E/W featured artist Nina Katchadourian (remember the big tangled clump of the NYC subway map?) has published a new monograph with the Tang Museum, titled All Forms of Attraction. In lieu of an Amazon link, Nina offers various old-fashioned options for purchasing the volume ($19.95 plus $3.90 tax & shipping):
1) Call Tang Museum Store at 518-580-5534
2) Fax an order to 518-580-5069
3) Email Barbara Schrade at the Tang Store at bschrade@skidmore.edu

After persuading New York-based grocer Fresh Direct that they weren't planning to do something rude, critical or distracting to passing motorists, architects Ben Aranda and Chris Lasch of Terraswarm were granted their wish this Spring: a few nights' access to the company's flat panel video billboard--the largest of its kind in the United States. This 65-by-90-foot behemoth is located in an industrial area of Queens, where it is seen by millions of motorists atop the Long Island Expressway as they approach Manhattan.

Terraswarm turned off the gargantuan advertising after midnight on a few inhospitably cold nights in February and March, and replaced it with Color Shift, a sequence of saturated color fields designed to illuminate the neighborhood around the billboard. The effects of this continuous stream of pixellated color washes on the surrounding architecture were documented by Terraswarm and their collaborators Scott Kuzio and Stefan Hagen in large format photos and a 3-channel, high-definition video in an exhibition currently at Columbia University's Avery Hall through April 30.

Building on a previous collaboration with Natalie Jeremijenko, the folks at Proboscis (of Urban Tapestries fame) have just annnounced a rather unusual performance and public forum planned in London on April 10 named Snout. A cross between a carnival parade and a seminar, the event will include a demonstration by artists, producers, performers and computer programmers of ways to turn scavenged media into wearable technologies that can map the invisible gases in the air we (or Londoners) breathe. The event, a collaboration betweeen Proboscis, inIVA (the Institute of International Visual Arts), and researchers from Birkbeck College, begins at Cargo, on 83 Rivington St in East London. Given Birkbeck's involvement, we feel duty bound to recommend as background reading the script from Birkbeck literature professor Steven Connor's intoxicating audio essay "On the Air", here: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/onair/

More info here: http://www.iniva.org/season/winter/project_05

Around 50 people braved the chilly February Minnesota weather to attend Mapping New Knowledge Ecologies (MNKE), a workshop at the University of Minnesota Design Institute on Saturday, February 10. The event brought together experts from the fields of interactive design, statistics, architecture and locative media to discuss how the University's new College of Design might use new mapping techniques and technologies to reveal knowledge assets and indicate potential new hybrid lines of inquiry emanating from the College.
Structured as the opening conversation of a long-term mapping project at the University, the workshop was split into a series of morning presentations by the guest panelists, and an afternoon of breakout discussion groups, each groujp assigned with the task of proposing potential knowledge mappings of the University. (Panelist Josh On's efforts to instigate a social network map of the attending group in the spirit of psychiatrist Jacob L Moreno are pictured above: participants were asked to place a hand first on the shoulder of the person they'd known longest and, second on the should of the person they thought "the world should hear more from".)

By 5pm, mapping proposals were proliferating, ranging from a wiki-like website to which researchers looking for collaborators would post notices, to a mapping of foundation and grant money flowing into the University.
A full MNKE report will follow soon.

According to its organizers, the Brooklyn-based creative group Glowlab, Conflux is not a conference, but a festival for contemporary psychogeography. It's a fitting description, as the slant of the event reflects the performative nature of psychogeography--an activity that uses human beings as the tool for urban analysis. The four-day festival comprised games, tours, actions and celebrations, all centered in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. Even the lecture series was very un-conference-like, held in the murky ambience at the back of a bar called The Lucky Cat. It was an apt setting for writer and mapmaker Denis Wood to discuss the origins of psychogeography.

The Conflux festival can be seen as an antidote for the cartographic disembodiment prevalent in an age of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). While today's urban planners and map makers typically engage the environment from an office chair and a GIS interface, psychogeographers at Conflux and beyond spill into the streets. Where one practice is built upon a tradition of tools--compass, clinometer, camera, computer and so on--the other measures the city with the intimacy of the body. As Denis Wood noted at the beginning of his presentation, "There's another instrument in this room and I am it."

Read more of William Owen and Fenella Collingridge's constructively critical review in Eye Magazine. http://www.eyemagazine.com/review.php?id=140&rid=653&set=719

Trumping the DI's Twin Cities Odorama for intensity is Gawker's New York City Subway Smell Map, created from reports sent in of odors, both horrific and sublime, encountered throughout New York's subway stations. The legend (above) really brings out the irony in Rodgers & Hart's song "Manhattan":

The subway charms us so
When balmy breezes blow
To and fro.
And tell me what street
Compares with Mott Street In July?

Highlights include:

Insider, a stock trading and backstabbing game on the streets of the financial district by Nick Fortugno (co-developer of the Design Institute's B.U.G), festival director Greg Trefry and Gamelab's Peter Lee and Mattia Romeo.

Manhattan Story Mashup, a collaborative storytelling game for 250 people around Times Square, organized by the Nokia Research Center.

Crossroads, a two-player strategy street game using GPS-enabled phones created by area/code, founded by Frank Lantz, (also a co-developer of the Design Institute's B.U.G) and Kevin Slavin.

Plundr, a laptop-based game also by area/code, in which players take on the role of bloodthirsty pirates navigating the high seas pillaging merchant ships and trafficking black market goods. The game uses a browser plug-in called Loki (www.loki.com) to identify the player's current location and determine which "island" he or she is near. Each island, corresponding to a realworld location, has merchant ships to attack and a local marketplace to buy and sell goods.

