serial consign

In the past I've discussed Vannevar Bush’s Memex as a harbinger of networked culture and the desktop metaphor in computing. Earlier this year, I spent some time researching several other technologies from the mid-20th century to consider how they tie in to the history of information visualization. I plan on gradually reworking this material as a series of posts, each focusing on the history and/or aesthetics of a specific technology. This first post is a crash course on the origins of Radio Detection and Ranging (aka radar). Expect future posts on the Head-up Display (HUD), an excavation of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) and other related technologies. It is my hope that in examining the history of these tools and processes we may better understand the intersection of 20th century imaging technologies and pervasive interface culture.

[radar display & operator circa 1945]

In tracing the genealogy of information visualization there are a number of potential historical discourses to draw from. The study of information design usually employs statistics, demographics or cartography as choice vantage points from which to consider the discipline. A continued interest in the work of William Playfair (1759-1823) and Charles Minard (1781-1870) is proof positive of the legitimacy of these backstories in the eyes of most design historians.

One of the most famous images associated with Charles Minard is his temporal map (pictured above) which details the ill-fated march of Napoleon into Russia in 1812-1813. It is no accident that one of the first complex information graphics schematized a military campaign, considering the longstanding tradition of technological and informational innovation being spurned by the gears of war. This particular cartographic enterprise has become of of the signature images of information visualization and can often be found within the first several slides of any introductory presentation on the topic. However, instead of submerging into a detailed analysis of the techniques and methodology of Minard in this visualization, a more fruitful discussion would be to instead dwell on the fact that this image was produced to document and represent a military campaign. Given that technological innovation is implicit in warfare, it only follows that the military is a key area of interest to any historical analysis of information visualization.

Of the many battles that took place between the United Kingdom and Germany during WWII, the Battle of the Beams was one of the most decisive. This conflict pitted nascent British and German radar technology against one another with aerial dominance of the skies over England hanging in the balance.

[german knickebein transmitter]

Radar was first developed by the German inventor Christian Huelsmeyer for the purpose of collision avoidance in nautical navigation. Huelsmeyer publicly demonstrated his system in 1904 and it operated by firing radio waves at targets and detecting their reflections. Over the next two decades, European and North American scientists would further develop this research and the range of radar systems extended from several to 25 miles. By the onset of the war, radar was emerging as a viable tactical tool. The crux of British-German radar warfare emerged from the German air force’s utilization of the Knickebein and X-Gerät signal transmission systems to enable nighttime bombing runs over Britain. The Luftwaffe bombing raids were executed with surgical precision and this presented a sea change in aerial warfare to which the British military had to respond. Fortunately for Britain, a rudimentary radar network had been implemented before the onset of the war and it was able to serve as the cornerstone in a comprehensive British defense strategy that would ultimately “out-visualize” their German opponents.

In 1937, a prototype radar network was set up along the perimeters of Great Britain. Dubbed Chain Home, the system consisted of a line of transmitter stations positioned at 50 mile intervals around the perimeter of the United Kingdom. Led by scientist Robert Watson-Watt the British military capitalized on this system to develop state-of-the-art methods for enemy detection and fire control. This advanced mapping of the airspace over the United Kingdom acted as a force-multiplier allowing the British defenses to concentrate the aircraft where they were needed most and coordinate supporting anti-aircraft fire. Chain Home was monitored by oscilloscope display units and the operation of this system is described in wikipedia as follows:

When a pulse was sent out into the broadcast towers, the scope was triggered to start its beam moving horizontally across the screen very rapidly. The output from the receiver was amplified and fed into the vertical axis of the scope, so a return from an aircraft would deflect the beam upward. This formed a spike on the display, and the distance from the left side—measured with a small scale on the bottom of the screen—would give the distance to the target. By rotating the receiver goniometer [a tool for measuring angles] connected to the antennas to make the display disappear, the operator could determine the direction to the target… while the size of the vertical displacement indicated something of the number of aircraft involved. By comparing the strengths returned from the various antennas up the tower, the altitude could be determined.

This imaging technology provided the British forces with an early warning system by generating realtime data tracking German aerial activity over, or approaching, the United Kingdom. These types of radar-based defense networks have been described as “electromagnetic curtains”, an upgrade to the medieval notion of fortification in which brick and mortar are bolstered and extended by telecommunication infrastructure (see Manuel de Landa's War in the Age of Intelligent Machines for an excellent critical reading of the history of the technology).

