This blog is a research platform organizing projects, examples, and thoughts surrounding the idea of an urban mapping which reads the city as a network of individual activities and relationships in time rather than as a static form. This research looks at the city both from within and from above as kind of urban cat-scan.
This fascinating video of birds in flight is a great visual example of the power of group dynamics in perceiving and synchronizing instantly. According to Brandon Keim from Wired, these like crystal formation and avalanches are "systems poised on the brink, capable of near-instantaneous transformation" and are called "scale-free correlation".
I have not posted in a while as I have been so busy with too many exciting projects. I have come across many things that belong in this blog but today's find led me to post again. This project by Deb Roy of MIT (via a former student) touches on various layers of the research and experiments I and my students have been working on. I saw in it pieces of so many of our experiments which all started with a/v which eventually became the origination of this blog. This project by Roy, The Birth of a Word, has a fascinating example of the data that can be drawn out of audio and video imagery and how it can inform us. It also shows a bit of experimentation with how the imagery can be filtered in order to become useful. I am terming the imagery where you move through the house as "Living Axonometric", in the spirit of one of our projects, "Living Section".
Martha Skinner is founder of 10^10, co-founder of fieldoffice and assistant professor at Clemson University. She studies our built environment as a delicate ecology using representation methods that visualize the cycles of life in order to more acutely address temporal, social and environmental issues. Her work includes several Living Maps of cities, which include NY A/V and BiCi_N, projects that involve the inhabitants of our cities in their daily routines to affect, in real-time, possibilities for social and environmental change. As the 1999 Walter B. Sanders Fellow at the University of Michigan, Martha developed Notation A/V, a seminar about the merging of drawing and moving image, a methodology she exploits in her work to filter, transmit, capture, and celebrate the intangible qualities of the passing of time with solutions that address the relationships between humans and the ecologies in which they are situated.
Allen, Stan. “Mapping the Unmappable: On Notation.” In Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation
Batty, Michael "Thinking About Cities as Spatial Events", in *Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design l29*, No. 1
Corner, James. “The agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention” in Mappings, edited by Denis Cosgrove
Cosgrove, Denis. “Carto-City” in Janet Abrams and Peter Hall (ed.), Else/Where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories
De Certeau, M. The Practice of Everyday Life. (S. Rendall, Trans.).
Hajer, Maarten and Reijndorp, Arnold. In Search of New Public Domain
Hall, Peter. "Flight Paths." in Janet Abrams and Peter Hall (ed.). Else/Where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories
Kracauer, Sigfried, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality
Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo. Vision in Motion
Nuti, Lucia. Mapping Places: Chorography and Vision in the Renaissance. In Mappings, edited by Denis Cosgrove
Nuti, Lucia. Mapping Places: Chorography and Vision in the Renaissance. In Mappings, edited by Denis Cosgrove
Ross, Rebecca. "Perils of Precision." in Janet Abrams and Peter Hall (ed.), Else/Where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories
Schwarzer, Mitchel. Zoomscape, Architecture in Motion and Media
Tschumi, Bernard, Event-Cities series
Tschumi, Bernard. Manhattan Transcripts
Tufte, Edward. “Multiples in Space and Time” in Visual Explanations
uploading
Vetters, Trui. ‘Night on Earth’: Urban Practices and the Blindness of Metatheory. In The Urban Condition: Space, Community, and Self in the Contemporary Metropolis
