Hi,

just read an interesting article, My Living Room, in the Urban Omnibus by James Reeves, writer and designer.

James Reeves describes his perception of New York as he has just moved to Helsinski and that leads him to reflect of what makes him feel comfortable in New York and what is different in Helsinki. He highlights how cities, places in general (and our perceptions of it) emerge from structures, material dimensions (size of the blocks, street labels, stoops vs. court yards, etc.) but also social affordances - which includes mores and practices: cheap food, stores open all night long, etc. in NY which allows a certain life style and a certain type of interactions, and defines your personal space in a different way - your apartment is not the walls of the space you rent, but it extends out in the street. It reminded me my friend John Klima who always told me that “the city was his kitchen”.

Reeves notes:

“There are probably just as many people who prefer a city like Helsinki over New York, so perhaps it’s easier to tackle the question from another direction: is a personal connection to one’s environment simply a function of time and familiarity, or is it possible to arrive in a new city and, after taking a look at its buildings and establishments, immediately have a gut feeling that says, “Yes, this feels good. I could get comfortable here”? ”

I guess this article also touches me as I’m moving soon from NY after 3 1/2 years and my walks through Brooklyn and Manhattan take another dimension. I could empathize with his feelings as he’s reflecting on the places he knows, his routines as I feel the same when I go down Smith Street in the morning, stop by at Victory to get my coffee, or bike up to Prospect Park. Like Reeves I feel like I might not have taken enough photos and I do take some. My next stop is not Helsinski, but London - more exciting than Helsinksi many might say. I’ll tell you more in a couple of months.

I guess these issues can also be linked to the different ways people experience online spaces. We had lunch with two friends yesterday and we were discussing social networking platforms and other online tools. Two of us did not feel comfortable with facebooks and the type of interactions it supported but we loved skype which we perceived as a one-on-one communication tool which allowed us both fast (”peripheral” in some ways in the sense of “peripheral vision”)  and long (in-depth) interactions with people we know and like… More to be discussed here.

al

I’ve just read on the urban omnibus about a project at the intersection of space and discourse: how one will tag buildings the same way one tags posts, pictures or videos online? … when the “online” practice moves to the physical world…

Cassim Shepard writes “On the web, we tag images, or describe them with language elements, for purposes of communal organization, identification, sharing. But the communal part of that practice is, by nature, limited to the common experience of those who understand the chosen label. In architecture, it is no different: parallel vocabularies often do not intersect. Much of the communication impasse between the different stakeholders in physical design processes is attributable to the narrowness of these vocabularies. And the exasperation different user groups feel when “their” language is misunderstood or unheeded is equal on all sides.”

An attempt for building a shared vocabulary, a common interpretation but that presupposes that the definitions of the tags (the labels) are understood and shared… I would argue that there is never a complete shared understanding and that this shared understanding is constantly renegotiated and in a sense that negotiation process can take place during the physical design process while online we might end up following a complete path that the one we thought we would…

To explore these differences in interpretations, “architect and information designer Kadambari Baxi has started a game of tag. She has chosen a series of recently completed, visually striking buildings and invited architects, an architecture writer and passersby to assign them a list of word associations that correspond to the built project.” The Urban omnibus offers you to play tag with 3 photos on their website.

al

Austin just sent me a very nice story about robots, people and space in New York city. Kacie wrote:”In New York, we are very occupied with getting from one place to another. I wondered: could a human-like object traverse sidewalks and streets along with us, and in so doing, create a narrative about our relationship to space and our willingness to interact with what we find in it? More importantly, how could our actions be seen within a larger context of human connection that emerges from the complexity of the city itself? To answer these questions, I built robots.”Read the rest of the story and/ or watch video to know what happened to the Tweenbots. I think it raises interesting issues about space and interactions…http://www.tweenbots.com/

Was talking the other day with Michael – Dub Studios principal – about his work on distributed high schools. The idea of distributed spaces reminds me / fits with the meta-architecture of storage spaces in the making and observed when studying neo-nomads (neo-nomads collect spaces). Sure these spaces are networked… what fundamentally changes the architecture of buildings though, is the fact that with technologies, distributed spaces can happen / be managed. So while blogger congregated to formulate and shape BSWW, I can’t help thinking of another movement… simultaneous happenings in various location.

