Category Archives: Major Studio – Interface
By
Ryan
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Published
November 30, 2009
“The practice of dérive is more than just an urban walkabout. As Jorn proposes, it is a practice connected to the discovery of the qualities of any block of space and time.” (Wark , 44)
Just finished reading McKenzie Wark’s book, Fifty Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International. This was my first introduction to Asger Jorn’s situology and Jacqueline de Jong’s contribution to The Situationist Times as well as the first extensive discussion of Debord’s Game of War.
Using Jorn’s writings as a guide, Wark defines situology as “the study of moments that are congruent with each other as a series but that are not repeatable” (Wark, 16). Wark goes on to write, “Situology studies what the Situationists elsewhere call ambiences, which are experienced subjectively as consistencies of mood, but which for Jorn are like blocks of time that form a temporal unity independent of the universal, abstract time that the clock measures” (Wark, 17). In thinking about my rides through many parts of Brooklyn, I became aware of certain areas being trapped or locked in a certain period of time. As I rolled through one area, it could have easily been 1985 and the neighborhood would have operated in a very similar manner. I roll through another area and just as the previous spot was locked in time, this area was just locked into 1993. I represented the passing of time, moving from one end of an area to another, and the tone of the neighborhood was aware but uncaring of this motion.
In search of more information about Game of War, I read an article by Barbara McPerson about how “a group of artists, gamers, academics and technologists have revised Guy Debord’s game of warfare and politics and have been staging performances to introduce audiences to the board game, and to educate about the poltics it symbolizes historically, and in the moderne age”. I checked out Class Wargames, and I watched a few videos describing game play mixed with quotes and movie clips of enactments of war and actual revolutionary footage.
Reference
McPherson, Barbara. “Class Wargames Revises Guy Debord’s The Game of War in London | NowPublic News Coverage.” NowPublic.com | The News is NowPublic. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Nov. 2009. <http://www.nowpublic.com/culture/class-wargames-revises-guy-debords-game-war-london>.
Wark, McKenzie. Fifty Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International. New York: Temple Hoyne Buell Center For The Study Of American Architecture and Princeton Architectural Press, 2008.
By
Ryan
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Published
November 29, 2009
While doing research for my final project for Major Studio, I came across Graphserver, which is an open-source multi-modal trip planner. According to visualcomplexity.com, “Brandon Martin-Anderson has produced a series of interesting maps from several US cities depicting the shortest path tree within its transportation networks.”
Here is a sample of Brandon Martin-Anderson’s Graphserver at work with a depiction of Portland, OR:
Also, a great resource for open-source maps has been openstreetmap.org.
Reference
Dauerer, Verena. “PingMag – The Tokyo-based magazine about “Design and Making Things” » Archive » Infosthetics: the beauty of data visualization.” PingMag – The Tokyo-based magazine about “Design and Making Things” . N.p., 23 Mar. 2007. Web. 29 Nov. 2009. <http://pingmag.jp/2007/03/23/infosthetics-form-follows-data/>.
Friedman, Vitaly. “Data Visualization: Modern Approaches – Smashing Magazine.” Smashing Magazine. N.p., 2 Aug. 2007. Web. 29 Nov. 2009. <http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/02/data-visualization-modern-approaches/>.
Martin-Anderson, Brandon. “Graphserver – The Open-Source Multi-Modal Trip Planner.” Graphserver – The Open-Source Multi-Modal Trip Planner. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Nov. 2009. <http://graphserver.sourceforge.net/gallery.html>.
“visualcomplexity.com | The Shortest Path Tree.” visualcomplexity.com | A visual exploration on mapping complex networks. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Nov. 2009. <http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project_details.cfm?id=610&index=34&domain=Transportation%20Networks>.
By
Ryan
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Published
November 24, 2009
Urban Drifts is a research–based, social experiment that calls into question prescribed city boundaries and instead enlists unrecognized physical urban magnets as guides through the city landscape. This project will culminate with a series of photographic works and psychogeographic maps of New York City. Through the use of GPS tracking and traversing landscapes on a bicycle, Urban Drifts is an experiment in physical intervention.
