Urban Choreographies

Δευτέρα 27 Ιουνίου 2016

Motionscapes project

Αυτό το εργασία χορηγείται με άδεια Creative Commons Αναφορά Δημιουργού-Μη Εμπορική Χρήση-Όχι Παράγωγα Έργα 4.0 Διεθνές .

Τρίτη 31 Μαΐου 2016

Smart cities and smart furniture

Many cities are trying to incoroporate some of the key fields of the smart city model (smart economy-smart mobility-smart environment-smart people-smart living-smart governance) in their development and design. The production model of today is based on oil as raw material and source of energy, on mass production and on a standardised global economic system. This model of course is not sustainable and cannot continue to shape the future of cities since manufacturing left the city and moved miles away, which led to an increase in consumption of fossil fuels, reduced work opportunities and – worst of all – separated consumption operations from production processes. Cities have turned into vast rubbish factories and their survival depends on the technology that is produced far away. They are the physical manifestation of our current consumption-based model. Cities need to innovate and create their own technology to share with other urban centers.(source: http://lameva.barcelona.cat/bcnmetropolis/en/dossier/dels-fab-labs-a-les-fab-cities/)

Barcelona is trying to turn to a self-sufficient fully productive city made up of citizens who share knowledge to solve local problems and set up new businesses and education schemes. The Fab City concept is a vindication of the idea of the citizen as the true centre of knowledge, the start and end point of a chain that links together researchers, universities, industry, commerce, the government, etc. It’s about producing locally, using both cutting-edge and basic technology, and sharing it to drive the development of new solutions at any given moment, anywhere in the world. Creating a network of digital fabrication labs (Fab Labs) it will be able to communicate with other cities, exchange know-how and work on solutions to community problems. It is possible to use waste as raw material and recycle plastic to do 3D printing.
Amsterdam is also establishing smart city practices like City-Zen Smart Grid in New West district which has a large amount of solar panels and therefore has been chosen for the construction of the first smart grid in the Netherlands. This intelligent electricity network (Smart Grid) contains additional computers and sensors placed in the grid. As such current and voltage are monitored continuously to provide more accurate monitoring and control functions. The smart grid provides with better and cheaper options to facilitate energy transition. So their electricity supply is based on an organised system of controlling the energy produced by solar power since this grid is equipped with computer and sensor technology at key nodes. Therefore maintenance is targeted and as a result the network is cheaper and the number of power failures decreases.

(source:http://amsterdamsmartcity.com/projects/detail/id/17/slug/city-zen-smart-grid#)

Smart Citizen platform

Smart Citizen is a platform to generate participatory processes of people in the cities. Connecting data, people and knowledge, the objective of the platform is to serve as a node for building productive and open indicators, and distributed tools, and thereafter the collective construction of the city for its own inhabitants.The Smart Citizen project is based on geolocation, the Internet and free hardware and software for data collection and sharing. It connects people with their environment and their city to create more effective and optimized relationships between resources, technology, communities, services and events in the urban environment. (source: https://smartcitizen.me/about)

The sensors

Smart Citizen from smartcitizen on Vimeo.

Smart Furniture

Urban equipment can also be 'smart' and contribute to a real time feedback of city data contributing to better and innovative ways of solving everyday life problems.

Soofa Bench is a solar-powered bench that charges phones and monitors its environment. Launched in Boston, now in 12 States and 5 countries. It is also a platform for sensors to monitor its environment and is made of sustainably harvested materials and solar powered. No wiring or infrastructure is required to get going.

(source:http://www.soofa.co/getsoofa/)

Immaterials: Light painting WiFi- YOUrban

The city is filled with an invisible landscape of networks that is becoming an interwoven part of daily life. WiFi networks and increasingly sophisticated mobile phones are starting to influence how urban environments are experienced and understood. We want to explore and reveal what the immaterial terrain of WiFi looks like and how it relates to the city.

This film is about investigating and contextualising WiFi networks through visualisation. It is made by Timo Arnall, Jørn Knutsen, Einar Sneve Martinussen. The film is a continuation of our explorations of intangible phenomena that have implications for design and effect how both products and cities are experienced.Matt Jones of BERG has summarised these phenomena as ‘Immaterials’, and uses sociality, data, time and radio as examples. Radio and wireless communication are a fundamental part of the construction of networked cities. This generates whatWilliam Mitchell called an ‘electromagnetic terrain’ that is both intricate and invisible, and only hinted at by the presence of antennas.

