people buy milk, where do they get a cup of coffee? It’s too easy to get lost in the aesthetics of something and forget to think in those terms. How does it work? How do these people live their lives? Where do they eat? Where do they work? How do they get home? Where do they park their cars? When you start thinking along those lines it gets easier to work on something of this scale. It’s emulating life so you have to imagine living in the world you are making … You’ll see branding for oil companies on barrels, gas stations and gas attendants clothing and then when you visit some of the more industrial areas of the map you’ll see the same branding on industrial facilities. We even created history in the branding with older variations on old painted ads fading on the side of old buildings. You’ll see virtual artists advertised outside galleries, see some of their work through the window and then see other examples in some of the homes you’ll get inside. Tiny businesses, dry cleaners for example will have a store on a certain street, and you will see their van driving around the area. There are stickers, graffiti, posters, signage, billboards, adds on the internet, phone numbers to call, company cars and vans, products, tv shows, films, radio shows, theatres, fashion, jewelry, food, drink, sweets, cigarettes, pharmaceuticals, businesses, perfume, institutions, law firms, banks, credit cards, garages, warehouses, car dealers, city services, shops, airlines, travel agents, sports teams and brands, the list goes on and on. And they are referenced and cross-referenced in as many ways as we can over as many types of media and situations as we can think of. [GTA IV: Building a Brave New World]

All images from Rockstar Games: Grand Theft Auto IV.

- Anne

Situated Technologies: Toward the Sentient City
An exhibition critically exploring the evolving relationship between ubiquitous/pervasive computing and urban architecture.

The Architectural League of New York invites architects, artists, designers, technologists, engineers, urbanists, or teams thereof, to submit qualifications for an exhibition that will critically explore the evolving relationship between ubiquitous/pervasive computing and urban architecture. The League will commission five to seven teams to develop urban interventions–to be installed in and around New York City in spring 2009–that will imagine alternative trajectories for how various mobile, embedded, networked, and distributed forms of media, information and communication systems might inform the architecture of urban space and/or influence our behavior within it. Commissioned projects will receive support ranging from $5,000 to $25,000.

Possible topic areas include: Privacy, Security, and Dataveillance // Social Space // Environment // Advocacy

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: June 27, 2008

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Conflux 2008
The art and technology festival for the creative exploration of urban public space.

Participants in Conflux share an interest in psychogeography. Projects range from interpretations of the classical approach developed by the Situationists to emerging artistic, conceptual, and technology-based practices. At Conflux, participants, along with attendees and the public, put these investigations into action on the city streets. The city becomes a playground, a laboratory and a space for the development of new networks and communities. Only events that take place in the New York City area are eligible. They may be outdoors or in a venue you provide.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: May 31, 2008

- Anne

Photo by hswapnil

The annual Tulip Festival began on Friday and runs until May 19th.

In the fall of 1945, Princess Juliana of the Netherlands presented Ottawa with 100,000 tulip bulbs. The gift was given in appreciation of the safe haven that members of Holland’s exiled royal family received during the Second World War in Ottawa and in recognition of the role which Canadian troops played in the liberation of the Netherlands … In 2002, the Festival celebrated its 50th Anniversary dedicated to its founder, Malak Karsh, having expanded to an event showcasing over 3 million tulips throughout Canada’s Capital Region.

The festival also includes Celebridée, “A Celebration of Ideas,” and this year’s speakers include Salman Rushdie, James Howard Kunstler and Jared Diamond, as well as talks about everything from dark matter to lost gardens.

Photo by andrewomerknapp

UPDATE 07/04/08

Pruned: The Machinic Landscape of Tulips

- Anne

In 2003-2004, the National Building Museum in Washington, DC ran an exhibition called Up, Down, Across: Elevators, Escalators, and Moving Sidewalks, and Terry Caesar’s (2000) essay looked at Japanese elevators as transit spaces that negotiate the public and the private, but generally-speaking elevators as social spaces have received little to no research attention–including within Space and Culture–since the popularity of proxemics studies in the 70s. So when The New Yorker recently ran an article on elevators, I perked right up.

Photo by ATENCION.

Smart elevators are strange elevators, because there is no control panel in the car; the elevator knows where you are going. People tend to find it unnerving to ride in an elevator with no buttons; they feel as if they had been kidnapped by a Bond villain. Helplessness may exacerbate claustrophobia. In the old system—board elevator, press button—you have an illusion of control; elevator manufacturers have sought to trick the passengers into thinking they’re driving the conveyance. In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power. It’s a little like prayer. Elevator design is rooted in deception—to disguise not only the bare fact of the box hanging by ropes but also the tethering of tenants to a system over which they have no command.

And as if that’s not interesting enough, I also learned that, apparently, it’s popular in New York City housing projects to “load up an empty elevator car with discarded Christmas trees, press the button for the top floor, then throw in a match, so that by the time the car reaches the top it is ablaze with heat so intense that the alloy (called “babbitt”) connecting the cables to the car melts, and the car, a fireball now, plunges into the pit.” Wow.

The New Yorker - Up and Then Down

- Anne

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Although Edmonton — my current abode — subscribes to the striated-space solution when it comes to its road network design, recent research by French and US physicists has revealed that more often than not road networks in urban spaces resemble the veins of your common leaf (PDF).

The production of these “lines of desire” are reflections of paths of least resistance, attempts to achieve maximum transport-efficiency, affordances, dispositions, etc. This revelation was revealed thanks to “a simple mathematical model that can recreate the characteristic leaf-like patterns that develop, growing a road network from scratch as it would in reality.”

Marc Barthélemy of the French Atomic Energy Commission in Bruyères-le-Châtel tells the story’s author:

Beyond the economic, demographic and geographic “forces” that shape a town, there are a myriad of small “accidents” that contribute. Although these are unpredictable, they can be understood in terms of statistics and simple modelling.

It seems, then, that the neorological mind-mapping aluded to in my last post might not be so farfetched since all that’s required is the right equation.

- Matthew