During the fall, Anne-Laure invited me to become a member of this blog. I agreed. And life was as complex as ever, and I did not get around to thinking about this until flying to California (I live in Connecticut) for Thanksgiving. I printed out the postings and began working through them from the start. Very thought-provoking. Lots of notes. Not enough time. So I continued the effort over Christmas, with additional posts of course. More thoughts. In January I explained the situation to Anne-Laure who encouraged me to make a contribution. And just about the point that I was going to post, I noticed that all I had been looking at were the posts, and none of the comments. Well, that stopped me cold. As did work, and the pressures of life. I had to miss the opening of the installation, and feared that I would miss the whole thing.

So finally, I set aside a day - this Monday -, and Lynne (my wife) and I headed into “The City” to have lunch with Anne-Laure and experience the installation before it was only a memory. And so I found myself walking into the space. And enjoying it immensely.

And then it occurred to me that I had not been worried about entering the space even though much had already gone on there and I was clearly not “up to speed.” But in contrast, I had been seriously blocked about just entering the blog without having “done my homework” - reading what had gone before. What was the difference?

Possibly it was the fact that my entry into the installation was understood (by me, and the culture I live in) to not carry any expectation that I know what was happening. Walk into a space, and it is assumed that you will be able to join in even if it takes some effort to feel out the scene, align with what’s happening, and then engage. And this expectation is based on the reality that the hjstory of the preceding activity has not been is captured and made available by the space. In contrast, all that has gone before in a blog is available. And so feeling out, and aligning before engaging is a much taller task.

A second reason that when I walked into the installation, I could see who I was engaging, I could evolve my interactions with them with awareness of the effect that I was having. I could limit my interaction to one or a few at a time, I could make “turns at talk” suit the immediate and local situation and correspondents; I could practice “recipient design.”  In contrast, in the blog, Without reading everything, or at least a lot, I could not know who my recipients were. Indeed, with lurkers, even reading would not help. I was flying blind, interacting without any sense of the “audience” and their purpose.

Thirdly, in the installation I knew why I was there. I wanted to see the embodiment of a word-based virtual space.  I was aware of the difficulties and a-priori non-alignments of the installation space and the virtual words-space, and was there to experience the installation as a provocation around the metaphor of space. But with the blog, I was not so sure why I was there - other than that Anne-Laure had invited me. And this was less about the subject matter - it was the same as the installation - and more about the genre. For in truth, as all the above shows, I am not at all competent in the the dance that is participating in blogs.

So my opening thought is this: spaces built with words have accessible history, and that can be understood by newbies to imply something very different that is understood by experienced bloggers - namely, that you are responsible for everything that is there. Instead, Anne-Laure tells me that you have already discussed the sense that a blog is (like) a party - A Blog Party - something that you can enter into and accelerate into. It seems like an excellent metaphor.

And so here am I, late to the party, and looking to accelerate into whatever is happening.

Thanks to one of my students,  I read this recent NY Time article reviewing a book by Andrew Lih, The Wikipedian Revolution and compares Wikepedia to a city (referring also to the History in the City by Lewis Mumford):

