A Brief History of Mapping

A brief history of maps with some great map links!

http://academic.emporia.edu/aberjame/map/h_map/h_map.htm

An explanation of the Cartesian Co-ordinate system

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_coordinate_system

Book: Wayfinding Behavior: Cognitive Mapping and other Spatial Practices

Manifestos

Some examples, far out and not:

Joseph Beuys, German conceptual artist: http://www.artnotart.com/fluxus/jbeuys-manifesto.html

Fluxus manifesto: http://www.artnotart.com/fluxus/index.html

White Manifesto by Lucio Fontana, "We are continuing the evolution of art."

The Italian Futurists wrote many manifestos. They wrote manifestos on everything from art to clothing. http://www.italianfuturism.org/manifestos/

The Manifesto Project
http://www.1000manifestos.com/

You'll love this one: The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism, Thomas Marinetti 1905 http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/manifesto.html

The Situationist Manifesto http://www.infopool.org.uk/6003.html

And this is the manifesto that will help you with the entire assignment and final project The Manifesto of Possibilities http://wiki.bbk.ac.uk/Buildingcultures/index.php/Manifesto_of_Possibilities

History of all assignments and readings as of 5/16

Class Assignments:


Invisible City 
Junaio/Zooburst test
Writing response to neighborhood walk
Following
Psycho-geographic sound walks on Lancaster Avenue/Powelton using Hipcast, Zooburst or other accessible via mobile phone
Put Something Here


Readings:


Two chapters from Mobile Interface Theory

The Pathways of Locative Media

http://mobileinterfacetheory.com/introduction/

Mapping and Representations of Space

http://mobileinterfacetheory.com/ch-2/

RootShock:  Chapter 3 Urban Renewal…  Chapter 4 Means Negro Removal

Sarah Pink, Doing Sensory Ethnography

Chapter 3: Perception, Place, Knowing, Memory, Imagination; Chapter 5 Articulating Emplaced Knowledge PDFs

Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity on library website

Critical Vehicles, Krzystof Wodizcko on http://hanaiverson.com/pdf/iversonh_07_081_441_01_wodiczko_critical.pdf

Creating Democracy: A Dialogue with Krystof Wodiczko by Patricia C. Phillips on libaray web site under Phillips

Meeting 5/16 at Reed's cafe

Moving out of the classroom and into Reed's cafe, located at 38th Street and Lancaster today.  We meet there at 9:00 am.

Moblogging

To record an audio moblog, dial: (512) 827-0431 .

When prompted, enter your PIN: 181-197-551 .

Your options will be: Record and Publish, orRecord and Not Publish.

If you select Record and Publish, you will be prompted for your Blog Number or Podcast Number. Your Numbers are listed for you in the table below: 1,133

Put Something Here

Public/Private: Put Something Here

Site-specific art carries the potential to redefine the intention of public place.

Put Something Here, an exercise which is purposely oblique, teases out a variety

of responses, all related to issues brought forward by the insertion of “something,”

or intrusion into public space. Students are asked to “put something here” to

which they usually respond, “What is the something and where do we put it?”

In reply we present Krzysztof Wodizcko’s “Alien Staff,” a pole with a mini

video screen on the top and a loudspeaker in the middle that plays a video

projection of the person carrying the staff. Wodizcko designed the Alien Staff in

response to the dilemma of the outsider, the immigrant who is invisible (and also

silent) as he moves through public territory. The Alien Staff is meant to make the

bearer (the alien) visible by creating a double presence, one in “media” and one in

“life,” inviting a new perception of a stranger as imagined (on screen) or as

experienced (real life) (Wodizcko 1999, p.104). In examining projects of this

nature, we are attempting to bring forward how engaging new media technologies

offer new conceptions of place as a space of resistance, interference, and

enunciation in opposition to those augmentations of surveillance and control they

also enable (Myers, 2006).

One project, titled Palimpsest FM, consisted of a device that houses a

hidden speaker which plays back the sounds of the same spot from an earlier

time, anywhere from thirty seconds to a day before. The replayed recording serves

as an audio version of a palimpsest, a proof of what had been there before. Using

sound as her medium, the student created a nearly seamless overlapping of past

and present where the sounds of today cannot be discerned from the sounds of

the past. Like a palimpsest, it will be unclear where the past ends and the present

begins.

