graffyard makes past graffiti made visible after it has been cleaned up.
It’s a nice example of encoding the visual history of the city onto itself. One can imagine a future where city walls have a secondary digital presence and all advertising, graffiti and signage takes place via a persistent visual augmented reality system. The city becomes a contiguous blank canvas, a physical platform encoded with embed tags for the reality we want to see. Maybe.

Love the idea of making maps into envelopes, even with the limitations of having to send all snail mail south-easterly to get the return address and the recipient’s address properly positioned.

Like when Reason magazine did custom magazine covers with aerial photographs for each of their subscribers homes – in June 2004

Artist Jörg M. Colberg creates images that are compressed with a customized jpeg compression scheme.

ajpegis a new image compression algorithm where the focus is not on making its compression efficient but, rather, on making its result interesting.

ajpeg is intended to go the opposite way: Instead of creating an image artificially with the intent of making it look as photo-realistic as possible, it takes an image captured from life and transforms it into something that looks real and not real at the same time.

Personalized custom christmas tree ornaments made by Really Interesting Group for their friends with each friend’s own social network data. Snowman’s head is number is Twitter followers, length of drips from cloud is Dopplr data, horizontal red bars for number of tracks scrobbled monthly on last.fm and the blue one shows the aperatures used on photos posted to flickr. Friends without data on a particular network got a 404.

Of course Really Interesting Group are the ones behind the excellent Newspaper Club.

More pictures and details over at russell davies: datadecs

Senex Prime on flickr

shoe box by aya masuda

This shoe box could not be more perfect. It is from a series of workshops and exhibitions called Without Thought organized by Naoto Fukasawa, the latest focused on the Box.
Box – Without Thought Vol. 10

More boxes from the workshop at designboom

Nice comparison showing the increasing size of a ‘compact car’ found over at Kitsune Noir as part of the desktop wallpaper project.

On time clock adds 3 minutes to help you not be late as usual. Tak Cheung at Fabrica Design

The Hand Drawn Map Association is an ongoing archive of user submitted maps and other interesting diagrams created by hand. There are 150 maps submitted already including some lovely map collections.

Our current collection features a set of maps created by John Hutchison exploring his relationship to the 50 states in the US. The collection starts with a map representing all of the US states. Each successive map in the collection reveals a different set of states based on increasingly limiting criteria until we are left with only 1 state (his least favorite).

Image Credit: John Hutchinson April 29th – “US state I have Visited”

Ring Roads of the World by Thumb for Rice school of architecture. Houston, where Rice is located, is shown in black. Second largest is Beijing, shown in red. Ring road?

Longbroading
Seeing a much bigger picture; thinking in terms of higher level systems, bigger networks, longer cycles

Open Authorship
Creating content for public modification; the ability to work with massively multiple contributors

Multi-Capitalism
Fluency in working and trading simultaneously with different hybrid capitals, e.g., natural, intellectual, social, financial, virtual

Signal/Noise Management
Filtering meaningful info, patterns, and commonalities from the massively-multiple streams of data and advice

Emergensight
The ability to prepare for and handle surprising results and complexity that come with coordination, cooperation and collaboration on extreme scales

Boffin is last.fm radio for your local music. You aim it at your music collection and it crunches for a bit. While it eats up your music you get a wonderful view of it all, with filename scrolling at warp speed in the background and album covers moving right to left.

This is the nicest possible progress bar an app could have.

When it’s done you get a tag cloud and you can pick the different genres you want to listen to.

todayisa.com checks the weather, news stocks and other mystey stuff to determine is the day is goo, or bad. Also available in json, LOL, boolean or on twitter @todayisa

Mike Frumin’s map that show New York City subway ridership between 1905 to 2006 with sparklines for each station. Its great to see sparklines in use on a map, where the detail given by the sparkline is a kind of cartographic detail you can get lost in when looking at a map.

The general idea it that the history of subway ridership tells a story about the history of a neighborhood that is much richer than the overall trend.

Collection from the Museum of Flight.

via onpaperwings

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

Sand Ocean Sky Available 7 Days Free of Charge – Steve Lambert

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.

NPR has some very nice visualizations of the United States electrical grid, including views for solar power and wind sources, including the the below which shows the realationship between where the good wind is, darker colors, and where the power grid is, not usually all that nearby.

Regarding an very small anti-war protest in 2003, emphasis mine. -

And I realized that they had earpieces, and were connected to spotters, who were also in the city. And I saw that, and thought that it was unlike anything that we had ever seen before. The technologies of communication that are usually associated with authority start to be used in a million other ways. I saw that their ability to communicate was going to enable totally different ideas of how we actually use space. By 2003, the mobile phone was already common, but the ideas of groups and more sophisticated interactions other than ‘I’m calling you’ hadn’t really been popularized.
But a big question mark had appeared over Broadway for that moment.

Regarding PacManhattan, again emphasis mine -

The things that have happened over the last ten years point to the need to restore the idea of thinking of the city as a system upon which things can be run. That the streets are not purely for commerce or transportation, but that they have a number of layers. To think of the city as hardware that different software can be run on. Some of that software is an entertainment software, one of the titles could be Pacman. To think of the city like that seemed like a new idea, and at the same time, a very old one. It’s also one that can be rethought with new technologies. Mobile technologies allow us to do it in ways that we may have never been able to do.