I seek to provide alternative views of New York City as well as provide a model (or new situation) for other individuals or larger groups of people to explore urban spaces as a form of information gathering techniques and play.
I am making use of Situationist International principles of psychogeography, dérive, and their understanding of the psychological effects of urban spaces on the groups of people that inhabit them. By placing myself in situations that I may see, hear, or feel the physical nature of these spaces, I will better understand the forces at work.
The dérive is described by Guy Debord as the practice of a passionate uprooting through the hurried change of environments, as well as a means of studying psychogeography and situationist psychology. Debord and the Situationist main insight of their research lied in the hypothesis of constructions of situations (Debord, 98). The situation is thus made to be lived by its constructors (Debord, 98).
At this point, I’ve biked for over 16 hours, covering approximately 40 miles in the Brooklyn area. This is a map combining my dérive’s up to this point:
At the culmination of this project, I hope to have enough experience and insightful findings that I can get funding to do this project in other cities, such as Shanghai.
References
Debord, Guy. “Towards a Situationist International.” Participation (Documents of Contemporary Art). London: The Mit Press, 2006. 96 – 101.
Ford, Simon. The Situationist International: An Introduction. London: Black Dog, 2004.
By
Ryan
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Published
November 23, 2009
Last week I attended the “Expropriating Labor in Virtual Worlds” lecture and discussion in Kellen Auditorium at the New School. The speakers provided each of their differing investigations of virtual labor, and Thomas Malaby (website) stood out as someone who was making the most clear and exciting connections between art and art theory, play and games, and virtual environments and labor.
Malaby’s discussion of Unreal Tournament (the official game at Linden Labs) brought up the subject of “practiced mastery” and “complex contingency”. This was my first introduction to those terms as applied to gaming, and it helped me better understand how Malaby distinguished more experience-based games and games that you master through repetition.
Malaby (although he said it was a change of gears) also made some connections between a project by Constant (a former member of the Situationist International) and the constructed environments of Second Life. Constant developed his idea of a future ludic society with his project, New Babylon, and focused on the ideas of an urban space that didn’t force social order through constructed environments but instead encouraged the freedom to focus solely on his or her creative energies. Malaby also mentioned that regardless of the freedoms that users feel or exercise in Second Life, the situations are constructed based on the rules described and set-up by Linden Labs, the game’s developer.
Malaby also brought up the importance of homo ludens, or man at play (see also Johan Huizinga’s book by the same name), and it’s blurring differences with homo faber (man as maker) when looking at virtual environments.
While searching for more information on Malaby, I came across this interview which was done as part of IDEA 2009 interview series, and it is helpful for anyone looking for a brief and concise breakdown of what is covered in Malaby’s book Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life.
By
Ryan
|
Published
November 18, 2009
Today I put the second prototype into action for my New York City dérive series. For today’s prototype, I again chose to do portions of Brooklyn. I made a conscious decision to head in a new direction (South West). Details of my trip are:
Start Date/Time: 18.11.2009 / 13:11:25 EST
Duration: 4hr 4min 29s
Distance: 36 km / 11.6 mi (6535 points)
http://gpsed.com/track/5278031124996864032
Here is a series of photographs I took while on the dérive. These buildings caught my attention and reflect the surrounding neighborhoods:
I also created a Flickr set, and you can see those here.
On this dérive, I became disoriented relatively quickly after moving South West of Ocean Parkway. There were several time when I inadvertently circled back to a place I had been before.
With that said, once I was approximately halfway through my dérive, I saw the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge peaking over the top of the surrounding buildings. Well known landmarks are prevalent in major cities, and after seeing the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, I thought about how members of the SI on their dérive may have had similar moments when seeing the Eiffel Tower or the Montmartre district.
As opposed to the first prototype, there were several moments today when it was made known that I was not welcome. On the first dérive, there were moments when I was welcomed into conversation and offered free food and beverages. Today, however, I overheard heckles or murmurs about my presence as I rolled through portions of a neighborhood, and once I was verbally requested to leave the particular neighborhood I was in.
