Visibility

Visibility

UIA - Celebration of Cities International Competition 2003

National Award. Lisbon, Portugal
a|Um with Marta Caldeira

A|Um Studio’s UIA Celebration of Cities competition entry suggested that one could map a city to
identify places of delay or acceleration of urban activity over time and, through this map, locate
‘acupuncture’ points in the city to open up flows and networks, converting zones that might be
dangerous, arrested or frozen into areas of interaction.('Agent intellects: pattern as a form of thought', Architectural Design, September/October 2006, Wiley-Academy)

Cities should be nothing more or less than the great range of density of human desires, which are able to provoke constant creativity in others.
A healthy city - an ideal agglomeration - is a condition born and developed through both the concrete and suggested inventions of its inhabitants. All the participating agents in a city are immediate beneficiaries of its evolution and answer to time. In the same way, each contribution is unique and indispensable in the process of imagining ongoing change.

(source:http://www.aumstudio.org/)

Cities have several temporal ranges, areas of history that appear and disappear, dissipating in the structures which materialize as temporary or permanent wills. One of the most pertinent capacities in an urban nucleus resides in some of these non-permanent structures: that of the self-modification of meaning, that of the intelligent material.

The accommodation of activities made by the city does not summarize the city in itself: neither does it do justice to its complex body nor to its intelligent answer to time.

A syndrome of disease in a city is evidenced - taking different forms - when the main role of individual agent inside a collectivity is not allowed to its citizens. Examples may be found in all the conditions that emphasize only unilateral or dual understanding of the surrounding environment. The concept of marginality, for instance, is foreign, yet nevertheless accepted in an urban mode of thought which is inclusive and by nature is engaged with the reconceptualization of city edges.

This discussion of limits evokes not only what is exterior to the self but also the integral internal elements of the city body.

It becomes necessary to create new situations, devices, machines or organisms that advance our ability to render visible this individuality within the collective: a key ingredient of a fruitful enrichment in both cultural and human terms.

[PROCESS]
A grid made of different nodal points is placed over the city. New points are discovered in the middle areas between the points of great visibility - of one temporal understanding of the city – and the opposite temporal points; those individuals who reveal a profound distance between the sense of locality, and the insufficient recognition of their individuality by the urban nucleus.

(source:http://www.aumstudio.org/)

The grid proposes a temporal complement to the city. Where the city extends its temporal zone of activity twofold, the grid adds flexibility to that concept, establishing itself as an anchor or an inversion point. The grid points function in syncopation with their understanding of the rhythm of the city, thus establishing themselves as catalysts for different forms of temporality and spatial regeneration.

Nodes that exist in a marginal situation - in less safe areas, in less visible hours- establish their high visibility and their individual temporality, reinforcing relationships of connection with other temporalities, dissipating their initial condition as marginal concepts.

(source:http://www.aumstudio.org/)

The nodes are spaces of night life - present in the urban dream - they are anchoring points for passage of individuals in a limit situation, when the capacity of self-expression is lost inside the urban context. The visibility given by the proposed structures announces a situation of play, of stage, of rehearsal, of temporary exercise of wills and desires, while simultaneously being devoted to the service of showing and caring for that same self-expression of others. The structures go from uncharacterised points to bright spaces of invention: exhibition galleries of diverse themes, experimentation places, meeting points. These nodes will start to bind themselves to their intelligent behavior, that is, the way in which they construct themselves on a local level and then invent new articulations of their situation in this network.

Let day be night and night be day.

