Process

Urban Infrastructural Data Visualization

The city breathes information and consumes energy. Visualizing this relationship enhances interaction with the urban environment and is the goal of this project. Specifically, I would like to show how much energy an individual building is consuming at any given time.

I’m interested in exploring this area of research for a couple of reasons. First, I’m aesthetically interested in making visible the invisible qualities of our built environment. Second, as we become increasingly aware of the limitations of our resources and alternatives become necessary, the ability to monitor something like electrical load helps us to adjust behavior accordingly. While still in its early stages, urban data on everything from subway tracking, traffic congestion, open wireless networks, and building information should be made publicly available and easily accessible. This is a burgeoning area of research with titles like Marcus Foth’s Urban Informatics recently published.

The challenge is getting access to this information, often residing behind walls of bureaucracy. The problem is not that it doesn’t exist, but that we’re moving toward a level of openness that can make larger institutions uncomfortable. Some, however, have embraced this opportunity for greater transparency and are seeking ways to make data available. NYU has demonstrated initiative in a recent study of building performance that compares the energy consumption of its residence halls. Still, these graphs aren’t live, nor are they particularly interesting to look at.

What if we could combine urban landscape photography with a network of sensor data—like that being pioneered by Pachube—on a systemic level to make information available to people at any time? This is the direction I’m moving in.

Tone Output

Connected to a speaker, Arduino puts out a weak audio signal unless you use a wave shield or run the audio off your computer. We’re doing the latter through Processing’s Minim library for a media controller group project. I’m interested in the potential of bringing multiple small speakers into an installation environment. Check out Peter Vogel’s work as one example.

How Are We Learning?

That is the question we posed to ourselves in response to a presentation given by Eric Siegel of the New York Hall of Science. His talk revolved around the concept of “informal learning” and the position that museums—particularly science museums—occupy in mediating both play and education. According to Siegel, primary school constitutes only a small fraction of the average lifespan, college even less so. That leaves approximately three quarters of our lives, when sleep is factored out, available for the informal learning process, supported by resources like museums, libraries, the internet, friends, and family.

Our response to his discussion solidified with our own visit to the New York Hall of Science a few days later. While the educational experience remained central to the conversation, we became keenly interested in how this plays out within important social structures—particularly the relationship between a parent and child. As we bounced from exhibit to exhibit, playing and trying to glean knowledge along the way, we also took note of those around us who were similarly drawn together. A father and his sons laughing in front of curved mirrors or a mother and her children bending light with prisms also brought to mind our own experiences of fun and learning. How might we share a similar channel of communication with our classmates?

We decided to invite those individuals who have played such an influential role in each of our lives into the classroom itself.

The following week, as each student entered the room, we provided them an envelope containing a piece of paper and instructed them to pair off in preparation for our presentation. With a brief introduction, we proceeded to model a phone call that our classmates would soon follow. Each student then proceeded to call a close relation—preferably a parent, but if unavailable a spouse or friend would suffice. Once contacted, the student then gave the phone over to his/her partner who asked the parent of the student four prepared questions.

1. Tell me about a time this person learned something from you.

2. What is something you hope for this person to learn?

3. What pushed this person to learn what they’ve learned?

4. What is this person up to at graduate school?

This provided an unusual context to pose somewhat personal questions to a stranger and invite them to share the answers with their son/daughter by way of the partner. Aside from an opportunity to make contact with someone important during a busy time such as grad school, this was intended to be a gift for the student. As the conversation progressed, the partner would write down the parent’s answer on the paper we provided and, in the end, give it to the student, folded into the envelope. The roles were then reversed and the exercise repeated for the other person.

In all, over one hundred classmates participated in the presentation simultaneously. After these phone calls wrapped up and the partners had a chance to share the answers with one another, we projected a video of campfire on a large screen and proceeded to discuss the insights and responses to the situation we had arranged. While many people felt vulnerable, they also appreciated the chance to reconnect from a different angle, even in the midst of an institutional learning environment.

Arduino and Processing, Together At Last

At this point in the semester, the things we’re learning in Physical Computing and the things we’re learning in Introduction to Computational Media are beginning to converge. In this lab, the Processing window is graphing the resistance of a potentiometer connected to my Arduino board. While insignificant in and of itself, this means we’re now combining sensor input from the outside with both gesture and visualization. More to follow . . .

Room Temperature

Here is a basic, self-contained device that registers room temperature with reference to a predetermined ideal. The dial is set to be in the middle at 72° and moves in response to variations between 60° and 85°. This makes the device more of a memory module for ambient air than a proper instrument of measurement, but I was really just interested in utilizing a temperature sensor that did not depend on a screen for the readout.