Parallel to the development of radar, British military engineers also implemented identification, friend or foe (IFF), which utilized an early version of RFID technology to distinguish friendly from "other" aircraft on a radar display. This kind of "tagging" and related RFID technology (along with the ubiquitous database) is now a driving force of contemporary inventory management.

The technological developments outlined above provided Britain with the strategic edge it required to turn the tide in the air war against Germany. Oscilloscope based radar system would eventually give way to the Plan Position Indicator (PPI) display (pictured above in a contemporary meteorological context), which is now universally associated with radar technology.

The game lies in searching for happiness in the natural and innate desire to decide one's own life, constantly roving around in search of contexts and climates that are more favorable to one's personal mood, or realistically, in search of employment possibilities, becoming nomads in search of new opportunities for discovery and adventure, living in Constant's New Babylon freed from work, or enjoying the freedom of choice offered to us by the society of consumption, like one of the many figures that crowd the instant cities of Archigram.

The above quote is an excerpt from Alberto Iacovoni's 2004 text Game Zone: Playgrounds between Virtual Scenarios and Reality, a writing project that broadly examines urban space as an arena for play and transgression. The text discusses the legacy of the Situationist International, along with a variety of contemporary public space interventions and related paradigms and aesthetics culled from the last three decades of gaming. The book is not only an engaging read, but it serves as a convenient point of entry into discussion about the recent Rockstar Games title Grand Theft Auto IV (GTA4). The protagonist of GTA4 is one Niko Bellic, an Eastern European immigrant and war veteran with a checkered past and no qualms about renting his services out to various underworld figures. It his through his eyes that we view and experience the richly detailed Liberty City, an open, explorable metropolis which draws quite heavily on the landscape and landmarks of New York City.

In a recent BLDGBLOG interview, Geoff Manaugh talked to noted concept designer and art director Daniel Dociu about his work on the spatial design of Guild Wars. In introducing Dociu, Manaugh highlighted the fact that tens of thousands of people inhabited and experienced in-game architecture and that perhaps it was worth examining a little more closely. I completely agree with this sentiment and what follows is a close reading of the "virtual urbanism" of Liberty City as well as some discussion about this specific digital metropolis as a city-sized coliseum. In Ways of Seeing (Digital Space), a post from last October, I examined a handful of recent progressive gaming titles in light of architectural representation. This post will apply that same scrutiny to the game space of GTA4, but zoom out quite a bit and think at a city scale.

Production Design

The above image, which prominently displays the Broker Bridge merging with the urban fabric of one of Liberty City's four boroughs, indicates the degree of detail at play within GTA4. Liberty City is a massive assemblage of distinct neighbourhoods and districts based off the local flavour, texture and inhabitants of Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, Manhattan and New Jersey. Liberty City is able to approximate these cities within a city so effectively through an elaborate network of roadway infrastructure, public transit systems, architecture, vehicles, pedestrians, signage, and even garbage and grime. Liberty City is simply brimming with stuff, and not that of the texture-mapped static backdrop variety, rather a living and breathing urban system with a tangible pulse that waxes and wanes over the course of each day and in response to the weather and progression through the game narrative. One only need look as far as the original trailer for GTA4 to see the lofty ambitions of the design team behind Liberty City as this video emulates the cinematography of Koyaanisqatsi, right down to the score (Philip Glass' Pruit Igoe). This staggering amount of detail has been scrutinized and summarized elsewhere and the heavily circulated Sightseeing in Liberty City photoset concisely illustrates how much specific aspects of Liberty City resonate with the landmarks and architecture of New York City.

Hyper-realistic stills don't really do Liberty City justice though. One needs to spend time exploring the city (not necessarily within the confines of the game narrative) to get a sense of how thoroughly this simulation of urban space has been thought through. Chatty cabbies, roadway construction, political campaigns, in-game media and an entire world of back alleys and urban texture help reinforce the notion that Liberty City is a plausible representation of urban space rather than simply a stage set. Beyond these details Liberty City is populated with a huge range of "extras", each with a style and unique backstory - one only need eavesdrop on a cell phone conversation or two to drive that latter point home. One of my favourite moments in GTA4 is the broadcast of a radio ad for Civil Service, an urban simulation game in which play revolves around the creation and micromanagement of a digital city. This satirical little wink at the audience not only provided the design team with a laugh but it also highlights the implicit genealogical connection between GTA4 and Will Wright's SimCity franchise.