YOUrban team, built a WiFi measuring rod that visualises WiFi signal strength as a bar of lights. In order to study the spatial and material qualities of wireless networks, When moved through space the rod displays changes in the WiFi signal. Long-exposure photographs of the moving rod reveal cross sections of a network’s signal strength.

The size of the measuring rod and the light paintings it creates emphasizes the architectural scale at which WiFi operates, and situates the networks in the physical environments that they are a part of. The light of the measuring rod pulses as it is being moved, which creates dashed lines rather than solid ones. This creates a semi-transparent texture that allows the visualization to appear within the physical setting without covering it.

WiFi networks can, both practically and metaphorically connect different environments. The radio waves from WiFi base stations flow from indoor domestic spaces and semi-private work places, into public parks, streets and bus stops. A typical example of how WiFi networks can bring new functions to urban environments is the case of a university network extending into a nearby park. This makes it possible for students to use the park as a networked area when the seasons allow it. However, this password protected park-network is both technically invisible and practically unavailable for anyone else.

source: http://www.yourban.no/2011/02/22/immaterials-light-painting-wifi/

Visualising motion

Can something so invisible and immaterial take form and appear before our eyes? Techniques like motion capture originating from Chronophotography (E.-J.Marey, E.Muybridge) show the way to capturing the beauty and dynamics of motion with beautiful visualizations that can even give a three-dimensional form to what the eye can't catch. Various explorations have been made not only with motion capture but also with time lapse photography and video.

Time-lapse Images of Nude Dancers Created with 10,000 Individual Photographs

Community Mural Projects

Visualize Pi

Artist Ellie Balk and The Green School’s Assistant Principal Nathan Affield are using mathematics to connect high school students to the community by painting large-scale murals in East Williamsburg.

In 2012, students constructed an image of the golden spiral based on the Fibonacci Sequence and began to explore the relationship between the golden ratio and Pi. The number Pi was represented in a color-coded graph within the golden spiral. In this, the numbers are seen as color blocks that vary in size proportionately within the shrinking space of the spiral, allowing us to visualize the shape of Pi and its negative space to look for “patterns”. The students soon realized that the irrational number of Pi created no patterns at all, resulting in a space that resembles “noise”.
So in response to that, last year they visualized the number Pi as a reflective line graph that resembles a sound wave. The colors of the mural change at each prime number in Pi so that the viewer can visualize a pattern of prime numbers within Pi. Located on a busy corner in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the sounds of the bustling traffic and rhythmic commuter passing creates the perfect backdrop for our visualization. The project was funded by launching a successful Kickstarter campaign.

(source:http://visualizepi.tumblr.com/)

Soundwaves

130’ community mural created in September 2011 by Ellie Balk working with 9 pianists and drawing the distance between their hands as they played Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata to create a musical landscape. Funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, supported by Myrtle Avenue Revitalization Project.

(source:http://elliebalk.com/#/soundwaves/)

Histogram of Emotions

In May-June 2011 E.Balk worked with high school math students in surveying the whole school, collecting data on how they were feeling based on different times of the day to create a bar graph that resembles a cityscape. Made Possible by LCB Grant.

(source: http://elliebalk.com/#/histogram/)

Emotional Cartography

Experience in the city is followed by emotions of its users, many times imposed by architecture and built environment istelf but conducting your love life or expressing your innermost feelings through an architectural medium within the city, is a challenging endeavor. Emotions are difficult to map since they are not something measurable. However, some artists and architects have experimenting finding ways to collect data about people's emotions and present them in a public way in the city.

