In the Category the physical digital
discovery in the city via mariolife and street art
Posted July 24th, 2009 at 8:52 am. There are 0 comments.
Walking home the other day I decided to play Mariolife, a real life GPS game on my iPhone. Playing in this case, is walking around in the real world gathering up virtual coins and mushrooms and rescuing princesses. In my quest to gather up coins I found myself walking on streets I had never walked, at least with any kind of noticing, and running into bits of street art I had not yet seen as well. My real life adventure was being guided by the placement of coins that existed only on the screen of my iPhone. So in spending a couple of hours wandering around collecting virtual coins and real street art (in photos) I realized that there was something really special about the collision of very different real world expereinces that was happening here.
Mariolife on iTunes
reso-net
Posted July 21st, 2009 at 6:00 pm. There are 0 comments.
Designed by: Mark Francis Tynan, William Hailiang Chen, and Shireen Hamdan
ResoNet employs Low-Fi techniques to visualise the resonance frequencies inherent in the natural environment, via the interaction of the public and surrounding elements detected by a LED net.
Reso-net.org and there is a blog chronicling it’s development, including some nice detail shots of the LED components.
the human printer
Posted July 2nd, 2009 at 11:33 am. There are 0 comments.
thehumanprinter creates CMYK prints of your photos by hand.
Unlike any other printer thehumanprinter creates unique, individual images each time it prints. Following the same process as a digital printer, thehumanprinter generates the printed product by hand. Throughout the printing process thehumanprinter assumes the role of the machine and is therefore controlled and restricted by the process of using CMYK halftones created on the computer.
On the Grid
Posted April 30th, 2009 at 7:17 pm. There are 2 comments.
On the Grid is a project documenting the space created by the vast nationwide network of powerlines and the land underneath them. Undeveloped except for the powerlines them selves they carve through the landscape, connected the most rural with the most urban. The shared space, buzzing with the hum of excess electricity, is at times a pristine and beautiful meadow surrounded by forest and others, the uninhabitable tract amongst suburban banality, beautiful in its own right.
On the Grid, a project by Adam Ryder and Brian Rosa, explores the landscape immediately surrounding high-tension electric transmission lines in Rhode Island. Starting near the Ocean State Power facility in Burnllville, Ryder and Rosa spent several days walking along various sites of this arterial infrastructure. Sites were chosen though surveying publicly available aerial photographs and land use maps, and all photos were geotagged with handheld GPS units. In combining the rigid technical process of digital mapping with the subjective practice of landscape photography, this project explores the state as a collection of differentiated spaces that, though seemingly isolated, are networked.
The resulting photographs showcase the topographical diversity surrounding these structures, whose own narrow terrain remains virtually unchanged throughout their straight, incisive paths. The path of the power lines functions as a rural to urban transect, cutting through farmland and commercial parks, cul-de-sacs and strip malls, used car lots and interstate highways.
As human intervention in the natural landscape sprawls to the most remote areas of the state, our lived space becomes increasingly regulated and our encounters with equivocal territories are especially rare. In more urbanized areas, we lose our relation to places which seem to exist unto themselves, where one can feel alone and unhindered. The ambiguity of the land occupied by high-tension power offers the possibility of experience outside of regulation. Despite being part of an infrastructure that is highly regulated and bureaucratized, the physical space inhabited by these power lines remains easily accessible though its sheer ubiquity. Thus, paradoxically, the realm of power lines seems to exist not only outside of regulation, but also outside of the normative properties of the native landscape. Whereas an area half of a mile away from a high tension line may be densely wooded, the space occupied by the wires will be clear-cut, devoid of trees and exhibiting, at most, low shrubbery and grass. The uniformity of this narrow swath as it cuts through the landscape reveals as much about its own spatial utility as it does of the landscape it bifurcates across the state (and beyond). It is this topographical sameness that makes the power lines amazing sites of contrast against both development and the natural landscape.
On the Grid invites reflection on the blurred relationship between networked technology, the built environment and nature through these buzzing monoliths.
– Website Text (An image on the original website)
They did a nice interview on the NPR show Living on Earth (mp3 link).
Quoting here,
Yeah absolutely, it’s a really unique tract of land that doesn’t have any development on it except for itself. So, it’s kind of, in a way its really pristine and untouched and…virginal, its kind of, kind of like, romantic and magical in that way.
-Adam Ryder
and
What’s really – I think actually awesome, is the best word I can use to say it – what’s really awesome about seeing this parade of power lines through the landscape, especially in rural areas is that we’re kind of seeing these, these tendrils connecting humanity as one large organism and it’s a cool way of looking at us, you know what I mean?
-Adam Ryder
Locate powerline grid infrastructure near you via this previous post
dead pixel for google earth
Posted April 30th, 2009 at 11:50 am. There are 0 comments.
82 x 82 cm burned square, the size of one pixel from an altitude of 1 km.
A real life dead pixel by Helmut Smits. Digital display technologies affecting the real physical world with it’s intentions of affecting the digital representation of the physical world. See also.
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