Today I put the first prototype into action for my New York City dérive series. As I mentioned in my previous post, my constraints are:
Bike
iPhone with GPSed app
5 Boroughs of New York City
The end result will be a series of psychogeographical maps for each Borough of New York City and a website featuring the maps with details of the events.
For today’s first prototype, I chose to do portions of Brooklyn. Details of my trip are:
On this trip I shot a series of photographs illustrating buildings which caught my attention and reflected the surrounding neighborhood:
I also created a Flickr set which illustrates all of the photos I took during this dérive. In my attempts to be as true to the dérive concept, I had a number of beers throughout the event. During my visit in Red Hook, the owner of the bar and his 5-year-old son provided me a chocolate truffle to go along with my IPA. They went very well together.
Here are notes that I took while I was on the dérive:
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.”
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:
Fellow MFA DT student, Ashley Ahn, and I are working with 3 great Fashion students, Chelsea Mak, Irene Villar, and Roxy Fata, on the LVMH “Made in New York” competition. As part of our pre-submission, I set up a website for all of our materials, and you can check it out here.
Be sure to check out the sketches that Chelsea and Irene did and the video that Ashely edited for our submission. Great stuff.
1. Strangers will interact in anonymous ways if the methods are recognizable and appealing to them. Strangers are more likely to reveal personal expressions if the methods are anonymous in fashion.
This was very clear in our different styles of probes and instruction sets done in Bryant Park. Our first set, which were pre-addressed and stamped postcards, provided an attractive medium “because of their connotations as an informal, friendly mode of communication.” (Gaver, Dunne, Pcenti, 23). Approximately 25% of the cards were returned, and these strangers who returned cards used our query into a personal logo as an opportunity for anonymous expression.
For our prototype which explored the questions of public displays of creativity and expression, we ended up using the installation more as a probe or a prop to interview the strangers who were in the park. Overwhelmingly, these strangers expressed that their lack of artistic or writing abilities prevented them from interacting with our instruction set in public.
2. Changes in physical environments affect how groups of strangers interact.
These photos illustrate the same location over the span of the project. This large space in the middle of the park has gone from a lush grass field used for relaxing, to a large dirt field, to a construction site, and finally to a ice-skating rink. These changes affected our instruction sets primarily because the physical environment directly impacted the expectations strangers had of each other and the environment that surrounded them.
At the outset, our research and understanding of the space led us to decisions of the kind of methods we would use in the park. Today, there are an entirely new set of social expectations, or “rules”, that illustrate an entirely new set of “constraints” or opportunities.
3. Weather conditions have a dramatic affect on certain uses of the park, such as sitting and eating, while regardless of the weather, pedestrians continuously use Bryant Park as a cut-through.
The following two videos are taken under the same conditions (ex. same area of Bryant Park, the same day of the week, the same time of day, the same number of seats provided in the park) with the only difference being the weather (i.e. rain):
Regardless of the weather conditions, pedestrians continuously use the park as a cut-through to get to another destination. However, other uses of the park, such as sitting, eating, reading, are affected tremendously by poor weather conditions, such as rain.
Next Steps
In looking at these conclusions about Bryant Park, we have a series of questions and instruction sets we would like to explore:
1. Documentary We’ve begun a documentary short which details our experience in Bryant Park. We’ve shot a considerable amount of video and time-lapsed photography, so we felt we could use this content to provide a cohesive outline and conclusions from our project and post it to the ourbryantpark.org website.
2. Poster – Physical vs Digital Anonymous Interaction Our interest in physical vs digital anonymous interactions with strangers was peaked by this project as a whole. In building a website and directing people to it through our 2nd postcard instruction set, we observed an increase in visitors for a short period of time.
We wanted to explore more attempts at creating an online experience for the strangers of Bryant Park through our website, OurBryantPark.org. Continuing the goal of the website, which is to provide the community of Bryant Park a place to view the responses to the various installations and interventions we put in the park as well as to see the creative works done by the community itself, we wanted to explore ways to increase the activity, both by our physical instruction sets as well as directing them to the web location.
