The Mixed-Reality City

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New New Topographics - Michael Waldrep

New New Topographics

John Cage - Which, if I understand it at all, has been a function of twentieth century art- to open our eyes….Just seeing what there was to see.

22nd & Mission, San Francisco, CA

          So much of the debate around Google Street View is concerned with privacy: even when the law does not require it, Google has taken to blurring out faces and in Germany even entire buildings. Google’s business practices in general have engendered suspicion, even while people continue (in some cases begrudgingly) to use their systems.

            But we would be foolish not to acknowledge the massive work that the company has assembled. 5 million miles have been photographed in 50 different countries. There is bias in the work—as there is in any photograph—but I would argue that there is less bias than most. Because production is automated, there is no one (artist or otherwise) composing and framing individual photographs, choosing which moment to capture or how best to expose it. The work is produced within a structure—both ideologically and physically—and the result is a proprietary collection of photographs taken on sunny days from about 8 feet above the middle of the lane. The automatic production, like a Taylorist work of art, leads to such standardization that any strangeness captured by chance is the subject of internet fascination.

8776 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA

            Without ignoring Google’s authorial role or denying the particularity of the project, we can still acknowledge it as one of the most complete collections of streetscape photographs ever assembled. Just as Ed Ruscha’s book Every Building on the Sunset Strip, self-published in 1966, had a particular (and closed) system of capturing and representing that West Hollywood street, looking at it now gives us a useful impression of how that space looked and felt on an average day that year. After all, neither his work nor that of Google is concerned with Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment. Instead, they capture longer periods of time; Street View is (as of yet) a relic of the late 2010’s, as today we might read a work like Ruscha’s as a slice of the generalized “60’s.”

Second Street and Fourth Avenue, Ashland, WI

            The New Topographics exhibition at the George Eastman Center in 1975 was a landmark for American photography, one where 9 young photographers shared their contemporary landscapes. They photographed in black and white (save for Stephen Shore) and attempted to capture the world around them in Henry Wessel’s words as “the things photographed existed in the world.” Lewis Baltz, who also exhibited, hoped “that [their] photographs are sterile, that there’s no emotional content.” Their works were affective, or must have touched a nerve, as the show resonated powerfully with audiences and critics; the whole of the exhibition was purchased by the Eastman House, and is still shown, complete, internationally.

Gower and DeLongpre, Los Angeles, CA           

If these photos are either emotionally or factually insightful, and can be so easily rephotographed (to borrow from another 70’s photographic movement) using Street View, then there must be something powerful within Google’s material.

Church and Worth, New York, NY

            Even taking as subject those photographs that are powerful or beautiful in their own right, an illustration of a lapse in time may be enough to utterly reconfigure our understanding of the photograph.

West Side Highway, New York, NY    

        Or of a single morning.

6th and Western, Los Angeles, CA

            Or of a small-scale war on Western Avenue in Los Angeles. We can collapse years in a single image; it forms a bi-stable impression of a place through time that tells a story of reconstruction, of a Korean-American community’s persistence in the face of struggle.

            We are forced to grasp at an unencumbered image of the city that Giacomo Balla depicted in a moment of crisis; paintings are charged with the emotion and intellect of the artist, where photographs are among the ultimate works of “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Benjamin’s sense. Street View, as an assemblage, will allow future scholars of the Occupy movement to image Downtown Oakland in that era, if not that critical moment. 

16th and Telegraph, Oakland, CA

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Harvard Square Veritas

     Why are the realities mixed? Why do people perceive public spaces differently?

    On one hand, the nature features possessed by the public space provide raw material for people to create the mixture. On the other hand, the different background and previous experience people carry around with them offer the initial power to mix. For a book worm, the books inside the bookstore windows are door to paradise, while for a tree, they are dead bodies of their peers and the window is a grave yard. For tourists, the signage stores are different places to meet, while for typeface designers they may be cases to learn from. There are always more than one way to use and describe the same thing, and more than one thing to fit into the same description. With different aspects exemplified, references built and various interpretations made, the mille-feuilles of public space is created, and people are stuck within one or several particular layers.

    The deciphering of the mixture often happened naturally and silently as the images of the space caught by people’s eyes and then melt into their minds with other existing fragments experience and memory. By creating our own stories and listening to those of the others, an opportunity is opened up to better understand both the space that physically keeps the mixture and people that mentally create and decipher it. No matter how irrelevant it seems for the other people, each interpretation inspired by the physical world is a corner of the iceberg “Veritas”. The stories leave hints and reveal the mental world of the storytellers. The interpretations of physical realm become bridges between the diverse layers of the space as well as people’s mental world.