[Taken from the official site: http://www.aumstudio.org/]

Collective intelligence platforms as a means of reconfiguring public space

According to Levy 'Collective intelligence' is a social project of varied intelligence, distributed, unceasingly developed and coordinated in real-time(1994). This definition is built upon four axioms: It is distributed: in the sense that nobody knows everything,everyone knows something; knowledge is in a community. It is unceasingly developed: Levy insists on the concept of human qualities; each member of a community is carrying a richness which would ensure a place and a contribution in collective intelligence. It is coordinated in real-time: the reference here is to cyberspace, to the semantic web in particular, a tool supporting collective intelligence and allowing communication between media on a large scale. Finally, it leads to an effective mobilisation of competences as collective intelligence is not a theoretical or philosophical concept , but it enables effective social organisation based on competences, knowledge and wisdom ( Caillard 2007). [1]
Collective intelligence is not purely a cognitive object. Intelligence must be understood here in its etymological sense of joining together (interlegere), as uniting not only ideas but people,

constructing society.[2]

With the rapid growth of telecommunications and information technologies, a number of open source software communities and alternative political organizations have appeared, enabling us to imagine an emergence of new forms of social, economic and political power wherein a common space is constructed by linking an infinetely diverse set of individual interests through shared projects or desires. Examples are political organizations fostered by networking technologies like moveon,org, but also user-generated organisations like the file-sharing communities of myspace and flickr or the online encyclopedia network Wikipedia. In these communities, participants operate from a variety of discrete locations spanning massive geographical distances via intensively reflexive feedback loops of communication and exchange. The participants are at once geographically and culturally apart from one another while also a part of a common space of endeavour. These communities not only rely on communication but also produce communicability, that is to say the generation of new information as a product, and platforms of exchange.[3]

Therefore, we can claim that those platforms of online exchanging knowledge, thoughts and ideas have become the immaterial 'forums' and common spaces of the 21st century capable of reshaping the material and physical attributes of the real urban public spaces.

source:https://neighborland.com/

Platforms like Neighborland, promote human centered uban design and give the power back to the people to take decentralised decisions and organise their community through this online communication space. Neighborland acts as a link for collaboration between organisations, residents, city agencies and universities for the organisation of local projects. People can suggest projects or submit ideas for events and other initiatives that have to do with the local community and get feedback and advice on how to find resources to implement them in  the public space. People can also submit ideas on how to improve existing problematic issues concerning their proximal urban environment. Therefore an online, virtual and immaterial 'public space' becomes the lever triggering a change in the physical surroundings of public space and promotes a new way of taking decisions and a new form of public power on urban space not only controlled by institutional  forces but appearing at the scale of the community of a city. Social networks can contribute to motivate and bring together members of the community so that they can reclaim the commons in new and innovative ways and organise new forms of political actions.
Another good example is Occupy Wall Sreet (http://occupywallst.org/) whose call of protest was initiated by the Canadian anti-consumerist pro-environment group/magazine Adbusters. In their site (https://www.adbusters.org/occupywallstreet/) users make suggestions about events or where they are going to perform and write their opinons freely, redefining the use of public space.

source: https://www.adbusters.org/occupywallstreet/

Another platform complementing the work of urban designers and planners, could be Planning 2.0 which "incorporates online geographic information system (GIS) mapping and web technologies to support collaborative planning and ongoing public participation. This enhances government transparency and accountability by creating a societal infrastructure for human interaction. Planning 2.0 helps us cast our net as far as possible to capture as much public feedback as needed and foster public involvement. This entails retooling our communities with effective means of communication that go way beyond the traditional civic engagement venues to a more open and capable dialog and transparent participation." as Ahmed Abukhater, Global Industry Manager for Community Development at Esri explains in Next American City magazine on how to shift from “planning for people” to “planning with people” using new technologies and platforms. Planning 2.0  has three levels of implementation: 1. Informing impacted and interested stakeholders, including the public, by disseminating information and maps using the GeoWeb as a common platform. 2.Involving members of the public by getting their feedback and quickly registering their preferences regarding planning initiatives, from broad issues such as community visioning to specific project-based proposals and land-use changes. This is enabled by crowdsourcing, through which citizens act as sensors and a source of geographic information and intelligence. 3.Empowering the public to make informed decisions about new and existing developments. By using the web, cloud computing, and open data-sharing policies as a platform to deliver geoservices, people are able to make decisions regarding what should and should not happen in their communities. This provides a collaborative platform that empowers both decision makers and everyday citizens. [4]

source: http://www.urenio.org/2011/01/20/planning-2-0-a-collaborative-platform-for-actionable-intelligence/

