Wifi 'measuring rods' thanks to Oslo School of Architecture (click on image for their article)

[Bogotá City Blues by Coso Blues]

Wired UK reports on the digital city. Here are some utopian, critical and imaginary highlights:

Digital Cities: ‘Sense-able’ urban design
By Carlo Ratti

“By receiving real-time information, appropriately visualised and disseminated, citizens themselves can become distributed intelligent actuators, who pursue their individual interests in co-operation and competition with others, and thus become prime actors on the urban scene. Processing urban information captured in real time and making it publicly accessible can enable people to make better decisions about the use of urban resources, mobility and social interaction. This feedback loop of digital sensing and processing can begin to influence various complex and dynamic aspects of the city, improving the economic, social and environmental sustainability of the places we inhabit.”

Digital Cities: Words on the street
By Adam Greenfield

“[T]he technologies that the networked city relies upon remain opaque, even to those exposed to them daily. In fact, it’s hard to be critical and make sound choices in a world where we don’t understand the objects around us … In the networked city, therefore, the pressing need is for translators: people capable of opening up these occult systems, explaining their implications to the people whose neighbourhoods, choices and lives are increasingly conditioned by them. This will be a primary occupation for urbanists. If we’re reaching the point where it makes sense to consider the city as a fabric of addressable, queryable, even scriptable objects and surfaces – to reimagine its pavements, building façades and parking meters as network resources – this raises an order of questions never before confronted, ethical as much as practical: who has the right of access to these resources, or the ability to set their permissions?”

Digital Cities: London after the great 2047 flu outbreak
By Geoff Manaugh

“Public squares were rebuilt using data taken from air-circulation studies and the physics of the human cough. The distance a sneeze could travel took on architectural form. The congestion charge was applied to pedestrians, keeping transmissibility to a minimum; you could cross from borough to borough only with the written consent of a GP. Movement was controlled; public gatherings of people with incompatible immunities were made illegal; even the floorplans of flats and houses were carefully reshaped in accordance with medical regulations. Being at home felt like quarantine (and often, it was: if your daily skin tests didn’t look so good, you’d find your front door temporarily sealed). It was cold; some said dystopian. Until the prescription districts started to appear.”

[The City by lepiaf.geo]

Same day update: Also worth checking out are Ben Hammersley’s comments on this and related things.

The NY Times reports that architects Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder “have created a virtual map to guide users around Manhattan to sites where projects they describe as ‘visionary’ were planned but never built. The map is available as an interactive iPhone application…that uses GPS technology to detect when a user is near any of the roughly 50 notable sites, triggering a feature that allows the user to learn about the proposal through the architect’s foiled designs and words. ‘It’s a wall-less museum where the art isn’t even there,’ Mr. Snyder said. ‘The juxtaposition of what could be against what is’.”

Or as Geoff Manaugh so eloquently puts it, “[Y]ou go around the city, iPhone in hand – a kind of architectural dowsing rod held in front of you – discovering the traces of buildings that never were (perhaps even fragments of a city yet to come)… You walk past a certain corner on the Upper West Side and your iPhone starts to ring: you’re being called by a missing building… Absent structures detected in a wireless blur, leaving messages for you (complete with call-back number). Electromagnetic voice phenomena in architectural form.”

[Image by Geoff Manaugh]

And benjamin_aguirre adds: “This is a fascinating platform for exploring the latent imaginaries buried under/embedded in/folded into the built environment, capable of mining a precise history of a site through its virtualities rather than/in addition to its actualities. The surfacing of the virtual here washes the city-as the project’s title aptly suggests-in the phantasmagoric and uncanny. ‘Here lies architecture, unbuilt’.”

As with Dan Hill’s projections in The Street as Platform, I find this blurring between the actual and the virtual very interesting. But I’m also taken by the possibilities of how projects and applications like these can actually reshape the city. For example, Matt Jones recently wrote in The City is a Battlesuit for Surviving the Future that “although Archigram didn’t build their visions, other architects brought aspects of them into the world.” Since we know that world-building is complex and imaginary architectures manifest in different and often concrete ways, I wonder how digitally augmented realities may become actual, material realities. Along these lines, Geoff Manaugh also asks us to imagine a scenario where “crowds of tourists mill about on 13th Street, looking around at the imaginary buttresses of a superstructure you’ve spent three years digitally assembling.”