    In early experiments before the final project, I focused on the signage of stores around Harvard Square, trying to trace back the history and story behind the icons and typefaces. I also tried to research the content of Harvard different school shields. I had expected some coherence of context or value behind the designs to produce the most persuasive and pertinent visual representation of the institution. However, it turned out that design is not natural science with a chain along which you can deduce from the origin till the other end.

The subjective understanding and selection have great impact on final products. The dynamic randomness caught my interests and I wanted to know how far the boundary and how different people could be while perceiving the same but mixed reality. So for the final project, I decided to use images collected images around Harvard Square and remixed them with my own understanding and interpretation to create a set of cards to make a storytelling game based on the board game “Dixit”.

There will be 4-6 players. Each player has a same number of cards (4-5). One player is the storyteller for the turn. He looks at the cards in his hand, makes up a sentence triggered by the content of one card, and then say it to other players. The other players select amongst their own cards the one that best matches the sentence made up by the storyteller. Then, each of them gives their selected card to the storyteller, without showing it to the others. The storyteller shuffles his card with all the received cards. He then randomly places them face up on the table. The goal of the other players is to find which image is from the storyteller amongst the displayed ones. Each player secretly votes for the card that he believes belongs to the storyteller. Those who are correct will get credit, and whose card are mistaken as the storyteller’s will also get credits. As for the storyteller, he will get credit unless everybody or nobody is correct. This will prevent the storyteller to make a sentence too obvious, too vague or entirely irrelevant for the card.

      By inviting people to take part in deciphering the mixed realities, I hoped to explore the boundary of both the physical and mental world, and offer a more interactive and engaging way for people to share memories, know the multiple layer of both the physical and mental world, and know each other, especially for new friends and blind date. The cards can also be used as postcards particularly for Harvard Square. People’s preference of a particular card is a sign of resonating and will represent their perception of the space, and convey the perception by sending it to others.

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OPEN UPHAMS / Submitted by Beth Lundell Garver.

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Haunted Public Space

Public space is often used as a platform for the expression of sentiment. Often this sentiment becomes synonymous with the identity of that place for a period of time, effectively turning it into a reservoir for those feelings and ideas. An extreme example is Tiananmen Square where 23 years later there are still candlelight vigils held for the victims of the massacre despite the Chinese government attempting to play down the events of that terrible day.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/05/world/asia/anniversary-of-tiananmen-crackdown-echos-through-shanghai-market.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

As the story of Tiananmen Square has propagated throughout media and recorded history, it has since become an international symbol for public righteousness, authoritarian oppression and the adversarial relationship between the two.

Looking at public space through this lens of sentiment may give us a way to see the roots of public space as it is practiced. Sentiment is the reason we do anything in the public realm: it embodies our aspiration, fear, anger, excitement and love. It drives us to publicly do things together (or alone), to demand change in our world, to add to our world or to enjoy our world for exactly what it is. Sharing sentiment overtly (ex: protesting) and ambiently (ex: public displays of affection – Tom Wolfe wrote an excellent essay on this in “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby”) justifies the existence of public space in terms of shared civic experience.

So what happens if we treat public space as a reservoir for sentiment in literal terms? Would the identity of that public space become more concrete? Would it become more nuanced? Would it ebb and flow over time like tides?

Michel De Certeauwrites “There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits there in silence, spirits one can ‘invoke’ or not. Haunted places are the only ones people can live in – and this inverts the schema of the Panopticon.”

That is the direction of this experiment – to treat public space as a reservoir for sentiment, to treat it as though it were haunted by that sentiment. The site for this experiment lies in the newly redeveloped Harvard Plaza. The means for this experiment lie in sound sculpture.

Because the site is newly defined in its character and experience, the shared experiences and sentiments associated with it are yet to be clearly defined. This makes it a strong candidate for such an experiment.

