I did my fifth prototype for my New York City dérive series today. I started this edition in Brooklyn, and I made a conscious decision to head to the Manhattan area. Details of my trip are:
Here is a series of photographs I took while on the dérive. These buildings caught my attention and reflect the surrounding neighborhoods:
On this ride I came across a number of interesting characters. I was propositioned by a prostitute. I was taking a picture of a building in the Gowanus area, and she checked to see if I was interested. I rode a few blocks, and an undercover cop asked me for directions. I knew he came off like a undercover, or plain clothes, police officer, but I knew for sure when I later rode past him while he and another officer were handcuffing another guy.
The bridge provided isolated views of the city. Serene quiet followed by the loud rumble of train traffic. The smell of fresh Chinese vegetables and dumplings were strong coming off of Manhattan bridge. Later I witnessed a drug deal, and then just a few blocks later, I heard friendly neighbors great each other. Then on to a great piece of pizza, The Bird. Music played. En Vogue followed by Fela Kuti.
“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.
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/>.
I am doing some research for my final project in Physical Computing, which will be an instrument that makes use of an accelerometer, and I found this great video of Jean Laurendeau giving a demonstration of the ondes martenot:
Here are a couple video stills of the demonstration:
For my Max MSP midterm, I put together a step sequencer. Making use of the “Global Transport” extra, I set up the ability for users to open samples at any point during the sound creation process. Here is a screen shot of the interface:
Here is a video demonstration of the Step Sequencer patch:
I happened to have rehearsal on Tuesday after showing the Sequencer in class, so I plugged the laptop in and put it to use. Here is an audio sample of one of the songs we did with it:
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Here is a video of the step sequencer in “user testing” during rehearsal:
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.
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.
Yesterday I did my fourth prototype for my New York City dérive series. I started this edition in Brooklyn, and I made a conscious decision to head South East at the start. Details of my trip are:
Here is a series of photographs I took while on the dérive. These buildings caught my attention and reflect the surrounding neighborhoods:
I also put together a Flickr set, and you can see that here.
Today I noticed that the limbs of a tree had been completely filled with empty plastic bags. It was at the entrance of the parking lot for Sears Roebuck. There was a large amount of trash scattered along the edges of the fence that surrounded the perimeter of the property, and the number of bags in the tree made me think of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
I also saw what I would say is my favorite building so far. The colors and the shape are not necessarily unique, but the combination of its location, it’s relationship to the buildings around it, and the general feel of the surrounding area all add up to a welcoming experience. I knew from a number of blocks away that this building was different than others I had seen.
Yesterday I did my third prototype for my New York City dérive series. I again started this edition in Brooklyn. I made a conscious decision to head East at the start. Details of my trip are:
Here is a series of photographs I took while on the dérive. These buildings caught my attention and reflect the surrounding neighborhoods:
I also set up a Flickr set, and you can see that here.
While on the dérive, I took a series of time-lapsed photographs so that I could better illustrate the sense of a few locations. The still photographs have been working well (see additional examples below), but I wanted to expand upon my still photographs and the notion of gathering the totality of an urban space:
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:
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.
“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)