BioMapping

In Christian Nold's BioMapping, participants went out for a walk in their neighborhood. They wore a specially crafted device that measured their ‘galvanic skin response’, an indicator of emotional arousal, and a GPS device that logged their movements. Upon their return, an ‘emotional map’ was compiled with three-dimensional spikes at points were people felt aroused (like busy junctions). The unique methodology of this project involves working with groups of people to interpret and analyse the data and adding annotating onto these individual emotion tracks. Through this process communal Emotion Maps of lots of people's emotion data are constructed which are packed full of personal observations and highlight the issues that people feel strongly about.
(source:http://biomapping.net/)

D-Tower, NOX

Doetinchem, The Netherlands, 1998-2004

D-tower is an art piece, commissioned by the city of Doetinchem in the Netherlands, that maps the emotions of the inhabitants of Doetinchem. D-tower records HAPPINESS, LOVE, FEAR and HATE daily using different questions. The D-Tower is a project where the intensive (feelings, qualia) and the extensive (space, quantities) start exchanging roles, where human action, color, money, value, feelings all become networked entities. The panels are insulated with milled styrofoam then covered with epoxy. It is a permanent public art work with its own website.NOX’s tower looks zoomorphic, a little like a pony’s legs. Its website (www.d-toren.nl), which being handwritten has an air of intimacy about it, maps the emotions of Doetinchem’s inhabitants in response to a questionnaire created by artist QS Serafijn.The tower then abstracts the emotions of these answers to the questions through its use of colour,transmitting ‘the State of the Town’ each evening, assuming the colour of the most intensely felt emotion. After running for a month, the architects concluded that it had been often blue
(for happiness) or red (for love) and sometimes green (for hate), but NOX’s Lars Spuybroek reports that it has not yet been yellow (for fear). Every six months, a different group of 50 of the city’s inhabitants will complete further editions of the questionnaire. Questions become more and more precise, and the answers are then translated into the form of different ‘landscapes’ shown on the website. Spuybroek explains that in the process, all the ins and outs of their emotional lives are made visible, including ongoing discussions about hot issues. ‘D-tower is a coherent hybrid of different media, where architecture is part of a larger interactive system of relationships,’ says Spuybroek.

(source:Architectural Design, 4d space:Interactive Architecture, Vol 75 January/February 2005, Wiley)

Mapping Invisibility

Mapping Invisibility is a cartographic exploration of the ‘illegal’ immigrants experience of the city. The aim of the mapping was to engage with strategies of hiding in the public spaces of Amsterdam. The results were presented at Frascati theatre on the 20th of May 2015 for the programme Out of State. In the workshop (which took place a week prior to the presentation) a number of illegal immigrants (experts in living invisibly in the city) guided participants to places in the city with an emotion in mind (a total of four emotions were mapped). Prior to the fieldwork a legend was generated by the participants, consisting of emotions that they thought undocumented citizens experience in the city. While walking/ mapping the participant could evaluate preconceived ideas (to what extent the chosen words matched reality or not) in the dialogue with the undocumented. Changing from one emotion to another happened at a fixed time and for all cartographers simultaneously, until all the words of the legend were mapped. The guests rediscovered the diverse meaning and associations of public places and were introduces to strategies of hiding, such as avoiding to walk with a bag, pretending to be waiting for a train, etc.
A web applications traced the cartographers footsteps while recording the dialogue. The longer they stayed on a certain location the thicker the line on the digital map would become, this way communicating the importance of a place in relation to an emotion and visualizing the diverse way of responding to a similar emotion (one might prefer to be stationed somewhere when it comes to a certain emotion, while another might prefer to walk). The conversation can be followed by downloading the audiotrack on this website: http://performativemapping.net/outofstate. The tracks can only be heard by being present on the exact same location and by walking the same track.
The map of emotional journeys are the result of the walked emotions. As long as the host and guest walked, a line was shown. The longer they stayed on a certain location the thicker the line became, until it turned into a dot. This way of drawing with time is a way to visualize the different responses of the stateless to a similar emotion (one might prefer to be stationed somewhere when it comes to a certain emotion, while another might prefer to walk).

The photo archive shows places, traces, materials, objects and behaviours that have to do with hiding/ sheltering from reality. The pictures were taken while walking.

The audio map consists of different tracks of stories related to ‘living invisibly’. During the mapping practice the conversation with the undocumented was recorded. The story is an mp3 that ‘visitors’ can listen to with a mobile phone and headphones by being on the same location and downloading the track. Only through being physically present on the location or following the same walked route, the story is revealed. If the visitor deviates from the place or the route (range of 20 m) the audio fades out. This way of aligning with the undocumented to reveal the story behind places or objects in the city, plays with a tension between hiding and making public which is a daily recurrent theme for the undocumented.