 The use of sound allows participants to leave notions of sentiment in the form of spoken “wishes” (wishes were selected because of their embodiment of sentiment, both civic and personal, both aspirational and vulnerable, and because of the symbolic physical impact that they leave on public space – often in the form of coins in fountains or parts of statues worn away).  When a participant leaves a wish at the sound sculpture, they are given the experience of the space around them being defined by sound: ambient voices stating wishes rise on one side of the space surrounding them, climax with a single voice all around them stating its owners wish in total clarity, and then ambient voices fade away on the other side of the space. The voice that is fed back to the participant in full clarity is the voice that furthest away from the participant in terms of time – this voice is continually redefined, since the number of voices stored is finite and continually cycling.

The space surrounding the participant becomes a wishing well of sorts. The latest version of these sound spaces surround newly defined seating areas in the plaza – the idea was to work off of the plaza's architecture and patterns of use specific to social interaction or prolonged occupation.

For the simulation of the experience that this sculpture would give, a Max/MSP composition was produced that used anecdotal wishes gathered from plaza occupants. Speakers were placed around the room used for the simulation so that space could be defined by sound.

Feedback for the project was wonderfully useful. Possibilities of the sculpture as an instrument or a spatial instrument were introduced, as were notions of the sculptures’ functional transparency and its implications for interaction. The relationship between space and sentiment was questioned. Of course physical model of interaction needs to be developed further as well.

I’m looking forward to exploring the direction and possibilities of this project over the summer.

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IF YOU HEAR SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING.

Where are the listening devices along the train track?   Are they mechanisms for surveillance?  For research?  For community action?

How can we encourage systems of listening to urban sounds?  How can we position a system of listening on the MBTA Red Line?

The final presentation of research for Mixed Reality City was a test/performance/proposal of portable listening headsets, built for users to monitor the MBTA Red Line train sound.  The headsets, and the surrounding advertising campaign, extend the Homeland Security ‘If You See Something, Say Something’ campaign, first designed for the MTA in New York.

The headsets are designed based on early 20th century, pre-radar military systems, designed to pick-up the incoming sounds of aircraft.  Simple paper and cardboard models were created to produce and amplify the listening practices first proposed by these military ears.

“As Jordan Crandall points out, the history of surveillant/detecting technology began with the remote sensing of enemy movements. “Its tradition is one of precise locational and temporal specificity,” but modern discourses have viewed “virtuality in terms of delocalization and disembodiment” (Crandall 2005). Frances Dyson observes that with the advent of more personal electronics, cyberspace is changing “from an interactive and collective enterprise to an array of intimate gadgets worn on the body or deployed in public space that engage or track the individual rather than unite the electronic community” (Dyson 2005:89).  Technology and networked connectivity have become both personalized/local and disbursed. The remote tracking computers of old were stationary and detected things generally “out there,” but today surveillance can be personal. You can be tracked through the Web, and the Web is wherever you are.” (Megan Gordon-Gilmore, http://ue.ucdavis.edu/explorations/2008/listening.pdf)

Earlier in the semester, in order to produce an archive of MBTA sound, I began building an audio archive of MBTA travel and analyzing the data using Spek, an “Acoustic Spectrum Analyzer” to visually map the train’s spectrogram. This spectrogram represents MBTA acoustic space in visual terms:

In the experiment for week three, I mobilized this archive of audio recordings to move beyond a data assessment of the material collected into public space using Wikipedia.  Through an account titled MBTA Sound Recordings, I edited the MBTA pages for all Red Line stops from Ashmont to Alewife. Sixteen different audio files were placed on the sixteen Wikipedia pages from Ashmont to Alewife, and another generic Red Line example sound was placed on the MBTA Red Line master page.

The final project was framed through the terms of surveillance, both to encourage new systems of listening and to consider forms of listening as political action. The headsets demonstrated in class were both acoustic instruments, props, and costumes for encouraging localization / embodiment of surveillance technology and to unite community in an effort to consider acoustic space in the city.

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100 Google Images of North Korea

This project is an attempt to visualize South Koreans’ notion of North Korea and North Korean defectors in South Korea. North Koreans have no access to the Internet due to the government’s strict control over disseminated information. They get only government information; no individual citizens can provide anything to counter the government. Furthermore, for more than half a century, South Koreans have been indoctrinated through anticommunist education and have invented an image of North Korea as a county lacking in substance. As communication technologies have developed, more accessible information has allowed people in South Korea to begin forming different points of view about North Korea. But this illusion-making process is still operating, even online. Repeated infusion of distorted images reproduces and reinforces a stereotype of North Korea and North Korean defectors. This project reveals South Koreans’ biased notion of North Korea by contrasting different Google image search results from various search words in both English and Korean.

