I'm currently in Washington for several days of R&R. I've decided to take a break from posting on Serial Consign for a few weeks. I have aspirations to migrate the site to Drupal 6.x soon and want to take some time to plan the redesign. Beyond this, I have some other writing projects that I'd like to get started on. Posting will resume the week of September 7th - enjoy the rest of your summer!

[gisèle freund / walter benjamin in the bibliothèque national / 1939]

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of stumbling across Walter Benjamin's Archive, a book published by Verso earlier this year. The text consolidates material pertaining to a fall 2006 exhibition at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin which cataloged a variety of Benjamin related ephemera for public display. This material included notebooks, postcards, drafts and scribbles, project outlines and photography. Given Benjamin's obsession with the analysis of historical waste, it follows that his legacy would inspire a rigorous archival project. This gorgeously designed text provides a side-door into his life and work enables a proximity that is both fascinating and somewhat melancholic.

[benjamin's paris address book]

The text is organized into thirteen short chapters which cover a diverse range of topics including collecting, traveling, graphic forms, puzzles and Benjamin's time in Paris researching the Arcades Project. Each of these sections is comprised of a selection of documents, many of which are extensively annotated and a few of which are translated. The chapters are also accompanied by introductory texts by Ursula Marx, Erdmut Wizisla and Michael and Gudrun Schwarz which frame specific interests, obsessions and spans of time in Benjamin's life. There is some great material pertaining to his interest in toys, his linguistic adventures in parenthood and several plans and outlines analyzing the life and work of Franz Kafka.

What is so interesting about this project, is rather than approach Benjamin as the subject for a standard biographical profile, this text employs his research and writing methodology to dissect and taxonomize his interests. In many ways, working through this text felt like a continuation of a reading of the Arcades Project as all the content is fleeting, self-contained and schematic. Despite the fragmentary nature of this collection, the whole is indeed more than the sum of the parts and a very vital, humane impression of Benjamin shines through this (curated) marginalia. Beyond the content of the text, Benjamin was a steady-handed craftsman when it came to writing - his research, documents and notebooks are meticulous constructions with the potential to inspire both scholars and designers.

The following two images and related excerpts made quite an impression on me, perhaps you'll find them of interest. The first, annotated by Ursula Marx, deals with Benjamin's editing process. The second is a trademark Benjamin observation, dealing with one of his favourite topics - the intangible nature of memory.

Alongside this work on the sheet Benjamin also used a very different technique: work with the sheet. He cut it crosswise into units which each represent one motif or building block of the text. In the case of the Kafka material [examples shown above] this resulted in about eighty manuscript strips in total. The complexity of Benjamin's editing procedures is revealed in this process: presumably, as a consequence of previous collations and groups of ideas, individual motifs are formulated and written out randomly on a sheet of paper. Using coloured symbols on the clear edge of the sheet, these are then pooled into units, which are placed in a sequence indicated by the number of the signs. After this—if necessary—the sheets are cut up in order to make the placing of the units in the planned order physically possible.

What lends an incomparable tone to the very first view of a village or a town in the landscape is the fact that in one's image of it distance resonates just as importantly as nearness. This latter still has not yet gained preponderance through the constant exploration that has become habit. Once we begin to find our way around the place, the earliest picture can never be restored.

The Tokyo Subway is undoubtedly one of the world's most complex rapid transit systems. Maps of this network have even eclipsed Harry Beck's famed London Underground Tube Map as the benchmark graphic representation of sprawling urban infrastructure . While sifting through ffffound! yesterday I (actually, my girlfriend Jordan) found a series of related graphics that expand on the Tokyo Subway map proper. Please note the following eye candy, which is long on sophisticated diagrams and short on commentary.

This is an axonometric diagram of Otemachi Station, the largest subway station in Tokyo (it is served by five lines). Above and beyond the expected system maps, the Tokyo Metro also provides diagrams for station-specific wayfinding. These drawings identify spatial layout, connecting transit lines, interior circulation, amenities and locations of information within each subway station. There is a definite abstract quality to these drawings as they reduce station architecture to a series of untethered platforms, ramps, elevators, escalators and stairways that seem to float in white space underneath a dense layer of annotation and iconography.