Vacating a certain area is relatively easy when you know where you are headed, but when you are drifting along, moving in directions based on subtle changes in the scenery, getting out of a neighborhood is difficult.
There was also a severe lack of foot traffic for most of the ride. There were central shopping areas that had it’s share of pedestrians and there were a few bus stops that had crowds of people, but for the most part, the majority of the people I saw were driving in automobiles.
By
Ryan
|
Published
November 17, 2009
Urban Drifts is a research–based, social experiment that calls into question prescribed city boundaries and instead enlists unrecognized physical urban “magnets” as guides through the city landscape. This project will culminate with a series of photographic works and psychogeographic maps of New York City. Through the use of GPS tracking and traversing landscapes on a bicycle, Urban Drifts is an experiment in physical intervention.
I seek to provide alternative views of New York City as well as provide a new model for other individuals or larger groups of people to explore urban spaces as a form of information gathering techniques and play.
As a research method, I am doing a set of Situationist International inspired dérives. My intention is to use these as a probe to gather information for my final project.
“The form of wandering that characterizes the dérive is intimately linked to psychogeography…You discover certain places in a city that you start to appreciate, because you are welcomed in a bar or because suddenly you feel better. This relates to the feeling you have in one place and not in another. As Debord put it so well somewhere in his writing, if you set off on a derive in a good state of mind, you’ll end up finding a good place.” -Ralph Rumney [consul, 67]
“That’s what the Dérive is-it’s up to you to follow your own.” -Ralph Rumney [consul, 68]
After reading the book the consul, which is a collection of interviews with Ralph Rumney (a founding member of SI), I was more than excited to read about Rumney’s deep belief in realigning technology with the arts . “Back in ancient Greece, arts were the praxis of philosophy. The split between them came in the Middle Ages, through the Church.” [consul, 80]
Rumney started a project called The International Institute for Arts and Technology in 1964, and he stated “My idea was to create a center for work and study where artists and scientists would collaborate on the conception and realization of innovative projects, taking my inspiration from the Renaissance.” [consul, 84].
I am interested in exploring this connection between urban landscapes and the emotions of the inhabitants of that urban space through the use of dérive and psychogeographic maps, and I am looking to see what new insights technology (primarily GPS tracking) can shed on this relationship.
Questions I have going into this project are:
What insights will GPS tracking of a dérive have on the formation of psychogeographic maps?
If the course of a dérive is made public and free on the internet, will it allow for new channels or pathways within a city to be opened up?
What positive and negative aspects of my surroundings will I dig up by following a course while on a dérive?
What aspects are common and what elements are different among the 5 boroughs of New York City? How will these differences be reflected in a psychogeographic map?
Examples of psychogeographic maps I am using as precedence are:
Guy Debord – The Naked City, 1957
Constant – New Babylon Paris, 1963
Ralph Rumney – Psychogeographic map of Venice, 1957
An article that caught my attention in regards to urban spaces and incorporating new wireless/tracking technology was Redifining the Basemap by Alison Sant.
Reference
Agamben, Giorgio, Jean Beaudrillard, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. The Situationist International (1957-1972). Praha: Jrp Ringier, 2007.
Ford, Simon. The Situationist International: An Introduction. London: Black Dog, 2004.
Rumney, Ralph. The Consul: Conversations with Gerard Berreby. New York: Verso, 2002.”
By
Ryan
|
Published
November 13, 2009
I went to see “EXPROPRIATING LABOR IN VIRTUAL WORLDS” in Kellen Auditorium this afternoon. The speakers were:
Free Labor, Collective Intelligence, and Artistic Production, Christiane Paul;
Software Art-Work For-Itself, Geoff Cox;
Invisible Threads, Stephanie Rothenberg;
No Matter, Scott Kildall, Victoria Scott;
Performing Value: Labor and Contingency
in Virtual Worlds, Thomas Malaby.
I took notes as a stream-of-consciousness, so here are 232 lines of notes from the talk:
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