The top-ranked 100 Google image search results are used as a source of input that has influenced South Koreans’ perception Google search results are products of mass participation that reflect the notion that already exists, but the results also reproduce and reinforce, implicitly or explicitly, the formation of social consciousness. The number 100 is a symbolic number of images are deemed as a sample that represents the infinite number of online images. Also, it enables us to make a clear comparison by allowing easy quantitative analysis. For instance, 15 images among the 100 implies that that theme of images comprises 15% of our notion of North Korea.

I brought intangible online images into tangible forms of representation by printing them and cutting out important parts by hand. The rough edges of the pieces reveal the trace of manual work, thereby reinforcing their tangible substance. By exhibiting the images in a physical form, I intended to make people encounter the images more critically. At the level of personal experience, holding, analyzing and cutting the images made me contemplate the meaning of each image. Also, the process of categorizing the cutout pieces and organizing them for display allowed me to structure the images and to conceptualize the ideas. This process gave me a more objective point of view than my preconceived notion of North Korea, and it helped me detach from an emotional response.

By cutting out the dominant components from the image, those parts are cut off from their detailed context so that the message of the image is simplified, aiding way we receive the connotative messages of the images. These cutout pieces are organized in categories to show the differences between search terms. Categories were determined by the dominance of the theme, the difference of the implications the images conveyed, and the uniqueness of a certain theme. Images categorized into a theme convey collective messages that have unique connotations from one another. People will be able to intuitively perceive the differences, including multiple layers of the messages for which words afford no explanation.

The comparisons of images reveal South Koreans’ self-centered point of view in which they deem themselves to be benevolent helpers who are affluent and powerful. From this prominent point of view, South Koreans label North Koreans as helpless, poor citizens and view North Korean defectors as inferior members of society who were rescued by South Korea. To break with this self-centered position, it is important that South Koreans recognize how distorted this notion is. To disseminate the results of these comparisons, I made leaflets that can be released in both physical and virtual space to inform people about my analysis.

The form of a propaganda leaflet, which has been used by both Koreas to spread their ideologies, is used as a metaphor for the effects of online images on the formation of social subconsciousness. The mechanism of propaganda bombing is a way to disseminate hearsay information. The purpose of the propaganda bombing is to instill doubts in a person about the opponent’s regime or to insinuate themselves into a person’s favor, so that it embeds itself in people’s daily lives as an ordinary experience. In that sense, it is similar to the way Google images exert influence on viewers.

As an onsite performance that symbolizes the dissemination of images in virtual space, I blew counter indoctrination leaflets in the classroom at the end of my presentation. To finish my work, reaching an audience specifically in South Korea, I have to return to online space to propagate my analysis of the results of my work that reveals how South Koreans’ notion of North Korea is distorted.

- Joungwon Lee

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Google Filter

Google Filter commenced in filming a large-scale LED advertising screen in an effort to understand the nature of the color changes emitted from moving light images. I sampled film stills from the footage at points where color differentiation was at its most acute, but my systematic approach of addressing the same point within each still did not produce compelling results. The differences in color throughout various structures within the composition existed in dynamic interplay with one another, and one point was not a measure of the entire effect. Therefore I began submitting the images to Google’s ‘search by image’ function, and it was at this point that I was able to understand the change in color tone as the screen progressed over time, as well as the ratio of one color to another within a single frame. 

This, of course, is a description of color from the point of view of a computer algorithm. I am intrigued by the images output by Google – often they capture nuances that belie the work of the computer at hand, occasionally it produces a whole set of equivalents that faithfully capture the essence of my input without any similarity of content. 

‘Cambridge’, on the website, is an example of a Google formulation: an algorithmically contrived interpretation of a filmed city walk, whereby a frame selected every ten seconds is input to image-search, resulting in myriad variations of a given color scheme, form pattern, or shape association reference.

The most recent addition to the project is the inclusion of Google’s word search mechanism, thus adding a verbal component to the imagery if the original material allows. As I transcribe into the search engine, I record word structures that are compelling in their implicit ubiquity – they would not have been sourced had they not been previously searched. By lending Google the autonomy of ‘choosing’ images and sentence fragments, the engine begins to formulate a distinct narrative.