References

[1] N.Komninos, Intelligent Cities and Globalisation of Innovation Networks, Routledge, 2008

[2] C.Hight, C.Perry, 'Collective Intelligence in Design', Architectural Design September/October 2006, Wiley-Academy

[3] C.Hight, C.Perry, 'Collective Intelligence in Design', Architectural Design September/October 2006, Wiley-Academy

[4]P.Tsarchopoulos, 'Planning 2.0: Collaborative Platform for Intelligence', http://www.urenio.org/2011/01/20/planning-2-0-a-collaborative-platform-for-actionable-intelligence/

Some open source analytical mapping tools

Isoscope

Isoscope is a web-based interactive tool that creates aesthetic visuals about locations that are reachable by car in a chosen time from a chosen location. The boundaries of the reachability is shown by 24 layered organic shapes, while one layer represents one hour of the day. The output reveals many information like the traffic infrastructure, connectivity of regions and natural boundaries. Since the location to choose is not exclusive, places all over the world can be explored and compared. (http://isoscope.fh-potsdam.de/)

First, the user zooms and pans to an area of interest, and clicks on a specific location. Multiple isochrone shapes are displayed based on travel time and other parameters. When scrubbing over the timeline the selected hour is highlighted . Switching between days (e.g. weekdays vs weekend) allows comparing the different scopes for rush hours on work days and corresponding times on days with less traffic density. Selecting additional locations on the map lets users compare multiple places side by side. (http://tillnagel.com/2014/07/urbane-ebenen-winter-2013/)

Egaleo mobility around points inside and around the park of Mparoutadiko reachable within 2 minutes on a Monday 14:00 o'clock.

Egaleo mobility around points inside and around the park of Mparoutadiko reachable within 6 minutes on a Monday 14:00 o'clock.

QGIS- open source software to create, edit, visualize, analyse and publish geospatial information

Social interaction triggered or mediated by interactive public interfaces

Urban screens are everywhere in our urban environment, including advertisment, information, global newsfeeds.The pubic encunters that had characterized the social life of an older urban form were increasingly displaced onto the electronic media. As Virilio sums it up: 'The screen abruptly became the city square'.[1] Media technologies and platforms are not only redefining architecture and urbanism, but the social life sustained within their domain.[2] This results to an  alienation of people from the public space of their city pushing them to isolation and increased use of social media for communcating.

Inspite of all these, digital interactive technlogies in the form of public installations and contrivances in urban space, can be utilized to trigger social interaction by mediating the communication between the participants of the 'performances' that emerge often intuitively. Around those interfaces the crowd negotiates the space to engage in the interaction and a crowd self-organaization driven by technology emerges in those digitally enhanced environments.

Liquid Light- L.Hesphanol, M.Sogono, G.Wu

The artwork stems from the concept of "familiar strangers" and represents people being connected by their glowing auras through shining energy halos gliding through ripples of water. Every now and then, glimpses of enlightenment about their shared condition are materialised in a burst of blinding white light, only to fade again, in an endless continuum. A real, physical mist gently falls at the back of the interaction zone, embracing the audience as a soft touch of realisation and awe. [3]

Liquid Light - Promotional Video from Luke Hespanhol on Vimeo.

SMSlingshot- VR/Urban

The SMSlingshot is an autonomous working device, equipped with a high frequency radio, hacked arduino board, laser and batteries. Text messages can be typed on a phone-sized wooden keypad which is integrated in an also wooden slingshot. After the message is finished, the user can aim on a media facade and send/shoot the message straight to the targeted point. It will then appear as a coloured splash with the message written within. The text message will also be real-time twittered - just in case.

 

SMSlingshot from THE CONSTITUTE on Vimeo.