[jim munroe / my trip to liberty city / 2003]

In a New York Magazine interview last month, Rockstar Games' Dan Houser described the relationship between Liberty City and The Big Apple as follows:

We try to get the essence of the place, not a photo-realistic, digital tourist guide. We wanted a kind of spiritual tourist guide that feels like New York, but a blown-out, larger-than-life version. We want it to feel you're the star of your own movie or TV show. We wanted an element of the classic New York of the seventies and eighties too.

According to this description, Liberty City is best considered a caricature rather than a simulation of a city. In considering cinematic equivalents, it would be wise to look to Martin Scorsese and the historical revisionism of Gangs of New York as an equally ambitious "over the top" exercise in urban production design. This conversation about GTA4 as tourism and of Liberty City as a legitimate destination makes the 2003 machinima short My Trip to Liberty City seem even more prescient.

The Evolution of Liberty City

Another factor to consider when examining Liberty City is that the metropolis is a work in progress. This is not a comment on the aforementioned in game roadway construction, but highlights the fact that the Liberty City in GTA4 is the fifth iteration of the city within the GTA franchise. Just as Calvino's Invisible Cities reveled in the perennial reconstruction and reiteration of Venice, the GTA series has been an extended reconsideration of Liberty City (as well as Vice City and San Andreas, based off Miami and California/Nevada respectively). When the current version of Liberty City (pictured above) is compared to the humble first attempt developed in the late 1990s, it is quite clear how much 3D graphics and open world gaming have come along in the last several years.

Liberty City also has an overt connection to an urban entity other than New York City - it is also the name of an extremely poor African-American neighbourhood in Miami. Ironically, the Wikipedia entry on Liberty City mentions that the neighbourhood is often described as a "model city" but "rarely, if ever described as such by anyone from South Florida". Liberty City is also notorious for the 1980 Liberty City Riots (in response to the acquittal of three white officers in the beating death of Arthur McDuffie), significant drug related violence in the late 1980s and the much lauded Meek Entrepreneurial Educational Center (MEEC), a satellite campus of Miami-Dade College. Given the depiction of urban space in the GTA series, the backstory of the actual Liberty City is an interesting counterpoint to the "digital approximation" of New York City.

Fatal Strategies

While thousands of hours of labour were dedicated to the design and construction of Liberty City there are certainly no pretenses about the fact that the pleasure of play in GTA4 is in the disruption and destruction of urban space. While the entire GTA franchise has had a mild obsession with cocaine, in-game intoxication is clearly derived from the intersection of ultraviolence and post-physics engine Ballardian crash aesthetics. GTA4 celebrates armaments and demolition driving with equal zeal and this heightened sensitivity of space, velocity and material creates a dynamic environment that craves carnage. The above video does a fantastic job of communicating how well the GTA4 physics engine can (man)handle bodies in motion and how this framework facilitates a full spectrum of sociopathic interventions. In Fatal Strategies Jean Baudrillard wrote about the prospect of harnessing the catastrophe:

...but that is pure madness. We might as well hope to capture the energy of automobile accidents, of dogs that have been run over, or of anything that collapses. (New hypothesis: if things have a greater tendency to disappear and collapse, perhaps the principal source of future energy will be accident and catastrophe.

It is this implausible energy source, a twisted metal fender-bender substrate that undergirds the narrative and gameplay in Liberty City.

[GTA4 mutliplayer mise-en-scène]

A cynical reading of GTA4 might delineate the game as an extended chain of cut scenes kneecapped by overly linear play, but once you step aside from the narrative proper and embrace the way the game represents and engages urban space, it is hard not be thrilled. In fact, the "purest" play that occurs in Liberty City takes place when you abandon the narrative altogether in multiplayer mode, where urban space becomes a gigantic coliseum in which a dozen or so players engage in a continuous collaborative action sequence the likes of which Michael Bay could never hope to equal.

The essence of appreciating Liberty City (truly a "model city") is a perverse love/hate relationship with civic order and urban space. This hypothetical American metropolis is compelling because it serves as an environs in which to reimagine present day New York City while acting as a benchmark for future living, breathing fictional cities.