 To assert the symbiotic value of image and verse it has been important to select from conventionally produced filmic works that incorporate both mediums. The decisions that were made in creating the qualitative product of a film are important in garnering robust output imagery, and the contrived narratives I sample are deliberately framed, colored, and imagined. I have employed perfume advertisements – Chanel No. 5 (1983), Thierry Mugler Angel (1993), L’Eau D’Issey (2011) – because they are short, possess several different shots or scenes, are artfully administered, have dialogue, and are reflective of a niche society.

To communicate that which is intangible has been the objective of perfume commercials through the decades. Brands invest a significant portion of their advertising allowances to deploy exaggerated imagery and melodramatic narrative that is often articulated through voices and phrases which might ring despotic in their fervent promotion of product.

Because it is impossible to convey scent through audio-visual media, the content of the films become an essential visualization of the brands’ intended perceived message: the smell has become the brand. These short films – often between thirty seconds and one minute – are highly controlled productions. The frame of a still, the distribution of light, and the selection of colors present within an image are specially designed to reinforce the product and brand at hand. The results, then, are direct reflections of the meticulously researched desires of the contemporary culture at hand.

I present a selection of commercials representing well-known perfumes with the intention of exploring their visual and semantic data through the by-products of Google search filters. By distilling frames and linguistics into separate blocks of information, the aggregate elements that define a cultural index can be precisely represented. The subsequent recombination of the meta-data sets allows for discordant and diverse reinterpretation.

Ultimately I found the visual documentation of the city to produce the most fruitful rendition of Google Filter. I plan to continue documenting cities in this format, and revisit selected images over time to measure differences in Google’s output as their image database constantly changes – perhaps the project can unravel as a small study of the evolution of the search engine itself.

www.google-filter.biz

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Visualizing Tweets Spatially

Ashley Mendelsohn

We understand space through narrative. Today, social media platforms like twitter allow large communities access to personal narratives. This phenomena results in fragmented and ever-evolving collective perceptions about place.  Spatial proximity can now be almost the same as proximity in time. Sites and events that once needed to be physically attended to be experienced can be experienced in real time virtually.  While formulating this research agenda, I considered analyzing the Boston Marathon as a case study. Following the bombings, I decided to continue with the investigation - analyzing the relationship between the events of April 15th and the site itself. I was particularly interested in how events shapes perception of space. The Boston Marathon, as an event in itself, influences the way that attendees view the city. Specifically, the use of roads and the threshold of the finish line - which is a permanent fixture in the city. The bombings undoubtably had a tremendous effect on not only those who attended and participated in the marathon, but also people across the world. The role of social media and it's relationship to both the bombing as an event and the site surrounding the finish line became the driving force of this investigation. 

The current stage of this project focuses specifically on visualizing tweets that refer to spatial landmarks at the site of the finish line. The following animation breaks the site into spatial landmarks (buildings, roads, and the finish line) and scales each element individually to reflect the number of times each respective landmark was referred to in tweets on specific days. 

visualizing tweets spatially from adm37 on Vimeo.

It was clear before creating the animation that the number of tweets would increase drastically on the date of the bombing. However, the specific spatial breakdown of those tweets was unexpected. The result of this case study not only directly relates to specific events that occur on site, but also the general perspective of landmarks within the site. Specifically small roads that perhaps lacked a collective narrative. 

The project can evolve in a range of ways. The extent and influence of unexpected events is a topic that I am personally interested in. Therefore, potentially extending this form of analysis to a range of large-scale events, ranging from hurricane Sandy to some of the work of Artichoke or Red Moon Theatre, would be interesting. This method of documenting could also be employed on a large city scale. I'm looking forward to pushing the project further. 