(source: http://tr-aders.eu/mapping-invisibility/)

Nevermind

Interesting examples can also come from the world of video games where artificial intelligence is implemented to enable the machine to adjust each online platform according to the users' preferences. But how much emotional intelligence is inside computers, cell phones, and video game consoles? In the past, the answer has been "none" — even the most complex deep learning machine is still a machine. Nevermind is a video game that can sense players' emotions and adjust experience to fit.The psychological thriller, which debuted last year, isn't the average first-person shooter game. Instead of being given a gun and told to kill enemies, players inhabit the persona of a Neuroprober, a physician who can enter the minds of trauma victims. As they explore the troubled psyches, Neuroprobers must solve logic puzzles and recover memory fragments to help their patients get better.
The world of the game becomes darker and more twisted as players exhibit more stress — and when they calm down, the game does, too. With the help of optional sensors like Garmin heart rate monitors, Apple Watch, and the Tobi EyeX controller, Nevermind responds to biofeedback like heart rate and eye movements. Now, the latest updates expand the game's capabilities by incorporating emotion recognition software Affdex, which uses data from players' webcams to track their response to emotional distress and further alter what happens on screen.

(source:http://theweek.com/articles/616903/innovative-video-game-sense-emotions-respond-accordingly)

Emoti

During an Art Hackathon, Emoti was developed, in order to show the emotional state of the world through combined visual colours and audio resulting in a beutiful chaotic representation of the emotional state of the world-or at least the twitterverse. Using Twitter widgets, the team was able to pull certain keywords from tweets being posted in real time and assign them to different emotion types, which meant being able to have constantly updated data on how people were feeling on twitter through these emotion-related keywords. The emotions they assigned them to were: Happy, Sad, Surprised, Afraid and Angry.
From this data they then created a simple HTML web-page with 5 divs, or blocks, of colour relating to the different emotion states. These would constantly change width depending on the data that was being collected from the tweets to give a visual representation of how many people were tweeting under each emotion:
Green = Happy
Blue = Sad
Yellow = Surprised
Pink = Afraid
Red = Angry
To make this experience of witnessing how the world feels and how frequently these emotions change more immersive, these visual representations are also accompanied with audio.

(source:https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/emoti-visualising-our-emotions/)

Locative Media

For a long time information and communication technologies have been understood as ‘placeless’. The dominant vision was that ICTs weaken or even obliterate the importance of physical place (location) in general and the need for spatial concentration in cities in particular , as well as social relations and identities based on proximate face-to-face interactions in social situations (locale). In response to this ‘old’ new media paradigm, recent work shows that mobile media practices in particular are frequently tied to physical places and physically co-present social situations. [1]
Locative media cover a wide range of artistic practices and aproaches, connected with technologies like GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and other location-aware and geotagging applications. Geographical space is faced as a canvas where artistic expressions are inscribed, through portable devices with location recognition technologies, mappings, social media. [2] Locative media artists use cartography as a visual medium. But locative media are not limited to be used only by artists or scientists but also from everyday mobile devices users and therefore are strengthened as a practice.
Marc Tuters and Kazys Varnelis see two categories of locative media. One is annotative – these are media technologies that allow its users to virtually tag (and consequently filter) the real world. The second is phenomenological – tracing the action of a subject in the world. Another way to categorize these new media is between media that take an actual spatial context of a communicative practice as its point of departure and media that provide a virtual but spatially organized interface related to an actual geography for communicative and informational practices.[3]
Locative media don't limit the interaction between humans and media in a screen but place it in the physical space. Place can become again a practical condition of social encounters, offering opportunities for action and social interaction. The rupture of digital information networks through the membrane of the city into the open view of people and their mobile screens relies on the body's capacity to 'proprioceptively' map its own displacement in real and imagined geographies. City is a circuit of ambient informational fields through which we learn to mediate spaces both near and far. Our own bodies are infused and intersected by the extensional networks of the living city, both controlling its machinery at a distance and triangulated socially and psychologically by that machinery in the course of our movements. We learn to operate the city as a meta-interface, one comprised of many smaller tactical interfaces The device becomes a window on to the hidden
layers of data held in or about the user’s immediate environment. Urban and network diagrams are images now animated in hand, transformed from maps into image-instruments with which to connect
and control the immediate and remote environment. Both distance and nearness erode under the weight of the interfaces imagery.[4]

