If there is a genealogy of urban visualization projects, there is certainly a category invested in reading the city as a text. CityMurmur?was developed by?Writing Academic English at the VISUALIZAR'08 workshop held at Medialab-Prado last fall. The project functions as a geo-aggregator and produces maps and semantic representations of Madrid based off RSS feeds. Mixing both mass media and blog commentary, the project provides a flexible interface for reading the city "through the eyes of the media". Some additional technical notes are available at a related VisualComplexity post?but the best way to get a sense of the project is to take it for a spin yourself.
Two notable links from the last few days:
[photo: jb]
In keeping with our current theme of urban representation, I'm going to make a point of using the Vague Terrain blog to share related content over the coming weeks and months. First on the agenda is the Bureau for Unstable Urbanism (BUU). We received an email about this project (and related conference in Oslo this May) from Jeremy Welsh at the?Bergen National Academy of Arts. The newfound BUU describes itself as "as a trans-national network of individuals and groups involved in a variety of practices that engage in different ways with contemporary urban space, actually or conceptually". Poking through their blog archives yielded some interesting musings on urban readymades and speculation on?shotgun architecture - I guess it is safe to assume this spirit of experimentation will be the driving force behind their conference this spring. Take a look at the BUU website for more info on the project, they've got quite the team of bloggers/artists hard at work examining urban space throughout the EU and beyond.
[Tori Foster / The Impossibility of Understanding in the Path of a Torontonian - still]
We are excited to announce the launch of Vague Terrain 13: citySCENE, the latest edition of our online digital arts publication. Curated by Greg J. Smith, the issue indexes a wide range of strategies for representing and visualizing urban space. Drawing on the collective talent of an international pool of new media artists and scholars, citySCENE catalogs how cartography, infrastructure and locative media shape perception in the contemporary city. Many submissions also explore more subjective urban experiences and consider notions of vision, acoustic ecology, movement and agency through experiments and interventions staged in a number of global cities.
Contributors: Abinadi Meza, Andrea Rojas,? Mattia Casalegno & Michael Langeder, Michael Chen & Jason J. Lee, Conor McGarrigle, David Drury, Franke Dresme, Greg Giannis, Hector Centeno, Katharine S. Willis, Michael Surtees, Mitchell Whitelaw, Olga Mink, Ivan Safrin & Christian Marc Schmidt, Thomas Dreher, Tori Foster and Yukiko Bowman.
To view the issue please visit http://vagueterrain.net/journal13
The French philosopher Paul Virilio argued that every new technology comes complete with its own unique catastrophe; the invention of the aeroplane, for instance, was also the invention of the plane crash. The corollary of the sample epiphany is what I call the "sample stain".
Simon Reynolds waxes poetic on sampling and Massive Attack for The Guardian.