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South Station Tracking

Project website: http://southstationtracking.tumblr.com/

Below are some texts quoted from Dan Hill’s essay “The Street as a Platform”.  ————————————————————­—————————- The way the street feels may soon be defined by what cannot be seen with the naked eye. Imagine film of a normal street right now, a relatively busy crossroads at 9AM taken from a vantage point high above the street, looking down at an angle as if from a CCTV camera. We can see several buildings, a dozen cars, and quite a few people, pavements dotted with street furniture. Freeze the frame, and scrub the film backwards and forwards a little, observing the physical activity on the street. But what can’t we see? We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic. This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street. ————————————————————­—————————- My purpose of the project is to extend people’s experience of public space to somewhere “hidden under the surface of the space”. For example the space of digital information lying underneath the physical world. There is a physical body of you in this physical space. But behind the surface of physical world several different identities of you may exist. For example, while your smart phone is connecting with a kind of public network like WIFI, LTE or 4G in a public space, the network just forms another layer of the public space. On this layer of public space, your identity is defined by an IP address and a MAC address. And the edge of the public space is also extended to a larger area—-the whole area covered by the same public network you connected in. It also makes it possible that we may have 2 or more avatars in the space. Moreover, the public space can be easily extended to the whole globe. With the Internet connection, the information activities in this space are interacting with global database all the time. For example, while your laptop is playing music at web-based services like Last FM, it accretes data to build a profile of your taste in music. Through the analysis of IP endpoints of the South Station WIFI made by packet sniffer, we can see the IP endpoints are in China, Australia, Europe and places all over the world. This is what happening now in the public space and how the spatial edgeless space is formed. Another limitation for us is time. All the spaces we live in are made up by countless sections of time. But as time flows linearly, we are always locked in one section of them called “now”. We have no idea of what the space was like last night, last month, or 10 years ago. In fact, by this way of experiencing the space we will lose a lot of information and we can hardly get a complete view of the space and the reality. What I’m doing is trying to change this kind of situation and unfold the edgeless space underneath the surface of every public space. In fact I’m trying to make a kind of illusion to change the way and perspective of us to experience the space. Specifically, I chose the site of the railway terminal of Boston South Station. I tracked a guy in the terminal. I recorded his whole process from entering the terminal, buying a ticket, checking the schedule and getting on the train. And at the same time, I connected to the wifi network of the terminal and collected the data stream of the space with packet sniffer software. I did the same thing of this for several times. Then I overlapped the video of different times with the visualized data stream I collected and made a new video, a video for people to play on their smart phones right on the same site of the terminal. So that people can experience the tracking themselves in the terminal.. My project is more of a reminder. I am trying to provide an experience of switching and comparing between different layers of the public space. And I hope this way of observation may become a trigger of thinking and push people exploring the hidden value of space. By Rui Tang

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Memoryscapes

Phantoms: http://zeega.com/118686

The Late George Apley: http://zeega.com/117486

Saadia Mirza + Gabriel Villalobos

  Conventionally, too much emphasis is placed on history to give identity to a space/place. We were interested in exploring other ways in which such identity is created and recreated. Our thesis is that much of platemaking identity is to be found in the delicate balance between fact and fiction. We therefore decided to consider the role of narrative and literary fiction in the collective construction of place.

Literary fiction is important because it betrays the "perceptions" of a place, by referring to incidents that may or may not have happened. Much of literature offers an insight into the mental constructions and perceptions of space that go unnoticed when dealing with historical fact.

    In this sense, we are dealing with a city that is collectively constructed, both physically and in the perception and imagination of individuals. It is a city at once real and virtual. Our concept of the virtual is inspired by Italo Calvino, who saw the city as a hybrid of physical space with alternative realities. A virtual city is therefore a city that exists at once in digital platforms, in narrative, and in the past.

This project is an interactive archive of literary narratives and facts taking place on Beacon Hill. This archive juxtaposes fact and fiction to render the character of Beacon Hill through multiple media. In this sense, we are not just spatializing literature, but materializing its mnemonic qualities. When reading a piece of literature, a reader delves into his memories in order to imagine places, people and events. As a text, the city also calls for individual and collective memory. This project makes use of this role of memory in exploring both city and literature. It offers the reader-explorer an experience in virtual flanerie.

  Our idea is that the project can be expanded inasmuch as narratives and histories of Beacon Hill continue to be produced. We envision a platform that will collect these submissions as layers, of which we have produced two. The first one reveals the interconnected historical and fictional events narrated in the novel The Late George Apley. Written in 1937, this novel depicts the life of a Boston Brahmin living in Beacon Hill and witnessing the changes taking place in the world between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The second layer follows the lives of writers who lived in or crossed paths with Beacon Hill, revealing its influence in their writings.

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We are not Contemporary: An analysis of the Contemporary Art Market

ART MARKET MAPPING

Cutting budgets for acquiring pieces in various public museums, an increase of private collections that are going public, the rising prices for certain artists or pieces,  the tendency to accumulate and store contemporary art,  a global economy of art. These are some issues that possibly all of us (as students in Art related fields) will have to face in our professional careers.