Bachelard speaks of centering oneself in stable surroundings, but if your

surroundings are constantly in flux (and also incidentally not just your

surroundings) like they are in New York, it is no wonder a sense of ontological

anxiety can result. New York City has often been described as a place where the

physical environment changes so quickly that rebuilding without being able to

erase what came before it becomes very obvious to anyone who has lived there

long enough to call New York their home. “You’ve become a New Yorker once

you have the urge to point out a place and say, “that used to be . . .” The “that

used to be . . .” that every New Yorker expresses is part of the inerasable past that

is being built over, it is an expression of memory of a piece of their home and

consequently a piece of their identities that is gone but not forgotten. It is

embodied in the senses. The urge to tell others what used to be is an attempt to

reassert one’s identity and the home they had carved out of the city. This project

serves as another means of describing the “that used to be.” But instead of

subjectively telling the narrative of one person’s New York, it objectively captures

what the place witnessed. The audio palimpsest played back in this project serves

as a kind of memorial of what used to be in the immediate past. It stands to

commemorate the same everyday New York that its citizens quietly mourn when it

is torn down and built over. It memorializes the trivial happenings that many may

overlook, but still plays an important role in a place’s narrative and consequently a

person’s identity. By placing Palimpsest FM in Washington Square Park under the

shadow of the statue of Garibaldi and the Washington Arch, a comparison can be

drawn between the monuments that commemorate the selective history of the

victors to one that records and replays all voices of the city equally. The

neighborhood narrative can then become more complete as it plays back

everything it hears.

Arts event on Monday 5/14

You are cordially invited to attend a kick-off reception for the visual and performing arts this coming Monday, May 14^th, 6:00 PM at Redcaps Corner 3517 Lancaster Avenue to discuss 2^nd Friday on Lancaster Ave. East and the JAZPOA (jazz/poetry/arts) Extravaganza on June 30^th.

Drexel University, People’s Emergency Center, Lancaster Avenue 21^st Century, and local arts co-ops are supporting an initiative that is bringing together professionals and hopefuls within the visual and performing arts to make Lancaster Ave. East an exciting, beautiful, and safe place for you to enjoy the best in live music, art shows, restaurants, social networking, outside cafés, pamper events, yoga, boutiques, great nearby living spaces, and so much more!

We will be providing opportunities for visual and performing artists to be a part of making Lancaster Avenue East, a premier up-n-coming hotspot in the city of Philadelphia.  We need you to be a part of the magic to make it all that it can be.

Please RSVP either way at info@TheCadenceCompany.com. Free Admission.

So far, the final project

A random set of signs that lead to each other in a non-linear way creating a variety of pathways

Directions: hidden in the art

Multiple portals of entry into the project including web

Video

Histories written on the landscape

Community can add a story: Person to facilitate

Place where a form of physical activity makes us aware of the external and the internal

Places that are existing

Places that are created

Time of day = safety

Who tells the story creates a condition of stakeholding

Other inventive Mobile Design ideas

http://www.makesweet.com/mixer/my-billboard

http://www.spur.org/events/calendar/yerba-buena%E2%80%99s-mobile-parklets

If you want to use Texting in your projects

http://www.textmarks.com/

Site-Specifics

The philosopher Michel de Certeau, wrote a book called "The Practice of Everyday Life" which is on the Locative Media Bibiligraphy that was published by the Leonardo (MIT) eJournal.

In this book, he says that "space is a practiced place." What he means by that, is that urban planning writes a specific meaning onto place. The direction of roadways, the areas of division in economic strata (where rich people live, where poverty lives etc), the location of the city functions (post office, hospital, train station, etc). So, what de Certeau is saying is that place becomes space when it becomes active, when it becomes inhabited. The daily action of everyday life, in all its detail, shifts the meaning of place from its monolithic, static meanings, to those that are human, social, fluid, always changing. Even our experience of place is determined by how long we are in a location. "Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into space by walkers." "Space as a practiced place, admits of unpredictability." "If space is like the word when it is spoken, then a single place will be realized in successive, multiple and even irreconcilable spaces." Think of Patrick's score..."In comparing 'pedestrian processes to linguistic formations" de Certeau states that.. to walk is to lack a place." Think of Patrick's score done again as a walking score in the city...