To do so, I connected a servo motor to my Arduino and mapped the values produced through a thermistor to the aforementioned constraints. Since the servo only rotates 180°, I made a color dial that fades from white to red and white to blue at 90° each. The 9 volt battery provides necessary power and an LED indicates if it’s on or off.

This is my “Stupid Pet Trick” assignment.

Universal Non/Fictions

I.

It is very beneficial—even necessary—for me to have a critical theory class in conjunction with my studio/lab classes at ITP. It gets me outside of the projects I’m working on, floating above them in the realm of theory, gathering information and experiences before returning with a renewed perspective out of which old ideas are refined and new ones are born. It also gets me out of the classroom and into parts of the city I wouldn’t otherwise make time to visit. Just as autumn sets in, I recently found myself on a bench in Central Park, across from the Guggenheim Museum, reading through texts on synaesthesia, color and sound, the development of abstract painting, and Wassily Kandinsky’s position therein. Indeed it was Kandinsky who occasioned our supplanting from the East Village to the Upper East Side to gather around a retrospective of his paintings within the spiraling Frank Lloyd Wright structure.

I’d not been to the Guggenheim before, despite the fact that I moved to New York four years ago this month, and it was good to visit for the first time as a group to engage with the work. Having the class comprised somewhat evenly of people with an art background and those with other backgrounds allows for a freshness that is rare around discussions of modern and contemporary art. So the fifteen-or-so of us congregated around paintings to make observations, responding to Kandinsky’s canvases with emotion, analysis, and playfulness as well. It was interesting to note how the size—and, perhaps, energy—of our group drew other patrons into the discussion. I was reminded of how much people want to experience art together, to make sense of it collectively. Probably seeing people around a particular piece also gives the impression of an importance that shouldn’t be overlooked. Either way, together we traveled through Kandinsky’s development as we sloped our way upward, glancing across the open space to take in colors still fresh in our collective memories.

There is a feeling of pilgrimage about going up the Guggenheim that might not be inappropriate to Kandinsky’s work. The relationship of color and sound he was exploring seems to have lead him through a spiritual awakening. Living through two wars and experiencing displacement during each, Kandinsky was undoubtedly disillusioned by the violence of his time and, like his modern counterparts, sought liberation through the construction of a universal something—in his case, language. You can’t help but appreciate the optimism of such a project. Even though its outcome is more aesthetically emancipatory than socially, Kandinsky offers us possibility, emotional energy, and heightened sensory awareness.

II.

Returning to the scene of the park, a different search for a kind of utopia emerges in the work of Pierre Huyghe. In the fall of 2005, Central Park’s ice skating rink set the stage for a dramatic reinterpretation of an expedition the artist had taken to Antarctica earlier that year. A Journey that wasn’t plays with fiction and reality through the landscape of mediated experience. It is the product of several layers of development including a text laying out the motivation for the journey, the trip itself, its representation in Central Park, a video intertwining the latter two, and subsequent installations that combine multimedia with sculpture and immersive architectural elements. The scope of the project, to say the least, is impressive but what really interests me about Huyghe’s work is his ability to incorporate uncannily seductive forms of representation to draw an observer in while maintaining a complex level of criticality.

Pierre Huyghe, influenced by ideas coming out of the Situationist movement and the writings of Guy Debord, Victor Segalen, and those associated with the Frankfurt School, approaches media with a skeptical embrace. He’s keenly aware of a tendency within global capitalism to incorporate and homogenize peoples in subtle but far-reaching ways. Images and representations, at the level of spectacle, powerfully reinforce ways of thinking and modes of consumption that further the will of the market. By setting up a scenario around Antarctica’s remote shores, Huyghe is addressing the notion of the other, its comprehensibility, and the translation of experience through images. Where Wassily Kandinsky aspired to a universal language, Huyghe builds barriers and questions the possibility of real understanding between people groups.

A Journey that wasn’t helps us to reconsider how contemporary art can provoke serious conversation, challenge existing socio-economic structures, and invite participation in a compelling, if fragmented, narrative of exploration. It is from a position of privilege that Huyghe is able to realize his projects—the conclusions of which I am, at times, in sharp disagreement with—but I appreciate that he is engaged with both politics and aesthetics. As one who values deeply the interfacing of different cultures, sincere communication, and the mutual respect it necessitates, I believe in forces more powerful than the market to draw people together. Hopefully, my own work can be an affirmation of these ideals without failing to recognize the struggle that is its counterpart.

Circles Intersecting

Little by little, programming is making sense to me. Here is the interactive version of last week’s sketch, all of which are archived here.