Check out a much larger version of the above image here - this shrunken screen capture doesn't do the drawing justice. Oddly enough, we couldn't find these diagrams on the "global" (English) version of the Tokyo Metro website.

This is the axonometric diagram for Ginza Station - another key transit hub. You can view a larger image of this drawing here. [via securecat]

[aguno / paul / 2008]

After a brief hiatus, Vague Terrain is back with a new website and a fresh issue of our digital arts publication. Vague Terrain 10: Digital Dub features a variety of multimedia projects that explore the intersection of digital culture and all things dub.

This body of work contains contributions from Aguno, DubRocket, Eduardo Navas, Jonah K, NAW, Ohrwert, Segue, The Straggler and interviews with DJ Spooky and Kevin Martin (aka The Bug) conducted by Eduardo Navas and Corina MacDonald - you can view the issue here.

Vague Terrain is now moving towards augmenting the journal content with a group blog. I'm hoping that we can enlist a dozen or so of the 100 artists, scholars and musicians we've featured over the last three years to provide semi-regular contributions related to their areas of expertise, supplementing the journal content in the process. We've also got a stellar next issue lined up by way of the CONT3XT.NET crew.

Please swing by Vague Terrain to check out our new digs and/or the digital dub issue, it'll take a few weeks for the group blog to get going but I'm hoping that experiment will yield an eclectic mix of content.

I could have sworn I finished it four months ago, but I've found myself revisiting Information Visualization and Pervasive Interface Culture, the book chapter I was working on earlier this year. This has sent me out into the (graphic) wilds in search of a few more precedents to discuss, one of which is the subject of this post.

This is the first image from labRAD's entry into White House Redux an international ideas competition organized by the Storefront for Art and Architecture. This competition called for a dramatic rethinking of the White House as an icon for democracy in the 21st century - no small task. If anybody was to undertake this venture, it had may as well be the architecture community as their labour costs about three cents on the dollar compared to Halliburton consultants.

This optimistic proposal, entitled White House 2.0, is based off an extensive historic and programmatic analysis of the American government, the legislative process and speculation as to how public opinion might more directly influence governance. Wayne Congar of labRAD describes the scope of research conveyed in this infographic as follows:

The composite image on the right is a a fairly sophisticated analytic tool which serves as a timeline, political index and a people's history. It is also contains architectural annotations tracking the minor alterations that 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has undergone over the last two centuries (these are quite well documented on wikipedia).

This image develops the proposition that the White House could act as an "information parsing machine" and consolidate a steady stream of web-powered polling and demographics...

...and filter these flows of realtime data into content for projection onto the various interior surfaces of the White House. The labRAD scheme serves up this "informatized interior" alongside a flexible plan for managing labour and space based off public opinion. While my inner pragmatist is not entirely convinced by some aspects of this proposal, I respect the fact it approaches redesigning the White House as an exercise in systems management rather than simply delivering a spectacular edifice. Beyond this, there are a diverse range of representational strategies at play within this work that manage to appeal to information visualization purists one moment and read like a graphic novel the next.

You can check out the full proposal via the following PDF which is archived on the labRAD site.

[david rokeby / seen / 2002]

I'm excited to announce the launch of TAGallery 21: City of Nodes, a selection of geographic and cartographic work that I've curated for the fine folks at CONT3XT.NET. City of Nodes is a collection of twelve new media projects from the last decade that reconsider the representation of urban space. Broadly speaking, the work deals with mapping but some projects also address narrative, the simulated city and the process of archiving. An excerpt from my introduction to the work:

City of Nodes is a collection of works from the last decade that explores the everyday domains of street, neighbourhood and the entire city as platforms for mapping, movement and communication. These projects adopt a bird's-eye view of urban space and storyboard the city towards a number of idiosyncratic ends. In these augmented and annotated cities, space and context are interrogated, surveillance technology exposed, fleeting histories archived and the role of the body reconsidered.