The anthropological understanding of place, is "formed by the individual identities, through complicities of language. local references, the unformulated rules of living know-how" (Auge/reading p.9), where one's location or position is known. Non-place is produced by passing-over place. Non-place designates two complementary but distinct realities formed in relation to certain, say, mobile or transitory ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure) and relations that individuals have with these places. For example, the train station: all the people who pass through it, sometimes regularly, as in commuters, and those people who work there - selling tickets, working at the coffee shop, cleaning up, etc.

On page 11 of the reading is an important point:

Place and non-place re rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed; they are like palimpsets on which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten. But non-places are the real measure of our time. (Auge 1995)

A palimpset is a paper that has been written on twice, the original having been wiped out.

One Neighborhood Narratives project by a student at NYU addressed the Palimpset:

The project, titled Palimpsest FM, consisted of a device that houses a hidden speaker which plays back the sounds of the same spot from an earlier time, anywhere from thirty seconds to a day before. The replayed recording serves as an audio version of a palimpsest, a proof of what had been there before. Using sound as her medium, the student created a nearly seamless overlapping of past and present where the sounds of today cannot be discerned from the sounds of the past. Like a palimpsest, it will be unclear where the past ends and the present begins.

Gaston Bachelard (in his book, Poetics of Space) speaks of centering oneself in stable surroundings, but if your surroundings are constantly in flux (and also incidentally not just your surroundings) like they are in New York, it is no wonder a sense of ontological anxiety can result. New York City has often been described as a place where the physical environment changes so quickly that rebuilding without being able to erase what came before it becomes very obvious to anyone who has lived there
long enough to call New York their home. “You’ve become a New Yorker once you have the urge to point out a place and say, “that used to be . . .” The “that used to be . . .” that every New Yorker expresses is part of the inerasable past that is being built over, it is an expression of memory of a piece of their home and consequently a piece of their identities that is gone but not forgotten. It is embodied in the senses. The urge to tell others what used to be is an attempt to reassert one’s identity and the home they had carved out of the city. This project serves as another means of describing the “that used to be.” But instead of
subjectively telling the narrative of one person’s New York, it objectively captures what the place witnessed. The audio palimpsest played back in this project serves as a kind of memorial of what used to be in the immediate past. It stands to
commemorate the same everyday New York that its citizens quietly mourn when it is torn down and built over. It memorializes the trivial happenings that many may overlook, but still plays an important role in a place’s narrative and consequently a
person’s identity. By placing Palimpsest FM in Washington Square Park under the shadow of the statue of Garibaldi and the Washington Arch, a comparison can be drawn between the monuments that commemorate the selective history of the
victors to one that records and replays all voices of the city equally. The neighborhood narrative can then become more complete as it plays back everything it hears.

The original prototype for this project was made with a recording device in one of those "record your own message" talking greeting cards.

The last mention from the Site-Specific reading is the last paragraph where it says, "It is in such contexts that site-specific art frequently works to "touble" the opposition between the site and the work.  Trouble is meant as critique, question, or to even create a problem, but all with the aim of heightening the exchange between the site and the work.

Critical Vehicles

Krzyysztof Wodiczko, in his book Critical Vehicles, discusses his art work over the span of his career, all of it highly political in nature. What Wodiczko focuses on is designing for human interaction, and human relationship. What he higlights is the binary of power: victor/vanquished. This type of binary analysis of social space can easily be understood in relation to race and gender. What is interesting about his Prophet's Prothesis, is the idea of a doubling - the real person and the media double, both simultaneously walking through the city. Here we have the Derive or Drift retranslated through the integration of media. Inside/outside, real/virtual. These types of binaries fuse together so that the doubled experience creates a whole. Conceptually very interesting. One could even conceive of the doubled self - the real and virtual as a ying/yang.

On p. 13, his design summary could be considered a manifesto. He has articulated a social problem that he is trying to solve through design.

What we have said in this class, is that design solves problems. One must first identify the problem and then create the design to solve it.