Body movies, Rafaelo Lozano-Hemmer(2001)

Body movies, first staged in 2001 at the Schouwburg Square in Rotterdam, utilized large-scale images, comprising over 1000 portraits taken on the streets of Rotterdam,Madrid, Mexico and Montreal, which were projected onto the facade of the Pathe Cinema building using robotically controlled projectors. However, the potraits were rendered invisible due to the powerful xenon lights saturating them from ground level. It was only when people walked through the square that the silhouettes of their interposed shadows revealed the projected protraits. This emphasis on the physical prescence of participants; bodies plays an important role in limiting the works' appropriation as abstract spectacle.Perhaps the most striking aspect of Body Movies was the playful engagement it sustained among groups of erstwhile strangers who came together in public space and discovered that, by enacting a collective choreography, they could affect the visual ambience of that space. [5]

Through these examples I'm trying to highlight the use of interactive technologies embedded in elements of public urban space in order to strengthen social interaction and engage the crowd in public life in a performative way

References
[1] S.McQuire, The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space, p.140, Sage 2008
[2] S.McQuire, The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space, p.7, Sage 2008

[3] https://vimeo.com/25193248
[4] https://vimeo.com/55813349
[5]  S.McQuire, The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space, p.153, Sage 2008

Choreographing the City

Trying to understand and visualize human movement and circulation in the city and specifically in and around the area of the park of Egaleo I came up with the thought: What if we could map the city with choreographic terms and even use choreography tools to re-organize and design it?

Our daily paths in the city chart a unique map, something like a choreography "not just through the city but a process by which both our body and that of the city provisionally take form."[1] The city with its structural elements, limitations and obstacles provides 'triggers' for our use and manipulation of space, the choices we make while moving, directions, speed. Like the dancers' 'choreographic thinking'- flow of thoughts while dancing that are constantly being re-embodied in space- walking and moving within the city is a 'way to move thoughts out of representation and into action'.[2]

The planned city acts as a kind of movement prompt met by our physical body in any given instance, leading to an action encounter that re-maps the already “known” space toward a new and unique dance.[3]

The city is similar to what William Forsythe refers to as 'choreographic object'- an element outside the dancing body that suggests new dance solutions with each engagement and subsequent iteration.[4]

William Forsythe has developed a whole interactive interdisciplinary project (One Flat Thing, reproduced) developing tools to reconfigure counterpoint principles in dance-that means the field of action in which the intermittent and irregular coincidence of attributes between organisational elements produces an ordered interplay. In other words, he is trying to use choreography in order to see how potentials and organization of actions can be re-structured according to 'cues' as he calls them (aural and visual signals that trigger events). 

William Forsythe's One Flat Thing reproduced (source:http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/media/inside.php?p=gallery)

So through years of research Synchronous Objects was developed by gathering data to discover patterns of organization of movement and visualizing it in many different ways (computer graphics, animation etc). Using the scheme 'from dance to data to objects' Synchronous Objects investigates the interlocking systems of organisation in the choreography of  One Flat Thing, reproduced.[5]  In the choreography there where some main themes repeated by the dancers but there were no set improvisation tasks- dancers observe each other and make these translations in real time, something that maybe lets us make use of the tools of the online interactive site for mapping the movements in the city and see how actions are connected and re-organaised by the prompts given by the city to the users and the interaction between users.

So let's take a look in some of the tools (objects)

Counterpoint tool

source:http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/content.html#/CounterpointTool

WIth this tool visitors can observe the motion of multi-armed performing creatures and give them broad choreographic direction using a straightforward button-and-slider  interface.[6]The creatures' motion consists of both articulated arm rotation and navigation around a virtual stage. Since the patterns are not so specific,are based on counterpoint techniques of improvisation and are letting us control the motion of the 'widgets' we could compare it to everyday life movements in the public space of the park, thus considering the park a stage. What's more, the whole choreography from which those systems where extracted is based on a grid of 20 tables letting us mentally visualize and comprehend the dimensions of the space and therefore adapt it to the real physical environment.

Video Abstraction Tool

source:http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/content.html#/VideoAbstractionTool

Making the use of video to extract visualizations that help us decipher the underlying structures of human motion and the interplay between human movement and designed spaces.

Cue Visualizer

source:http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/content.html#/CueVisualizer

This tool shows the collective network of communication and spatial distribution by showing the interplay of 'cues' between the performers and the fixed basis of physical space, which is the 20 tables grid.