But the content of these imaginings is also crucial. Kazys Varnelis reminds us that “Archigram were fundamentally modernist at heart, eager to see their visions realized in a capitalist utopia but the Italian radicals set out to critique the system, exacerbating its operations in works that were more dystopian than utopian… [And] my fear is that some theorists have argued against critique and self-reflection for so long that a new generation doesn’t even have an inkling of how to practice it.”

Now critics do raise issues about access to technology, and the more negative or nefarious purposes to which the same technology can, and will, be put. But what isn’t at all clear to me is how the imaginary can be used as critique. I wonder how exactly might technologists, designers and citizens proceed to reimagine the city in more critical ways.

Any ideas?

NY Times: Data Center Overload

“Much of the daily material of our lives is now dematerialized and outsourced to a far-flung, unseen network … But where is ‘there,’ and what does it look like? ‘There’ is nowadays likely to be increasingly large, powerful, energy-intensive, always-on and essentially out-of-sight data centers. These centers run enormously scaled software applications with millions of users … Small wonder that this vast, dispersed network of interdependent data systems has lately come to be referred to by an appropriately atmospheric — and vaporous — metaphor: the cloud … [T]he electricity on a low-end server will now exceed the server cost itself in less than four years — which is why the geography of the cloud has migrated to lower-rate areas…”

Photos: NY Times: Search Me

Reviewed by Niamh Hennessy, York University

This is an interesting and provocative collection of stories, commentaries and reviews that offer a series of meditations on the transformations of everyday life in the new century. The perspectives are drawn from a range of cultural contexts even as these particularities strike a universal chord in the themes that link them together. The tones of the various articles continually shift; even the emphasis on nostalgia in Bell’s subtle inquiry on the Garbage Museum in Curitiba, Brazil is coupled with a certain joy in the discovery of lost objects made meaningful by the social relationships embodied or projected in their display. The female workers at the museum sort objects by hand as they move along a conveyor belt. Not well paid, but with relatively good benefits and conditions, the workers are situated in relation to the poor who collect and deliver garbage to the museum in exchange for food. All of this takes place in context the active promotional campaign the city of Curitiba launches during the 80s and 90s as the eco capital of the world.

The complexities of the social relationships examined by Bell are followed by Quentin Stevens’ eerie account of the American Murdo Station as the hub of scientific conquest of Antarctica. US interests in Antarctica date back to post World War II and the Cold War, and come to reflect contradictory impulses of modernity in the design of metropolitan and frontier spaces at Murdo. In detailing the ‘architecture’ of its colonial ideology, Stevens seems to mimic the mono-tonal hum and monochromatic images of the military’s regulation of landscape and social relationships. If these lead essays offer contrasts in tone and centre-periphery dynamics, other essays on cultural production and display invert and subvert the public/private dimensions of reality television, the construction of nation and the inward/outward glances in the reporting of community tragedies.

Susan Hedges’ article on Schlemmer’s ‘The Triadic Ballet’ points to how machine technology came to be incorporated in the movement of human bodies on stage, suggesting a more futuristic vision that is simultaneously an architecture of theatre space and a repetition. The theme of nation and performance returns in Richards’ account of the increasingly urbanized Maori alongside Susan Ballard’s account of the corporeal in installation settings in which digital codes intersect with material forms. The emphasis on performance over production is troubled by Kirsten Hudson’s efforts to link the former with the production of everyday life.

The hybridity of global media and advertising that depend equally on the expansion and segmentation of new markets of consumers suggest new definitions of the diaspora in Grixti’s essay, while other essays discuss how previously untapped markets, for example senior citizens, bring the periphery to the centre of advertising strategies and formats. Kate Greenwood theorizes how films like Metropolis (1926) and The Matrix (1999) fall short of representing contemporary experiences of subjects even with their recognition of the simulated of character motivation and action. Surprisingly absent from Redshaw’s essay on speed and the car is any mention of Taylorism or scientific management in its genesis, but the essays on new technologies and forms like email evoke these themes by detailing the collapse of time and space that figures in any account of postmodern subjectivities, whether singular or collective. Accordingly, the cyborg requires new rethinking and redefinition for its original instantiation as ‘half-man’ and ‘half-machine’ is superseded by the idea of a ‘self-regulating machine’ that Wiener, for one, likens to the activity of human intelligence. In that sense, we are cyborgs because we are, at least minimally incorporated in the feedback loops of machine technology whose functions are only most recently perfected or exploited by digital forms of communication. In short, this collection of essays from Canterbury University Press in New Zealand is worth a read not only for the resonances that cross culturally, but also for its distinctive character in voice and perspective.