Our next idea would be to create a poster that featured the creative expressions from the postcard instruction sets and include our web address. Will a poster be more effective? How will we determine if the posters are being used? Is our intention to provide these to specific kind of stranger, the mid-day holiday crowd or the morning commuters?
2. Games – Using more images than text with instruction set In analyzing our previous instruction sets, we felt we relied too heavily on text based instructions, and we want to explore more image or illustration based instructions.
With the addition of the holiday shopping area and skating rink, the volume of weekday and weekend public use of the park has increased since we first started observing the park. As opposed to the destination being somewhere on the other side of the park, Bryant Park is the destination for the foot traffic.
We’ve developed a game which instructs a stranger how to build a paper airplane and illustrate for them what we’d like them to do with it. We would offer prizes for successful attempts.
This came partly from our recent visit where a game shop has opened up exactly where we handed out our first instruction set.
3. Additional Postcard Instruction Sets
We have discussed taking our two prototypes of postcard instruction sets to other areas of the city. Is there a difference in response between differing locations? Do the physical surroundings affect the response rate? What sort of additional emotional information can be gathered with these postcards?
References
Gaver, Bill, Tony Dunne, and Elena Pacenti. “Design: Cultural probes.” interactions 6.1 (1999): 21-29.
On November 3rd (Tuesday), we handed out 100 copies of our new postcard prototype. At this point, we have received information in regards to one of our questions, which was “Will people investigate the website?”.
Since handing out the postcards that provided the “OurBryantPark.org” web address, we have had 20 visits to the website, with a total of 56 page views. This is encouraging in regards to our query of the difference between physical and digital anonymous interactions.
We have been tracking the IP addresses of these visits, and 5 of them originated from the New School location.
We were surprised by the physical traffic patterns that morning since the new shops have been put into the park. Despite the heavy construction, the morning commuters continued their use of the West entrance.
At the time of this posting, we have not received any postcard responses.
Manuel and I worked together to build out the ISD17240 IC Voice Record/Play Chip on our breadboard. We used Example #1 (page 78) from the data sheet which made use of a microphone and push-buttons.
Here is a video demonstration of the finished project:
Manuel and I worked together to attach the Arduino chip in the Breadboard to the Breakout board. We were working with a 3.3V chip (FT232R), so we had to break the soldered link between 3.3VCC and VCC on the top of the chip.
We then put code on our Arduino chip to provide serial data back to the computer (using the Analog 0 pin) and used Processing to read it. We found a very helpful tutorial on the Arduino website (here).
First we added Google Analytics and a additional plug-in to our website which tracks the visitors. We will know when they accessed the site, and we’re tracking where they are accessing it from (by IP address).
We also added new posts to our website to illustrate the projects that have been done in the park so far.
We then designed new cards and printed up 100 copies. These postcards were self-addressed and stamped. We decided to use the two colors of paper that we received the most responses from in the previous Postcard prototype. For the front side of the card, we approached another question we wanted to get responses to which is:
How would the community of Bryant Park describe the park with a logo?
For the back side of the card, we approached it with an instruction without explicit text. We used 4 different photographs and used an image to request a response to the photograph (image pulled from here).
The photographs varied in context, providing different perspectives of Bryant Park. We also included the web address for OurBryantPark.org to continue our investigation into physical vs. web interest in the project as well as show new responders previous work done by other members of the Bryant Park community.
Questions we have are:
1. Will the photographs used alter the response rate? Will we receive more responses of certain photos?
2. Will the photograph affect the kind of logo drawn by the responder?
3. Will the responder know that we would like them to comment on the photograph?
For this prototype, we wanted to explore a 2nd version of our Postcard object. In the previous version, we presented a questionnaire with text instructions. The stamp and address were affordances which indicated to people they could drop their responses in the mailbox. In this example, we wanted to explore more possibilities with instructions using shapes.
“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]
