adam in the world

Augusta Atla posted this picture of a Robert Smithson (check, check, check) None-site. I like Smithson very much and the idea of the Non-site:

'The Non-site (and indoor earthwork) is a three dimensional logical picture that is bstract, yet it represents an actual site in NJ (The ine Barrens Plain). It is by this three dimensional metaphor that one site can represent another site which does not resemble it - thus the non-site'
Robert Smithson, 'The Collected Writings', p. 364

But looking at it this time, I got the feeling that I'd be much more interested in the surrounding information and documentation. About the actual place and proces. Though Smithson defines the Non-site as a 'three dimensional' 'metaphor' which 'does not resemble' the place it represents, he has not kept from adding that other layer. And that is the part I suppose I would dwell by the longest. Explore and dig out facts about the site and background. And perhaps create a world of my own. Which is something I don't feel the Non-site allows or invites me to do.

Someone who've done something like this is Christoph Niemann - an illustrator who blogs - Abstract City - for NYT. Here's how he introduces I Lego NY:

'During the cold and dark Berlin winter days, I spend a lot of time with my boys in their room. And as I look at the toys scattered on the floor, my mind inevitably wanders back to New York.'

I think there's quite a bit of Non-site in that. But what he does is more like the detailed documentation hanging next to (and is part of, of course) Smithsons piece. He takes known and less known characteristivs of New York, and describes them in Lego, through different types of representation:

Some are practical and instructional:

Elevations:

Diorama depicting a specific situation

Wellknown phenomenon:

Unlikely juxtapositions of scale and subject:

It's brilliant I think - see the rest. He lights his subject from numerous different angles. Which reminded me of something I read by Edward Tufte recently ... actually I think he said it in his review of the iPhone (worth watching):

'To clarify - add detail'

Of course - clarification might not be the goal exactly, but I like the principle. Tufte is the great guru of infographics, and I've been following some of his different advice lately. His website can be labyrinthic to explore, but is full of interesting stuff focusing on the visualiation of information. Fx. this piece about image annotation, consequenty used with the above pictures.

This artist, Jonathan Harris, writes amazing pieces of software. Software which maps nothing less than the mental state of the world. The results are some very poetic interactive maps. It's done by collecting data from the internet. A concept that has been tried in many variations before. What is special about this stuff is the extremely clever ways these data are treated and visualized. Fx. in We Feel Fine which maps the emotions of the world. It would be more precise to say emotions of the blogosphere perhaps... but anyway - the results seem really quite advanced and poetic, so go and play.

Newer and even more interesting than We Feel Fine is Universe - a modern mytholgy.

But before you start playing and exploring these worlds of his (or us) do yourself the favour of spending 20 min. of precious mindless browsingtime and whatch his speach from the TED conference this year, to get a very prober explanation of how these interactive maps work.

I feel like a map of myself.

(and thank you Luis for bringing my attention back to Ted's YouTube channel :)

A while back I promised a loong in-depth series about the aborigine mapping-koncept of songlines. And I admit it's been so so with the updates on that. But you must understand we're talking serious stuff here. Serious thinking.

So - introduced to the subject by the gentlemen Hank Williams and in particular Tony Bennett - let's continue warming up on the subject and take a detour around urban nomads.

Many people living in cities today doens't let themselves be defined by a limited geographical locality. Rather our identity is created through the daily or weekly routes we move along through the city. From home, to work, to favorite bar, etc... and when we get a new job our route shifts and we see a new city. But we don't plot these routes according to practical consideration alone. They also follow our immediate desires and mood. Through these choices we define ourself and the city. And as the city changes atmosphere throughout the day, year or more - we change our routes. It is not the place that matters but the velocity (uuh - veloCITY) we choose to move with.