“[…] Like a city, Wikipedia is greater than the sum of its parts; for example, the random encounters there are often more compelling than the articles themselves. The search for information resembles a walk through an overbuilt quarter of an ancient capital. You circle around topics on a path that appears to be shifting. Ultimately the journey ends and you are not sure how you got there.Wikipedia articles can send you down unlikely alleyways in two ways. First, there are links that direct you to the same article in another language, a trippy experience that sheds light on a culture. Spend time in German Wikipedia, and you find jazz musicians likeThelonious Monk with articles far longer than those written in their own language; you may also come upon odd areas of deep interest, like “pecherei,” the extraction of resin from trees — no English equivalent provided — and 15 different tools needed for the job.Second, at the bottom of most articles, there are the categories — impromptu neighborhoods, or perhaps civic organizations, that bind together the virtual encyclopedia. […] 

Mumford elaborates: “Even before the city is a place of fixed residence, it begins as a meeting place to which people periodically return: the magnet comes before the container, and this ability to attract nonresidents to it for intercourse and spiritual stimulus no less than trade remains one of the essential criteria of the city, a witness to its essential dynamism, as opposed to the more fixed and indrawn form of the village, hostile to the outsider.”The marvel of Wikipedia — and cities — is that all the intercourse and spiritual stimulus don’t make living there impossible. Rather, they are exactly what makes living there possible.  […]”

Of course I found the comparison between the virtual space of Wikipedia and the physical space of a city a compelling comparison. I also found interesting the comments on the role of social practices (trust, behavior, etc.) which once again highlights the discussion we had about the intertwining between social and physical spaces. Last, I could not be insensitive to the description of the journey through Wikipedia similar to a journey through a maze!

al

Really happy to have made it to the centre of the maze to experience BSWW. The space that has been built is a beautiful and comfortable space. With a wonderful soundtrack too. Al and Aileen, it’s fantastic milena

Published a few days ago in the NY Times (and thanks to Yasmine’s blog), there was an article about Grand Central the new Google application:It was intended to solve the headaches of having more than one phone number (home, work, cellphone and so on): Having to check multiple answering machines. Missing calls when people try to reach you on your cell when you’re at home (or the other way around). Sending around e-mail at work that says, “On Thursday from 5 to 8:30, I’ll be on my cell; for the rest of the weekend, call me at home.” And having to change phone numbers when you switched jobs or cities. Many notions come to mind: mobility, neo-nomads, technology, digital cities, but also space and the intermingling of physical and virtual space. I remember the time where you would never ask someone when calling her “where are you?” as the number you dialed told you where the person was - at home, in the office, at X’s house. The cell phone changed the practice and the usual “Hi, how are you?” became “Hi, where are you?”. You still knew where the person was if you were calling her on a land line and she picked up the phone. Grand Central promises to blurry the frontiers between physical and digital even more by eliminating any clues of location.  al 

Reading the comments from visitors about their experience as they interact and construct the space, I remembered a reference that Yasmine sent me a while ago:

“Some time ago I came across the work of Raphael Lozano-Hemmer, the Vectorial Elevation, Relational Architecture 4 experiment: users could log in and change via the web the lighting configuration of the plaza, hence the space in which people evolved.”

On the installation website, one can read:

Vectorial Elevation was an interactive artwork that allowed participants to transform the sky over Dublin, Ireland. Using a three-dimensional interface, this web site let you design huge light sculptures with 22 robotic searchlights located on and around O’Connell Street. A web page was made for each participant with photos of their design from four cameras located around the city. The piece was live from April 22 to May 3, 2004 to celebrate the expansion of the European Union, in that time over half a million unique visitors from 100 countries reached this site.

Check the video at: http://www4.alzado.net/dublinvid.html

a similar idea of offering people the possibility to interact and construct the space (through lights / through discourse)… The door open was bigger as any one with an access to the website, wherever her/his geographical location, could interact with the space… In our case, the (”virtual”) door is physically located: on the second floor of the Wunsh building…  Comments are open to all but they are not projected on the maze (for technical reasons…).

al

I could relate something from the movie “The Matrix”. A virtual world and how things happens inside. I liked it and interested in research on this new idea on depicting virtual interactions in to physical world…I will do some more analysis and come some other time to understand in detail and see how ideas live in this virtual world…