Annotative locative media projects aim in the transformation of space by adding data and personal comments (geotagging). Some applications and services overlay physical space with digital information that can be accessed on the spot via mobile media devices. An example is Wikitude 'augmented reality' platform for media devices. Depending on where one is (GPS), and where one points the mobile phone camera at (compass and accelerometer), the Wikitude application displays information about physical points of interest from online sources like Wikipedia. It projects this information over the camera view on the screen. Users themselves can contribute geotags and points of interest to the Wikitude.me platform. Such services depart from a geographic position in physical space (‘reality’) and add extra layers of digital information. This is why they are called ‘augmented reality’. Augmented reality's ideal is to blend virtual information more or less seamlessly into what people are normally seeing. [5]

Another example of annotative locative media is Urban Tapestries by Proboscis team, and is an experimental platform which allows the user to access place-based content like text, sound, image. Every user can share knowledge, information, stories, while at the same time leaving the trace of his connection with the environment.

One similar application I personally used during the first international training school 'Enhancements:Mediated urban landscapes' held in March in Thessaloniki is 'Way-Cyberparks'. The public open spaces monitoring tool, called WAY-CyberParks, consists of a smartphone application (app) and a web service. The app on one hand tracks the way people use the space, allowing them to get contextual information through augmented reality, to send suggestions or complains, or to answer questions based on the context among other functionalities. It can be downloaded from Google Play (Android based users) and App Store (iOS based users), look for "way-cyberparks". On the other, the web monitors the way people use the space in real time allowing to visualize people’s suggestions, answers, or path filtered by gender, age, occupation, or reason for visiting the space among other location based services. During the workshop we were divided into three large groups and after downloading the app and the maps in our phones, we posted location-based questions for the other teams like 'Would you like more green space here?' so that when a user walks in the city with the app, it pops the questions according to their locations and then collects the data from their answers. We also recorded conversations with other citizens during our walk in the city and later added them to the map of the application. It was a really exciting experience!

The other category are the phenomenological locative media, tracing the walking of people. One of the earliest tracing projects is Amsterdam RealTime by Esther Polak. The idea of this project is based in the notion of 'cognitive map'. Every resident of a city has in mind an invisible, mental map which influences his decisions and determines his movement within the city. Amsterdam RealTime aims in the visualization of the cognitive maps of Amsterdam residents.

Another response to the sense of local displacement associated with networked image-making is seen in a project by artist Mark Selby, Camera Explora. The project employs a specially designed location-aware camera with an embedded map to urge us to explore a wider range of locations and photograph each more mindfully. The camera only allows the user to take one photo for each plotted grid on the map, and when this picture is captured, the camera disables itself until the photographer physically moves to a new area. The photographer's movements around the city are also plotted in real-time on a map, and each photo is printed as it is taken. Selby states that ' these constraints aim to encourage more attentive exploration of the city, more careful consideration of which locations or experiences to record, and consequently, in combination with the materials produced, to allow the creation of more valuable records of experiences.'
In effect Selby's redesigned camera paradoxically enables self-expression by limiting it based on a user's location and movement. One is given incentive to venture new, unexplored areas; one has to consciously decide what the most important characterstic of a specific location might be before they snap a photograph.[6]

References

[1] Michiel de Lange, Moving circles: Mobile media and Playful identities, Erasmus University Rotterdam, 2010

[2] Δώρα-Δανάη Κολοκυθάκου, Ιχνογραφώντας σ/την πόλη: τα Locative Media στις «διάχυτες» περιπλανήσεις, Ερευνητική εργασία, Πολυτεχνείο Κρήτης, Σχολή Αρχιτεκτόνων Μηχανικών, Ιούλιος 2015
[3] http://themobilecity.nl/background-information/about-locative-media/
[4] iPhone City, Architectural Design July/August 2009, Wiley
[5] Michiel de Lange, Moving circles: Mobile media and Playful identities, Erasmus University Rotterdam, 2010
[6] http://rhizome.org/editorial/2014/mar/26/locative-media-revisited/