Choreographing the city to re-map social interaction

Since I previously made the assumption that walking is an embodied mode of thinking, I believe it can 'move' human ideologies in ways that re-choreograph social registers [7]. Our bodies with their motions and gestures accumulate socioeconomical aspects defining our identities,as well as personal memories, our race, gender and so on. All these give form to how we participate in social life. Andrew Hewitt uses the term 'social choreography' to show that everyday perambulation is a mobile cartography of ideology that reconfigures the social realm.[8] Using 'choreographic thinking' as a way to describe walking considered as choreographic activity shows potentials to change the way we live and inhabit public space by re-distributing known elements and consolidated solutions to problems and changing the way we negotiate issues.Altering basic elements of walking like the posture or quality of movement, changes the sensation of motion and therefore the thinking that accompanied it. [9]. Trisha Brown with her pieces Roof Piece(1971) in which dancers passed movement like a game of telephone across the tops of buildings, and Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970), which suspended a solo figure by a harness who then descended a three-story building on Wooster Street, used the city to change the relationship between bodies and forces

so that new problems arose to be solved by the dancer. These pieces importantly reveal thinking processes from both inside and outside a crisis situation, which might suggest how movement, body, and thinking work together as social choreography.

 Trisha Brown's Roof Piece(1971)
(source:http://art.thehighline.org/project/trishabrown/ Courtesy of Trisha Brown)

Trisha Brown's Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970)

source:http://www.walkerart.org/press/browse/press-releases/2008/walker-art-center-presents-exhibition-of-tris Courtesy of Trisha Brown

Blending the tools of William Forsythe for better understanding the patters of moving within a city with the notion of social choreography as a result of embodied thinking translated in walking, we could invent strategic ways to design the city as a stage of social interaction changing the norms of its existing cartography.

References

[1] Megan V. Nicely, 'Choreographing the City: Techniques for Urban Walking', Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies Vol. 11, No. 2 ,June 2015

[2] Megan V. Nicely, 'Choreographing the City: Techniques for Urban Walking', Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies Vol. 11, No. 2 ,June 2015

[3] Megan V. Nicely, 'Choreographing the City: Techniques for Urban Walking', Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies Vol. 11, No. 2 ,June 2015

[4]William Forsythe,'Choreographic Objects', http://www.williamforsythe.de/essay.html

[5] http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/content.html

[6] Cecilia di Chio, Applications of Evolutionary Computation: EvoApplications 2011, Torino, Italy, April 27-29, 2011, Proceedings

[7] Megan V. Nicely, 'Choreographing the City: Techniques for Urban Walking', Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies Vol. 11, No. 2 ,June 2015

[8] Andrew Hewitt, Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement, Durham: Duke University Press, 2005: 15.

[9]Megan V. Nicely, 'Choreographing the City: Techniques for Urban Walking', Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies Vol. 11, No. 2 ,June 2015

Park of Egaelo- A first mapping of the area

Tracing of movements in the public space of Athens Ancient Agora

This is my project for the course 'Conceptual Design of the City: Void-Landscape-Archive' in the first semester of the postgraduate program 'Architectural Design-Space-Culture'.

I tried to conceive a system of tracing the layers of movements in three important eras of the Athens Agora through typologies of motions according to the circulation in the public space and the relationship between empty and built space. The traces of the trajectories of motion in the public space accumulate a sense of absence of the actions taking place in the public space and of the corporality which gained a spatial being and dense symbolisms and meanings.

Virtual Flaneur

I am trying to place the contemporary flaneur in a virtual world by developing a sort of game/virtual environment where one can catch a glimpse of how the experience of urban space was formed in each era and how the different circulations were structured as well as virtually interact with this mental motion landscape. My goal is a reconstruction of the archaeological site through the visualisation of these important movements which used to exist as of utmost importance for the everyday life. In these movements the basic one articulating the rest is that of the road of Panathinaia where in ancient times the procession for godess Athena took place.

Frames from the virtual environment

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