It was quite exciting for me to research this project as it will serve as the foundation for a venture that I'll be working on later in the year. Beyond my enthusiasm about this body of work, I was an early fan of the use of delicious as a tool for curation (see my post Tagging as Curation from last summer); contributing to TAGallery felt right on point with my research interests. What follows is a brief introduction to a few of the projects included in City of Nodes.

Aram Bartholl is German artist whose work explores the intersection of web culture and everyday life. 256² was an exercise in delineating a parcel of land from NewBerlin (a reproduction of Berlin in Second Life) in Berlin proper. For this 2007 project, Bartholl used chalk to trace the bounding box of a 256 square meter area in Alexanderplatz reinforcing the connection between this public space and its virtual counterpoint.

One Block Radius was a 2004 project by Christina Ray and Dave Mandl founded on archiving the ephemera of a Manhattan city block (now the site of the New Museum). The work utilizes a web interface to store a variety of entries which catalog photographs and experience via categories such as rules/regulations, daily life and sounds/noise. I really enjoy the rigor of this project and in many ways it seems prescient of sites like Everyblock, a web service that I've written about several times in the past.

City of Nodes was also an opportunity for me to finally pay homage to Amsterdam Realtime, a 2002 project by Esther Polak, Jeroen Kee and The Waag Society. The work equipped volunteers with GPS devices to track their movements over a two month period. The resulting "personal" maps were compared and composited as part of retrospective exploring 100 years of cartography in Amsterdam. Amsterdam Realtime is as a benchmark locative media project and an ancestor to later, influential work including Polak's MILK project (2005), the MIT SENSEable City Lab's Real Time Rome (2006) and Stamen Design's Cabspotting (2006).

TAGallery 021: City of Nodes also contains work by Tuur Van Balen, Gordan Savic, Tom Carden, the Insitute for Applied Autonomy, John Geraci, Mushon Zer-Aviv + Dan Phiffer + Kati London + Laila El-Haddad + Thomas Duc + Ran Tao + Charles Pratt, Shawn Micallef + James Roussel + Gabe Sawhney and David Rokeby.

You can view the full list of projects and annotations via this link.

[severn tidal fence]

Kindly direct your attention to InfraNet Lab, the new online writing project of designers Mason White and Lola Sheppard of Lateral Architecture. This research venture is invested in exploring the intersection of infrastructure, design and resource management, an architecture they describe as being comprised of "surface, containers and conduits". Mason and Lola were shortlisted in a recent Reykjavík-based landscape design competition and are definitely worth keeping tabs on - those interested in ecology and architecture take note.

This has been a very strange week. I've heard rumours that I'm on vacation but I'm too busy working on web projects to notice. I've been revisiting some writing from earlier in the year which has inspired a week-long obsession with all things GUI. To that end, I thought I'd fill the bloghole with a trio of interface related links. What follows is an assortment of material that I've been looking at recently - make of it what you will.

Igor Eskinja's Untitled (pictured above) is a play on the rank and file of desktop space. I love the ghostly reflections cast by his floating folders and the tension of the trash can interrupting the base of that wall as if to remind the viewer "this is indeed perspectival space". Eskinja has a real knack for creating illusionary scenes and his archives contain some very clever work. [via vvork]

Long before the world of pre-fab, modular video mixing software there was Jitter, and before that there was nato+0.55. A few months ago, Create Digital Motion contributor Vade posted the the above video and a brief summary of the legacy of nato+0.55. His reading of the software is bang on and the idiosyncratic interface and aesthetic of this tool are still relevant a decade later.

