serial consign

[Civilization Revolution]

This morning my first contribution to Mez Breeze's excellent Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1 "GAM3R 7H30RY" blog went live. In the coming months I'm going to be developing a series of posts for Augmentology entitled Tentative Spaces which will explore the cultural and spatial quality of interface and information overlays in gaming. I'm interested in how gamers occupy these spaces and how they sit outside and "on top" of narrative. I plan to use this writing project to formalize and further develop many of the ideas I've explored in past posts on gaming like Ways of Seeing Digital Space, Notes on Operational Narrative and Learning from Liberty City. So rather than say any more, here is a link to the post.

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.