The initial aimf for the project was to

1.     Understand the threads weaving each one of the personalities taking part on this complex market

2.     Understand the concept of “value” in the art market and how that value is determined.

 The project, at its first stage, consisted  in a deep investigation on the art market actors and connections within them reflected in an infographic database set done  in Excel that related  artists, pieces, collectors, gallerists and auction houses into one global map. 

Some of the results obtained are:

1.     96% of the artists are masculine, 4% are feminine. (Note that Guerrilla Girls where fighting against that in Modern Art, but the situation is still the same for Contemporary art) 

2.     2. The graph points that most of them started their careers in the eighties and that by 2013  the population of contemporary artists is starting to decrease

3.     44% are Chinese, 44 from the US, 28% form the United Kingdom, 8% from Germany, 4% form Japan, Taiwam,, Italy, Spain, and France. No Latin American African or Australian artist takes part on this market.

4.     84% use painting as a medium, 36% Sculpture, 16% use installation as a medium, and 16% use photography. 16% are involved in fashion,  8% are collectors, 12% are curators and 20% are considered businessmen.

5.     28% claimed that they are  influenced by old masters, and because of that, their style is actually like the stile of these old masters. 20% are influenced by Abstract Expresionism, 24% by Andy Warhol, 16% by surrealism, and 12% by Jeff Koons which is part of the analysis as well.  

6.     40% are represented by Gagosian Gallery, 36% by Saatchi Gallery, 44% have taken part at the Venice Biennale, 32% shown at MOMA NY.

7.     Collectors such as the Rubell Family, Steve Cohen and or the Mugrabi Family  are the ones that have the big portions of the market whereas cities, museums and municipalities have less access to buy the pieces because of the price increase..

This data is important in terms of understanding who is shaping the art world,  and what are we  as “contemporary habitants” inheriting to next generations to look upon the world of art.

The final experiment (which is only a prototype of what I would like to develop in a neat-crafted way) consisted of a panel with flat data arranged visually to explain the situation of the art market in numbers. 

The second component of the prototype was done as an augmented visualization  project, through a digital interaction application called LAYAR  that explained  visually, the numerical structure found in the panel.  Images and videos arranged throughout the panel space. Where found as users pointed their mobile devises to the panel.

The aim was to try to explain visually to the general public, the incoherencies of the art market and its many problematic layers. 

This project’s investigation and product is only part of an initial investigation and statement that hopefully will be taken further in order to raise awareness of the art market situation and our consumption of it as individuals.

The prototypes aim was to explore layers within layers found in the contemporary art market and take a posture about the current situation. 

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South Station Tracking

Rui Tang

Time, together with space, makes up the four-dimensional space-time and forms the basic structure of the universe. As a basic element of space, time is difficult to be directly touched and observed in people’s normal experience of space. What we see in our three-dimensional space are actually different sections of the complete space. In fact, by this way of experiencing the space we will lost a lot of information and we can hardly get a complete view of the space and the reality. My project is aimed on change this situation and make a kind of illusion to change the way and perspective of us to experience the space. I chose the site of the train terminal of Boston South Station. My method of this project is overlapping experiences of different moments in one same space. Specifically, I tracked a guy in the terminal and recorded his whole process from entering the terminal, buying a ticket, checking the time table to getting on the train. Half an hour later, I held a cellphone playing the video I recorded before and tracked the guy on the cellphone screen again in the same space and followed the same route. I used another video camera to record the process of my second tracking. In the second video I recorded, it was like I was following a guy who did not exist in the space at that time. During my second tracking, I asked the guy appeared outside of the small screen several times. This is to make an uncanny experience of the space and make people confused and begin comparing between the two spaces, or the two sections of a same space.

Then I made another tracking video in which I mixed the “tracking” experience in daytime and night. I uploaded this video on Youtube(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snjPyR8iLnM) so that everyone can use their cellphone to play it online. So everyone in South Station can pick up their phone and track the guy in the screen. It’s like playing a video game in a public space. All my attempts is trying to provide an experience of switching and comparing between different sections of the public space.

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The Student Union / Participatory Sound Sculpture

After our midterm review this project was revised in order to take advantage of its scalability - nodes for a user's interaction expanded into surrounding neighborhoods and other centers of campus. In the pic above, points of interaction are in red, the sound sculpture is in blue.

