serial consign

[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.

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]