Naked City

The Parisian bohème around 1900, the flaneur, drifted strolling through the city. A tempo where the senses are kept open to even the most ephemeral impressions - the scent of a woman, the mood around montmatre at dawn.
The 50'ies International Situationists with Guy Debord and Asger Jorn made it into an artistic strategy - the Dérive. Their Psychogeographic maps are assembled of urban fragments. Areas and places with particular atmospheres, connected by taxi-rides.

Space changes over time. Not just when you build up or tear down. But because the subject that percieves the space always will be moving. Always interpreting. And thus an urban space is is not stable, but vibrating with the people who occupies it. Taking shape of their actions and the memories of other places they bring with them. Actions and memories again shaped by the space where they take place.

Extra bonus - found this along way:
Psychogeographic Guides to Paris and New Orleans

Extra extra bonus - Oh Tony, style and charm and those moves, my new hero... here's three more videos with him:
Interview and duet wit K.D. Lang - such an odd couple making that particular song even more beautiful.
Starring in the Comedy show Saturday Night Live - this really made me crack up.
And finally the young Tony again on the Dean Martin Show - those funky underplayed moves

Ayers Rock a.k.a. Uluru a.k.a. Beethovens 5th + Ulysses

OK... I have to write something about songlines now. It's a term, a concept, I've been circling the past year and a half. Since I was led on to read the aptly named book "the Songlines", written by Bruce Chatwin. Compulsory reading for all architects and planners - when I become president.

Songlines is a virtual map of Australia used by the Aborigenes. That is one way to describe it and my main angle of interest. Imagine a nomadic people. With stoneage technology. Walking the desert for 50.000 years (go home Jesus and your 40 days). They have no practical way to carry around maps of routes they only use once every 50 years. They have to keep all in their minds. They use song for this. Stories, narratives, with a melody.

"In the beginning the earth was an infinite and murky plain, separated from the sky and from the grey salt sea and smothered in a shadowy twilight."

The beginning describes a world, an earth, where all things is allready there. As lumps of matter hidden in the ground. The Ancients. All this potential is released when the sun first feel the urge to be born. It's not an outside force who pulls it up. It's all there allready. All in right time. The Ancients, the Ancestors, awaken and rise in the sun.

"The mud fell from their thighs, like placenta from a baby. Then, like the baby's first cry, each Ancestor opened his mouth and called out, 'I AM!' "... each one "put out his left foot and called out a second name. He put out his right foot and called a third name ... calling all things into being and weaving their names into verse".

Thus the land was not there before it was named. It must exist in the mind first. Not far from a buddhist idea of the world as an illusion. The land is the stories told about it. And vice versa the stories can be read in the landscape - each rock and river and featureless plain of gravel playing their part. Noting the melody as one walk past.

This all points to a number of interesting ideas - which will be discussed in upcoming posts and filed under the brand new label "songlines" :

- The question of identity and belonging.

- Memory of a space through a narrative

- The landscape as a representation of itself.

- Space perceived as a network

... and more - so stay tuned...

Ay ay ay, it can be hard to update. Hard, hard work... but here it is... an update.

The grand MAP OF SCIENCE!!

"As to what the image depicts, it was constructed by sorting roughly 800,000 scientific papers (shown as white dots) into 776 different scientific paradigms (red circular nodes) based on how often the papers were cited together by authors of other papers." LINK to a very nice article about it.

I like it so much when dry and hard science turns out to create the most intriguingly (my favorite word on this blog) beautiful visuals. There is a certain bit of ostranenie - estrangement in it.

The reason it looks like a feather boa is that from every node runs a line of key-words. HERE you'll find a huge version where you can read the words. And HERE is the most beautiful version of it - where you can buy a rather huge print of it too.

The image was constructed by Kevin Boyack and Dick Klavans. On their site mapofscience.com you'll find a simpler interactive version of the map that describes the idea and possible uses very well.