The idea behind this expansion was to give voice to both the residents of communities surrounding the school and to the students at various schools. The sound sculpture still culminates in Harvard Plaza (the new hub of student social activity), and active feedback is still given at the various points of interaction in the form of the voices of other participants. In this iteration, the sound sculpture at the Plaza becomes a hub for experiencing the voices of others across the university and in the surrounding neighborhoods.

This addresses issues of meaningful social ties between schools and social inequity between the school and its residential neighbors. (http://harvardmagazine.com/2013/01/residents-frustrated-by-allston-expansion). The Student Union is then an interface from student to student, student to public, and public to public.

But why stop there?

Conversations between the university and surrounding neighborhoods are only conducted between just a few individuals when it should be conducted by many, the students here have ties to family and friends across the globe, and the work produced at Harvard has an effect that is felt far beyond its geographic domain. Perhaps everyone should have a voice.

If the Student Union is meant to engage the sentiments of those outside of the university then perhaps an interface through a website is the best answer. If interface through the website can engender play or performance, then participants may feel like they have a personal stake in how the relationship that they establish with the sculpture.

Not to be taken literally, here's an example of a work with a similar structure:

http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_whitacre_a_virtual_choir_2_000_voices_strong.html

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Behind the Heraldry – Harvard Square Heraldry Tourist Guide

By Jenny Yang

  Heraldy is a visualized identity. It is also the product of culture, art and history. To read these stories behind the images contained in the heraldry, proper methods of deciphering is required. Starting from Harvard Square, I am looking into the origin, history and meaning of heraldry, both the logos of stores and school shields of Harvard University, and will try to build a tourist guide of heraldy around Harvard Square. The form of final product is not yet concrete. It could be a hard copy of handbook, or a virtual tour with Prezi or Zeega.

[mixedrealitycity]

Contemporary Art Market

 Cutting budgets for acquiring pieces in various public museums, an increase of private collections that are going public, the rising prices for certain artists or pieces,  the tendency to accumulate and store contemporary art,  a global economy of art. These are some issues that possibly all of us (as students in Art related fields) will have to face in our professional careers. For this reason it is important to:

1.     Understand the threads weaving each one of the personalities taking part on this complex market

2.     Understand the concept of “value” in the art market and how that value is determined.

  Today’s art market is not about art but about actors, and we should learn from it if we want to be part of It or to detach from It.

 The project consists in a deep investigation on the art market actors and connections within them reflected in an info-graphic database set  (built in Excel and  Access)  that relates artists, pieces, collectors, gallerists and auction houses into one global map. 

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    Talking to Jesse today over the phone made me confident at least that my project is reading—essentially free of context—reads clearly. A minimal presentation is going to be ideal for getting the effect across; this will be the case both in the work's web life, and in its real life presentation, which I mean to work on in the coming weeks. What I'm calling the "bistable" images (as seen above) are, as I suspected, the most compelling animated works, and while I may give some more thought to the "wandering" or "look around" pieces, they may be dropped entirely. 

I have a lot of thoughts as to what the project "means," or what questions it ought to bring up. But, beyond an artist's statement somewhere in the presentation (not at the beginning, anyway) I don't mean to make these thoughts or intuitions clear. I want the piece to be simple, and to not let my over-explicative and far-too-theoretical self be involved. 

I haven't yet decided how many photos graphs the final piece will be, and while I'm tempted to limit myself to Los Angeles, I have already found so many source images that work well that aren't from within that set that I'm not sure if I'll limit myself. 

[mixedrealitycity]

What defines North Korean defectors?

by Joungwon Lee

Political conceptualization of North Korean defectors have been established by fluctuating circumstances such as war, confrontation, and post-Cold War. Without having direct contact with North Korean defectors, South Koreans have defined the identity of North Korean defectors based solely on social discourses. This project aims to quantitatively measure the dynamics of discourses from various social powers revolving around the North Korean defectors. By revealing the fact that one’s preconceived notion is a product created by various input of social discourses, this project will allow people to defy, or at least recognize, the stereotype of North Korean defectors they had so far. In order to measure the discourses, frequently used words in describing North Korean defectors will be sorted out from the texts collected from online sources. The importance of each word among different social groups will be analyzed and visualized. These words will be categorized by emotions associated with each word, demonstrating how South Korean’s reactions on the issue of North Korean defectors are socially constructed. All the texts, results of analysis, and images 1) will be combined into a narrative using online platform suitable for story telling such as Zeega, or 2) will be reconfigured into propaganda leaflets for counter-indoctrination.