urban informatics and data navigation

The mapping of latent urban conditions as a diagnostic tool with which to evolve discourse and develop sites of enquiry for architectural design is becoming transformative to our understanding of them. The increasingly widespread cartographic impulse that pertains to numerous branches of creative practice is coupled with the accessibility, accumulation and mapping of data surrounding the built environment. How this information is transposed and described through maps to reveal characteristics of the urban landscape becomes significant in the pursuit of developing dynamic modes of enquiry, reflecting the flux of the city itself. This type of activity and communication affords instrumentality and interpretation of complex datasets and extant scenarios. Indeed, as we progressively mediate our experience of urban conditions through a variety of digital media, the phenomenal and ephemeral aspects of the city may also experience a transformation that provides opportunities to both understand and negotiate the boundaries and layers that were previously distinct but are evolving a greater coterminous relationship. This shift provided the platform for the research paper ‘Interface and Implementation: negotiating the boundaries between physical landscape and digital territories for architectural design’ presented by the authors at the recent Theoretical Currents II: Architecture and its Geographical Horizons, held at EMMTEC, University of Lincoln, 4-5 April 2012. The paper also critically discussed the appropriation of mapping methodologies and representation for architecture as a means through which the complex spatial demarcation of the contemporary urban realm and its, often unstable, geographies may be useful in edifying our knowledge of such situations. The syncretised nature of urban space comprising of the physical and the perceptual was then extrapolated as a notion through which we may reveal and further understand the traces of various cultures that hitherto reside on the edges of normative society.

OODA Loop, John Boyd, 1976.

mapping the internet

The image was published in 2007 and is the work of research scientists at the Bar Ilan and Hebrew Universities in Israel.

 

A map of the internet circa 2003 showing the connections between different internet routers, from the Opte Project.

Peer 1 Hostings - Map of the internet

Chris Harrison - Internet visualisation

It is strange that visual representations of the internet are always explicitly structured and often align with the perceived mental image of ‘network’. There is frequently an ethereal allure to these vaguely recognisable structures and a sense of tangibility and simultaneously an unfathomable, but believable, complexity. The recent rush for new methods of infographics has been captured in several books, most notably the two volumes of Data Flow and also in McCandless’s Information is Beautiful, but the beauty and complexity expounded in these compendiums is at odds with the physical infrastructure of the web; endless cables and wires that circumnavigate the globe at one scale and end up in tangled knots behind our desks at another. That isn’t to mention the vast server farms that are growing up next to a river near you (vast amounts of cooling water) and requiring the onward construction of new power stations to support the huge amount of energy consumed in data storage and processing.

At one end, yes, the web is strange, complex, alluring and beautiful, at the other its a messy, messy business.

projection mapping / light space

Pablo Valbuena - Medialab Prado, Madrid

First brought to our attention via the digital archive slowly building on the excellent ICASEA blog attached to the UK/JP electronic art label, the work of artist/architect Pablo Valbuena challenges the perception of space by the direct manipulation of light to create complex geometric illusions. The use of form, space and light, highly conventional architectural terms, as layers of intervention and re_presentation through sculpture and projection mapping in his work is well removed from the prevalent employment of such.

Perhaps of most interest here are the interventions in urban space, rather than those in interior environments. The animation of the hard rectilinear landscape outside of the Medialab Prado in Madrid (2007) is a post-Tron digital dissection of space. It is remarkable how the aesthetic of cybernetic art has returned to a minimal and binary position. The works of Carsten Nicolai and Ryoji Ikeda have consistently relied upon a retreat to minimal linear and geometric form that can be easily perceived as not too distant from the pioneering work of Lloyd Sumner and Roman Verostko.

Ryoji Ikeda - Datamatics

mapping disease

Prior to an April 2009 research trip to the US, the authors were marginally concerned over the outbreak of swine flu in Queens, New York. The authors also have associates in Mexico.

The speed with which we can now record and share global data at simple and accessible level is historically unparalleled, and this recent possible pandemic has brought this fact into focus, perhaps more clearly than ever before.

Live update of swine flu cases across the globe. Image from google maps