Locative Art

Following the last post I thought I would blog some locative text and art projects.

Image of FieldHello, world! is a work mowed into a field that encodes in Semacode the universal programmers greeting, “Hello, world!”

Image of SunsetEternal Sunset shows you webcam images of the sunset wherever it is happening at the time you visit. (This one is from Norway.)

Grafedia ImageGrafedia is a site where people can send emails with a word they have seen written in blue and underlined on the street. They then get back images associated with those words.

LogoAbout Google Maps hacks for Sonar is just one post from a group blog with a lot of posts on the category locative.

Screen ImageGutenkarte is built on MetaCarta and lets you see a map with the locations important to a text as Google Books does. They process the text, identify locations in the text and then map them. It would be neater if they let users run a text through.

Gibson: Spook Country

Spoiler Alert
Book Cover ImageLast weekend I read William Gibson’s new book, Spook Country. Like most of Gibson’s book he does a great job imagining the evolution of computing technologies. He is the master of close-future forecasting. In this case he looks at GPS (Global Positioning System) or, more specifically its use for what is called locative art or augmented reality. One of the parallel plots of the story has the main character Hollis follow an artist and look (through a special visor) at virtual works superimposed over real locations like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s death where it really happened. Gibson in Q&A with the Boston Globe calls it graffitti (compared to current locative art which is mostly audio-cellphone based.) Gibson has put his finger on something important – the way GPS and WiFi enable an outdoor virtual reality superimposed on where you are.

What I find dissappointing is the increasing predictable passivity of Gibson’s characters. In Spook Country he has three witness zombie characters who essentially move around the plot watching the real protagonists and reflecting on them. That Hollis would by sheer luck (and her having been part of a defunct band) get invited to witness and talk to the protagonists becomes unbelievable at the end. I can see no reason why either Bigend or the old man would involve her as they do based on Gibson’s prose. Likewise the character Milgrim is dragged along to witness the far more interesting character Brown. The strange passivity of such central characters spoils an otherwise very smart book. Gibson is trying too hard to avoid a third-person point-of-view so he creates unbelievable witnesses.

One thing Gibson does well is science fiction of the here-and-now. Spook Country takes place after 9/11 and in the shady reality of contract intelligence. It reflects in the way that speculative fiction can on what we are worried we will become. Washington Post reviewer Bill Sheehan rightly compares Gibson to Don DeLillo, both of whom write “fiction that is powerfully attuned to the currents of dread, dismay and baffled fury that permeate our culture.”

Recipes and Generative Codes

Screen shot from web siteChristopher Alexander of Pattern Language fame has developed a second generation of pattern language that focuses on process rather than outcome.

A generative sequence may be thought of as a second generation pattern language. (From the Pattern Language Website)

Reading around the web sites I am struck by how Alexander has woven computing into his second generation ideas. Could it be that Alexander was influenced by the way computer scientists responded to his pattern language ideas?

Now a sequence is something that looks very very simple and is actually very very difficult. It’s more than a pattern; it’s an algorithm about process. But what is possible is to write sequences so that they are easy. You follow the steps in a sequence like you follow the steps in a cooking recipe. (From A Just So Story)

Reading A Just So Story (subtitle “How Patternlanguage.com got its name”) suggests to me that the way the computing community took to his ideas led Alexander to think about processes and code. In his The Origins of Pattern Theory) 1996 address to the OOPSLA he calls the overlap of ideas “a deeper coincidence in what you are doing in software design and what I am doing in architectural design”.

It is also worth noting how Alexander describes generative sequences as recipes (which we have been using to help people understand text analysis):

After all, every recipe is a sequence of steps. Is a generative sequence anything more than a series of steps like a recipe for cake or omlets. (From Uniqueness of Generative Sequences)

Elsewhere he talks about unfolding and recipes synonymously.

I think there is an interesting thread to pursue through the criticism of Alexander’s sometimes naive mysticism while also experimenting with its application to methods in the textual disciplines. Patterns and recipes are evocative and useful, I’m not sure I buy the Heideggarian philosophy the Alexander thinks they are grounded in.

The web materials under Patternlanguage.com are, to make matters worse, confusing to browse. (They are under “method” to begin.) Alexander has another site, Building Living Neighborhoods which is much better organized and is aimed at the neighborhood activist. It illustrates what he is talking about better than the home site.