By Julian Stallabrass

A striking interview with Eyal Weizman in Else/Where:Mapping highlights the importance of the control of map data. In the 1993 Oslo negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the latter were relying on crude and outdated maps of their settlements. The Israelis had highly detailed maps that showed topography, land use and road networks, and exploited this asymmetry of information to their advantage. Weizman and his collaborators set out to make a public map of Israeli settlements using information gathered from aerial photography, ground visits and satellite data, and made highly conscious political choices about the form of the result, including decisions about how to draw the boundaries around built-up areas and what colour to make the settlements. The result was controversial, and an exhibition in Berlin, A Civilian Occupation, in which it was to be included, was cancelled by the Israel Association of United Architects. The map has been made available on the web as a modifiable PDF, and many have added to it, so that it has become a collective and open practice.

A series of technological innovations have made mapping a more expanded and contested subject, and may make control of data (and subsequent asymmetries of information) more difficult to sustain. These include the provision of satellite data in Google Maps, PDAs and other devices equipped with GPS technology, RFID tags, and the marriage of data from such machines with collectively produced software and creative content. Abrams and Hall’s collection of texts, discussions, images and artists’ projects examines the mapping of digital networks as well as physical space, and the mapping of online discourse, and forms a rich and fascinating resource on this area. Digitisation has had fundamental effects on mapping, claim the editors, freeing data from instantiation in a single visual form in which the two are congealed, and creating a situation in which many visual manifestations of the same dataset may be designed. (This claim has a parallel in Lev Manovich’s argument in The Language of New Media that digital art constructs an interface to a separate database, rather than having the two inseparably melded in a painting or sculpture.) Mapping technology may also be applied to any complex dataset for the purposes of pattern recognition and manipulation—the book includes Ben Fry’s work on the visual mapping of the human genome, used for example to highlight the genetic variation between individuals.

The possibilities such technologies hold out for the marrying of data to an experience of place are remarkable. Marc Tuters and Karlis Kalnins’ work Geograffiti uses GPS waypoints at which users can leave stories, video, audio or other data for others to peruse at that spot. While such systems are in their infancy, and their social use is being pioneered by artists’ projects, it is easy to imagine an urban space saturated by others’ stories, opinions and impressions, the filtration of which could become a problem in a collective version of Borges’ famous story, ‘Funes the Memorious’, who was cursed with the inability to forget.

Some of the artists included here (Julie Mehretu is a prominent example) play on the data sublime, providing the viewer with the impression and spectacle of a fantastically complex and immensely large mapping of data that acts much as mountain scenes and stormy seas did on nineteenth-century urban viewers. In both cases, it is the remove from the threatening subject that allows the experience of an enjoyable frisson. Yet the line between the instrumental and the aesthetic display data is a blurred and uncertain one, as digital data synthesises production and reproduction, visualisation and instrumentality. Who can tell whether some impressive vision of the stockmarket as a star chart, for example, will not become an effective device for predictive trading?

In an essay on the mapping of people’s movements around urban spaces, Steve Dietz warns of embedded, distributed computing that it ‘will give rise to nightmarish scenarios of Total Information Awareness by governmental, commercial and illegal powers’ but also holds out the hope that "these capabilities can be used to give expression to personal points of view which, in turn, can be mapped into collaborative, alternative visions." This positive view points two ways: first, to the old alliance of surveillance and individual consumer choice, which has leashed personal data to the production of goods—and there is a danger here that artists, in their creative and ‘critical’ interactions with these possibilities may dramatise and romanticise them for a new group of early adopters; and second, to collective projects, including many the forms of Wiki and free software, to the online gift economy, that may be the only protection against the real threats inherent in the first.

Julian Stallabrass is a reader at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.

Natalie Jeremijenko, whose OneTrees project is featured in Else/Where:Mapping, has created a 1,000 square foot garden on the roof of New York's Postmasters Gallery (459 West 19th Street, New York) which she describes as "an environmental experiment in interaction with New York City bird population". It includes bird housing projects (multi-family dwellings), water systems, and other avian amenities, including a design by E/W featured architects Terraswarm. Urban system consulting by Laura Kurgan, whose Architecture and Justice show opens this Friday, 15 September.

From Natalie's press release:
OOZ is ZOO backwards.
Alongside architect-designed housing, Jeremijenko provides for the birds regular healthy food, water and bathing facilities, a system to contain and recycle local waste, and other public *cultural* amenities for birds, such as a concert hall, shopping mall, preferred foliage, insects and other resources. She is in effect launching an experimental platform to see:

Will birds share?
Will birds use a weapon against another?
Will they use the concert hall to perform and amplify their lovely songs?
What forms of leisure will they pursue, given their basic needs are taken care of? A ferris wheel ?
Will they self-medicate when given the opportunity?
How much ecological impact can one green roof have?

September 7 - October 7, 2006
NATALIE JEREMIJENKO
OOZ, Inc. (Šfor the birds)
Infrastructure and facilities for high-density bird cohabitation on the roof of Postmasters Gallery

with public housing projects by:
Aranda/Lasch + TerraSwarm
bonetti/kozerski
Leeser Architects
Materialab with Gensler+Gutierrez
OpenSource Architecture
SYSTEMarchitects llc
theLiving

perch design: Phil Taylor
water systems designed by Fountainhead
landscape design consulting: Kate Bakewell
urban system consulting: LOOK/Laura KurganSeptember 7 - October 7, 2006

http://xdesign.ucsd.edu/ooz/

Friday August 11 from 6.00-8.00 pm
at
Paragon Bar
Montgomery Hotel
211 South First St
San Jose, CA

We look forward to seeing you there!
http://01sj.org