To continue our interface nostalgia, this promotional video for the Xerox Star has recently been making the rounds. Introduced in 1981, the Star was the first commercial application of the "desktop" computing metaphor. The Star, and the earlier Alto were key influences of Apple's Macintosh and all personal computing thereafter. Watching this video drives home the point that the workspace of the digital desktop really hasn't changed that much over the last quarter century. [via JS Sheffield]

Pictured above is a screen capture of Intersections 2, a flash sketch by interactive designer Jonnie Hallman. Launching this mini-application yields a simple workspace that contains three adjustable circles. Each of these circles has a pair of white sliders (vertices) that allow you to pivot and scale the entity. You can also create new points with which to generate vectors that run across the canvas. This all sounds simple enough, but what is so engaging about this application is the manner in which the interface tracks the interaction between geometric entities. Each intersection is represented by a yellow marker that highlights the point in question - if you pivot a circle "through" another, the point(s) of contact will slide along to trace the movement. Modulating the arrangement of these shapes feels like calibrating an abstract instrument of some sort. This experienced is no doubt enhanced by the sharp visual language of the piece.

Jonnie Hallman has a variety of experiments, including more "intersection" pieces in his archives. Hallman also authored the recent DestroyFlickr application, which is a widely noted alternative interface for the photo-management service.

Over the last few days I've discovered a pair of interesting projects that explore urban form through computation. The first is an interactive map of Rome that locates and contextualizes a number of 18th century perspective drawings, the second is a software application that utilizes procedural modeling to generate expansive 3D cities.

Imago Urbis: Giuseppe Vasi's Grand Tour of Rome is an interactive archive of the work of Giuseppe Vasi (1710-1782). Like Pannini and Piranesi, Vasi is considered one of the great vedutisti (delineators of urban space). His masterwork was Magnificenze di Roma antica e moderna, a 238 image, ten-volume collection of prints that provided comprehensive documentation of the architecture and urban character of Rome. The crux of the Imago Urbis project is that it is takes Vasi's perspectival views and locates them on the Nolli map. The screen capture above illustrates how the vantage point of each perspective is identified and how architectural and infrastructural "points of interest" are annotated and colour-coded so that the user can situate the drawing in relation to the surrounding urban fabric.

The statement for project contextualizes the relationship between Vasi and Giambattista Nolli (the author of the Nolli map) as follows:

Given that Nolli and Vasi were contemporaries and collaborators focusing on the same subject, it seems obvious that their work is intrinsically related; up to now no vehicle existed to effectively synthesize their individual achievements into a single resource that effectively evokes Settecento Rome. We believe that it will be extremely informative to place these 18th century documents into their 21st century context so that spatial relationships can be drawn and new conclusions reached about their continuing significance to the understanding of the city. Our overarching objective is to document and integrate two distinct graphic modes for representing the Eternal City: the pictorial view and the ichnographic plan.

This interactive piece functions as both a map and an archive, a historical document and a database of urban views.

This is the main interface for Imago Urbis, which identifies the location of each of Vasi's drawings. Beyond communicating the inventory of available views, the map resonates with the increasingly familiar process of geo-navigating through a set of images (on everyblock for example). I find Imago Urbis extremely engaging because it applies numerous tropes from contemporary urban informatics to a historical archive, breathing new life into old representations of urban space. In addition to the overall scope of the project, the elegant interface and design are also commendable; how can you not love an "urban viewport" with a taxonomy class for the sites of executions?

Imago Urbis was developed by Jim Tice, Erik Steiner, Allan Ceen, and Dennis Beyer from the Department of Architecture, InfoGraphics Lab and Department of Geography at the University of Oregon. This is the same team that brought us the Interactive Noli Map in 2005. [via the map room]

CityEngine is a new software system developed by Procedural Inc., a Switzerland-based developer with ties to the ETH Zürich technical university. In watching the video above, it is quite clear how this tool could be employed to quickly produce sophisticated models of urban space based off defined parameters, design rules, material palettes, etc. The application seems equally capable of generating meandering street geometry as it does detailing elevations - one can only imagine how useful a tool like this could be in the film or gaming industries (the software made quite a splash at fmx/08). More abstractly, the software speaks to the emergent nature of urban form and growth, when viewed in fast-forward the process seems even more amazing.

More information on CityEngine can be obtained at the Procedural website as there a number of additional animations available for viewing, Procedural CEO Pascal Müller's site is also worth taking a look at. [via digital urban]