building_space_with_words is featured on Caught in the Act: Art in Brooklyn, on
Brooklyn Independent Television (Time Warner 56 and Cablevision 69). It was premiered on October 28 at 10 pm.

For the next month, it will repeat every Monday & Wednesday at 2pm & 10pm.

It’s also on their website:

http://www.bricartsmedia.org/community-media/brooklyn-independent-television/caught-in-the-act

In the Wired UK edition from November, Andrew Blum wrote about the relationship between physical and virtual space in cities, how technology - social networking, mobile phones, etc. - are adding a layer to the physical cities. He argues that technology is not killing real communities but reshaping our interactions inside these communities (in organization studies, work on online communities such as open source (O’Mahony and Ferraro, 2007) or my work with Gerry DeSanctis on public online forums show the importance of geography and location for these online communities). It also reminded me a post  discussing an article in the NY Times on local communities blogs and how they ‘enhanced’ the physical.

Andrew Blum quoted Anthony Townsend, an urban planner and forecaster at Silicon Valley’s Institute for the Future who talks about “blended urban reality”: “neither cyberspace nor an urban landscape blanketed with blinking television screens, but the regular old city, albeit socially fused with real-time electronic interactions”. It evokes for me the move in organizational studies on the importance of materiality in organizations (despite the increasing number of “virtual” organizations, “virtual” teams and “virtual” communities). It also highlights the complexity and subtlety of the phenomenon, where usual interaction patterns, communicative practices are blurred and redefined - something we started exploring in building_space_with_words.

Townsend makes a surprising argument that as cities grow bigger, and mega-cities multiply, technology make them manageable: “Cities maybe be much bigger, but the social graph is the same” (Townsend quoted by Blum).
Yet Blum rightly reminds us that even if technology is a tool that helps coping with the city’s chaos and scale, it does not mean that physical space should be not taken into account, on the contrary I would argue.

“Density increases the need for thoughtful public space. For the cities of the future to work, the physical and the virtual have to stick together” - Stick together to allow people to develop a sense of place…

on the relationship between virtual and physical space… when the “nomad” finds a home - “virtual” yet “real”.

“I soon realised that the site would evolve into some parallel living space, some sort of lateral existence in connection with a different world, through the lens of design. (…)”

See “behind the scenes” at  http://www.bazartropicando.com/home_works.html

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

MAGNIFICENT! walls alive with the wonderful inchoate cacophany of the virtual world.

–Sunita

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 

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…

Here’s an interesting piece of work that really points to a lot of what we have been talking about- the materiality of the virtual…

http://www.jeanshin.com/textile.htm

Friday, Aileen and I were talking about the visitor account that is available on a computer at the installation site and how it was changing the affordances of the blog space - in this case increasing propinquity, and decreasing privacy. Interesting to see how a blog which is usually seen as public by essence has in fact degrees of privacy… Interesting also to increase propinquity (”traffic”) by adding an access in a physical location - as if the installation was becoming an extension of the blog, a door to its conversation space.

This blog was conceived as a semi-public space with a certain number of contributors who can write posts, while others can only post comments. We decided to create this account for visitors to interact with the maze and “build the space with their words” and suddenly the space changed with a diversity of potential authors and discursive practices - shorter messages, some “chat” style on the day of the opening night (the maze had then become a giant bulleting board), and others related to the experience of the space (the latests posts are more of this type).

One person mentioned to us if we were not willing to have these visitors’ posts posted on another page; he was worried that it might kill the discussion between the original contributors. We thought of it but Aileen and I agreed that it was part of the experiment and that it would be great if visitors read some of the posts and posted comments, and that it will be also great if the contributors to the blog kept posting while the installation (and the blog consequently) is open to the public.

The reading of the visitors’ posts is also a great source of learning. To see how people interpret our work and what it evokes to them - in some cases, their views of space. One visitor added the tag “body”: it was interesting that despite many of the discussions we had on this blog about materiality (particularly on how virtual was not synonym to immaterial), about sensory experiences, this tag had not been created.

Cassim  Shepard wrote about maps on the Urban Omnibus yesterday: 

” The map provides one of the principal governing metaphors for how we organize and navigate information. According to New York Times technology reporter John Markoff,

With the dominance of the cellphone, a new metaphor is emerging for how we organize, find and use information. New in one sense, that is. It is also as ancient as humanity itself. That metaphor is the map… As this metaphor takes over, it will change the way we behave, the way we think and the way we find our way around new neighborhoods.

Understanding where we are in the world usually involves a singular conception of location. Phrases like “from point A to point B” reflect the common view: you are either here or there. And if you are in between, you are at a single point in between. Mapping fields of action is far more complex – activity is zonal, concentrations are unequal – and the two together often lead to muddy and busy if not downright confusing results. “

I could not help thinking of the discussions on this blog and how one might be involved in several conversations online (through email, chat, facebook, posting on a blog etc.) and thus involved in many different “spaces” while sitting at “point A” - whether it’s your home, a coffee shop, your office or an airport. This notion of space and geography is indeed challenged by the current development of the technology…

As noted by Cassim “One of the many gaps in the existing literature that STEW-MAP seeks to redress is that notion that no two bodies occupy the same space. Common sense tells us otherwise, yet the most popular and accessible forms of geographic information (note the google map on your right) still make it easier to drop a pin than to draw a polygon. ”

Questions discussed with Yasmine Abbas   on physical, digital and mental mobility: e.g. one can be physically in a place but longing for another place, or Turkle’s work on people who feel that they are more present to the MUDs they are involved in than to the physical space in which they sit while playing, are relevant to these issues.

There is also a second of issues highlighted by Cassim linked to our definition of the geography of the city (cf. Latour’s book on Paris Invisible): there is the level of the streets but there are many other layers, spatial but also of practices involved in the making of the city that we are often not aware of.