Following

The Following exercise was inspired by both Janet Cardiff’s audio walks (Two of which are Walk Münster by Janet Cardiff with Georges Bures Miller, 1997. Skulpture Project Münster 97, curated by Kasper König, Münster, Germany and The Missing Voice (Case Study B) byJanet Cardiff with Georges Bures Miller, 1999. Whitechapel Library organized by Artangel, London, England, June 17 – Nov. 27, 1999.) an example of the expressive, generative version of ambulant geo-notative locative art practice; and Sophie Calle’s Suite Vénitienne, where she used a conceptual strategy to create a document with photos providing evidence of her search to Venice to look for a stranger she met at a party. One student chose to follow five different people at his usual stop on the subway. Three of these people were “intimate strangers”, people he had observed frequently on his route, but
whom he did not know. Two people he followed, as a first encounter. He documented the experience of each trajectory, the time and distance traveled the fantasies and assumptions of each life, housing them all in a web-based map project.

Jean Baudrillard writes,
“To follow the other is to take charge of his itinerary; it is to watch over his life without him knowing it. It is to play the mythical role of the shadow, which, traditionally follows you and protects you from the sun – the man without a shadow is exposed to the violence of life without mediation – it is to relieve him of that existential burden, the responsibility of his own life. Simultaneously, she who follows is herself relieved of responsibility for her own life as she follows blindly in the footsteps of another. Again, a wonderful reciprocity exists in the cancellation of each existence, in the cancellation of each subject’s tenuous position as a subject” (1983 p.82).

Somewhat similarly, the responses of past students to the assignment ranged from one student’s realization that in her heart she loved to follow people – in fact, she realized that she had quite an “affinity for following people.” A city where walking is the main mode of transportation constantly puts people face to face, often the same people over and over. Since she moved to New York, it had frustrated her to find herself constantly surrounded by people she recognized but had never met. This assignment was her chance to figure out who these people really are. Yet, once she was asked to turn her curiosity into an exercise, the idea of following turned sour. She said, “I felt like I was invading not only their physical space, but their mental space too.”

A different reaction was elicited from another student, who was extremely threatened by the idea of following someone and allowing someone else’s physical itinerary to determine her movement in the city. Her sense of territory had distinct
racial and economic boundaries that determined her awareness of safety. Following another route was deeply disturbing. Her solution was to solicit the help of a friend to go with her. However, throughout the experience of following someone on an unfamiliar route, she commented that she had to “watch her back,” which became the next exercise for the class.

The Following exercise is similar to the Loca (Location Oriented Critical Arts) project. According to Evans et.al. Loca was initiated out of an interest in how surveillance and social control emerge as a residue or unforeseen effect of virtuous information systems and network technologies. Loca observes people's movements by tracking the position of the Bluetooth enabled devices that they carry. Over seven days more than two thousand five hundred people were detected enabling the team to build up a detailed picture of their movements. People were sent messages from a stranger with intimate knowledge of their motion. Over the course of the week the messages became gradually more sinister, the would-be friend mutating into stalker, "coffee later?" changing to "r u ignoring me?" For participants the experience of Loca is intangible, it unearths
what is not seen. The aim is subtle affect. As the developers note, “Loca is like a picture glanced at sideways, a message caught in the corner of the eye, or a mosquito swatted on the arm (http://www.loca-lab.org/).” It makes apparent the
kind of peer to peer observations that become possible as a result of the discomforts and dislocations associated with everyday surveillance.

Mobile Audience

Great blog by Martin Rieser, Artist, Theorist and Educator

http://mobileaudience.blogspot.com/

Janet Cardiff

Here is the link for Janet Cardiff and her husband Georges Bures Miller. If you look at the site and listen to some of the audio, I think you will find it interesting. It may give you some ideas for your own projects.

http://www.cardiffmiller.com/

Mo-blogging from Hipcast

To record an audio moblog, dial: (512) 827-0431 .

When prompted, enter your PIN: 181-197-551 .

Your options will be: Record and Publish, orRecord and Not Publish.

If you select Record and Publish, you will be prompted for your Blog Number or Podcast Number. Your The class blog is: 1133

What is due this week 5/2

Reading Miwon Kwon and commenting on your blog
Preliminary design ideas for Lancaster Project
"Following" assignment - documented.

Brainstorm