It is not a map of science, in essence. It's a map of text. In this case from a particular database of scientific papers. And therefore 'social science' is the blue worm in the extreme left of the diagram. Political science completely absent. Economics. Law. Philosophy. Litterature, poetry, drama. Could be nice to try the same on those. A virtual mental map of humanity. Which scaled down on the screen of the computer begin to again resemble a written sign.

With these words I'll ride into the night. Celebrating first of all that I got my first paycheck today. And secondly that I work for a city that has been run by social democrats for 100 years and therefore I have the day off tomorrow. I wish you all happy international worker solidarity.

I have a thing for maps at the moment. More to come. This is one of the first maps that names "America". Notice that it is put together of 12 seperate sheets. I particularly enjoy southern Africa and the incredible geometrics used to unfold the globe. And even more on map projections here. Got it from Odden's Bookmarks, The fascinating world of maps and mapping

Sweet Dubi send me this:

"In the morning paper, I can read the weather report as well as the stock quotes. But when I look out of my window I only get a weather update and no stock exchange info. Could someone please fix this bug in my environmental system? Thanks."

DATAFOUNTAIN

Today I've really dug up something for for the young readers who hunger for action, blood and nude people. The visible human project has it all.

Very basically they've taken a (nude) dead body, frozen it and cut it in very, very thin slices. Finally all the slices have been scanned, opening up numerous new possibilities for visualizing the human body. For instance this movie.

For more pictures from the project there's the facinating site with the interesting full name "Introduction to Introduction to Cross-Sectional Anatomy" from Harvard University.

And have a nice day : )

During a little bit of project-relevant research on the net i have I've come across a very nice place on the net, from which you will now all benefit. It is "THE SCHØYEN COLLECTION, a checklist of 650 manuscripts spanning 5000 years" - infact it spans much further.

Below you see the item that led me there. If it indeed is a map, it is quite possibly the oldest in the world. It is a so called cylcon, depicting river Darling with tributaries Warrego and Culgao, New South Wales, Australia, 20,000-3000 BC.

cylcon

The collection has pictures of such categories as: History, Weights & Measures, Architecture And lets not forget Middle Scots Languages.
Link can from now be found in the fancy and rapidly expanding links section to your left (filed under "image banks & other libraries".

In 2003 EASA was held near Kalø in the Danish countryside and Kasper, Mikkel and I had been Hijacked to tutor the Magic Village-workshop. We wanted to have "time" as an underlying theme in our task of making the campsite more "magical" and to introduce this to our participants we made this little installation in advance. An almost classical "still life", "nature morte" - a wonderfully selfcontradictory subject.

lille stilleben 2

The decay is far from "still", though time takes it's toll differently on different matters. It was there for the 14 days EASA lasted, a nice little study in life and death, the passing of time and the longevity of some modern agricultural products and the opposite.

There's two weeks between these pictures. We'd wanted to keep and dry the tablecloth - as an auto-drawing, a recording of the EASA-time which had elapsed. Unfortunately it turned out to be so extremely discusting, especially as a result of the maggots which had eaten the chicken from within, that our hangovers the last day couldn't cope with it.

Also unfortunately - we weren't prepared for how difficult it was for our participants to understand the greatness of our idea. What a shame, but now we know that you can't leave anything to chance (allmost). But we liked it.

More photos can be found here.

Very, very happy monday. Hope you've relaxed and enjoyed the weekend 'cause now it's over. And talking about the hustling and the bustling we've all got waiting this week - here's a fascinating link that should help you get stressed:

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF AIR TRAFFIC OVER THE CONTINENTAL U.S.

I'll be right back

Here's a quite interesting link - a glimpse into a strange world that apparently just goes on and on and on...or, rather, you zoom in and in and in... Have a look, it's nice.

Came across this nice project the other day. They have supplied a number of people in Amsterdam with little GPS transmitters and tracked their movements in the city over a 2 month period. In this way they draw a living, constantly changing, map of the city. Not showing where people could go, or where there's an important historical landmark. Only where people actually are going, or has been, where they spend their time...