Book Cove4rI need to say something about Alexander’s site and books. They are poorly designed and undermine his message. If he followed a process for developing his web site I would call it the “use frames when you don’t need them, use tables within tables so that people can’t help but see them, and randomly add things when you think of them.” Consistent navigation or design is not a priority. The second series of books The Nature of Order, published by The Center for Environmental Structure, also suffers. At CAD $100 a book it feels cheap and the images reproduced often look like they were scanned from newspapers. If you look at the nested boxes on the cover (click on image) of his second series of books you can see how attached he is to coloured tables and boxes. If you look closely at the cover you can also see how sloppy it is. I wish Alexander and The Centre would practice in web and book design what they preach for architecture. These ideas are too important (and too close to mysticism) to be tainted by cheap and amateur design.

As Alexander puts it in a strange misspelling about the shift from patterns to sequences,

In fact, both A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way Of Building say that the pattern language is to be used sequentially. In practice, however, this feature dropped out of site, and was not emphasized in use. (From The Origins of Pattern Theory)

Did it drop out of “sight” or out of the Patternlanguage.com “site”?

CCA – Lessons from Bernard Rudofsky

I was in Montreal today and visited the CCA (Centre for Canadian Architecture) which has a show called Lessons from Bernard Rudofsky and one called Clip/Stamp/Fold 2: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X – 197X.

Lessons from Bernard Rudofsky is a thematic retrospective on the architectural critic (and architect) Rudofsky who wrote Architecture Without Architects and other books. The exhibit includes panels from the Architecture Without Architects show at the MoMA in 1964 showing organic architectural forms that evolved without modern architects to design them. He also tackled fashion (making money from a simple series of Bernardo sandals) and everyday life. He was in a tradition of anti-modernist thinking that influenced Christopher Alexander.

Image of cover of Architectural DesignClip/Stamp/Fold has its own web site here. It is an exhibit of the lively “little magazines” of architecture of the 1960s and 70s. The little magazines include student publications, underground magazines, and newsletters. What stands out is the graphic design of these magazines and the way they use the medium to communicate ideas that would never be built. Why, afterall, need architecture be only about what is/can be built?

illegalsigns.ca and other words in the wild

As I think about and show the Dictionary of Words in the Wild Surreal Headline ImageI’ve come across some neat web sites that deal with public textuality in different ways. illegalsigns.ca is dedicated to tracking public advertising and the law in Toronto.

Melissa sent me a link to a great mashup, The London Evening Standard Headline Generator from thesurrealist.co.uk. She also pointed me to a Flickr collection Evening Standard Headline Crisis 2007 which collects images of the headlines displayed on the boards. Looks like the raw material for the Generator.

Scholarly Work in the Humanities and the Evolving Information Environment

John Bradley’s abstract for his talk at this year’s Digital Humanities conference, Thinking Differently About Thinking: Pliny and Scholarship in the Humanities pointed me to one of the better discussions about what we know about how humanities scholars do research. Scholarly Work in the Humanities and the Evolving Information Environment is a CLIR report that is available in HTML and PDF. The thing that stands out for me reading this is that humanists are readers (and writers.) Reading is research and writing is research. As John puts it when he talks about Pliny, the hard thing to pin down is when we shift from Reading/Interpreting to Interpreting/Writing. It is that turn when you think you can respond to what you have read that is what Pliny (and other types of notetaking software like Tinderbox) is supposed to help with. If you have invested the time in taking notes while reading then those notes become useful to writing.

History of Technology Videos

One of the educational virtues of YouTube is that one can now find historic footage about computers like the 1984 Macintosh Commercial by Ridley Scott above or the Apple Shareholder Meeting where Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh. Many of the videos posted are amateur (and bizarre) efforts, but many are interesting as historic documents themselves, like Computer History – A British View from 1969.

I haven’t found any really good lists of links to online video, but here are some starting points:

Has anyone found a good list of what is out there?

WikiScanner

The media has been reporting on a neat tool that Virgil Griffith developed called the WikiScanner which scans the Wikipedia for entries edited by a particular domain. This has allowed people to find that people at the Department of Defence, for example, are hard at work editing the entries for abortion and the pill. The BBC has a story at Wikipedia ‘shows CIA page edits’. Wired has a story, See Who’s Editing Wikipedia – Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign. Wired also has place you can submit interesting Wikipedia Spin Jobs.

All this raises the question of what/who is a legitimate Wikipedia author? Is there something wrong with a company editing its own entry? Isn’t the point of the open enditing to let all the various interests out there negotiate the entries?

I should add that the WikiScanner is an example of the unexpected uses of datamining. It uses information no one expected could be mined and combined to produce interesting results that can be interpreted.