Nicolas Nova describes this as a: “Tapestry made out of old motherboards, encountered in Lisbon, Portugal. Ubicomp/urban computing to the letter.”

I’ve always thought that motherboards look like architectural models for industrial neighbourhoods, but never more so than with this one. Perhaps because it’s been painted one colour?

- Anne

How could one avoid being just a technical end-user and late-adopter of Geographical Information Systems – that’s geodata or spatial data in other lingo : Does anyone have truly theoretical and methodological innovations in areas such as GIS for visualization of local and of community issues, locative and mobile media applications, GIS-amateur sketch map interfaces and cognitive mapping methods, or use of maps in a range of disciplines.

One example is Proboscis artist group’s  mapping – or is that unmapping? – of community issues.  The way they transform radio-controlled cars and other toys into ‘feral  robots’ equipped with eg. air quality sensors to allow schoolchildren to playfully gather data which is then posted up on interactive maps of their community.

Are we at at the beginning of a paradigm-shift in the use of GIS because these technologies have come off of the desktop onto portable devices.  Consider GPS devices, smart phones – almost ubiquitous in some industries.  What is the research agenda?

This is uniquely urban but the spill-over into touristic areas is already evident (take a drive through the Loire Valley with  a GPS enabled smart phone).

Are there examples of revitalizing old geodata (geodata for Edmonton goes back to 1963 but is in inaccessible formats) by making it available in museums, in exhibits or to the public for use in the form of downloadable and /or interactive maps?  Are their other projects such as Andre Lemos, Marilei Fiorelli and my locative art of drawing on Google Maps with a GPS logger?

How do we get from desktop/supercomputer style GIS to the scampering world of geotagging, geocaching and interactivedata accessed on the go (Google Earth on my mobile)?

-Rob

From the abstract:

Following urban computing and locative media and their accompanying visions from labs, conferences and classrooms to journal publications and popular media accounts, this dissertation presents four case histories in corporate, academic and artistic design practice. An analysis of the Mobile Bristol, Passing Glances, Sonic City and Urban Tapestries research and design projects draws out the idea that everyday life in the future city is expected to become more expressive, engaging and meaningful. The increased extensibility and transmissibility of the city itself, along with an increased ability to be socially embedded within it, is seen to be a fundamental promise inherent in these projects. The dissertation argues that such spatial and cultural potentialities can be productively understood as involving temporary, selective and mobile publics, where creative and playful interactions emerge as primary means of social innovation…

I’ve posted both the full dissertation (1.33 mb pdf) and individual chapters, and feedback is always welcome.

- Anne

William Lamson (2007-2008)

via Wrong Distance

- Anne

The debate has recently been extended in the Toronto Star to the time-space of academe. Stephen Marche observes that this whole kerfuffle is grappling with a moot point given that the market forces of academia “will do away with it long before its intellectual silliness has a chance to become apparent.”

He notes that although philology “is vital to scholarship [...] almost nobody does it now.” Instead, theorists in the humanities and social sciences study “Deleuze or Irigary” since they can “get the gist in six months.” It follows, suggests Marche, that “the old academic books that took a lifetime of lecturing to produce, and which often were readable, and even beautiful, have no place.”

Marche’s suggestion is that the spaces of academe, whether or not neorobiology is able to inform them, do not have the patience for so complex a “problem.” Instead, he implies, with a focus on churning out publications and looking productive, graduate students and faculty develop vague aesthetically-inclined discourses, thereby condemning aesthetics (thankfully?) to an ongoing life of mystery. He explains:

Typically, young academics are given four years to write a Ph.D., during which time they are probably teaching a heavy load, paying their dues as cheap replacements for the professors the university can’t afford to hire. They must also publish articles if they want to be hireable once they graduate. If the student takes too long writing the dissertation, the university stops its financial “support,” which in the humanities is a term that must always be chaperoned by quotation marks. For junior professors, the institutional hunger for publications cannot ever be satisfied. They simply must always produce more — quality is unmeasurable so it is not measured. The spew of publications must be continual and prodigious. In such a system, who on earth is going to go to the trouble of learning neurology? If anyone were foolish enough to attempt it, by the time he or she had written anything, neuroscience would most likely have changed and the work would be worthless. Better and easier to rummage around the archives or the old enthusiasms, and find something manageable, like a dress Queen Victoria wore which you can relate to Great Expectations, or a few untapped sadomasochistic longings of John Donne. Neuroaesthetics is too lousy a gamble. There’s no need to bomb this airfield, the planes were never going to fly anyway.

- Matthew