via digital globe

8-bit City is an awesome Kickstarter funded project by Brett Camper. Videogame graphic inspired slippy maps built on top of Openstreetmap data.

The 8-Bit Cities project, which started with 8-Bit NYC, is an attempt to make the city feel foreign yet familiar, smashing together two culturally common models of space: the lo-fi overhead world maps of 1980s role-playing and adventure games, and the geographically accurate data that drives today’s web maps and GPS navigation. I hope to evoke the same urge for exploration, abstract sense of scale, and perhaps most importantly unbounded excitement that many of us remember experiencing on the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Commodore 64, or any other number of 8-bit microcomputers. Maps offer us visual architectures of the world, encouraging us to think about and interact with space in particularly constrained ways. Take some time to think about your surroundings a little differently. Set out on a quest. Be an adventurer

BLDGBLOG posits some possible futures of trap rooms which are the architectural equivalent of a trap street in the context of in the of interior mapping of shopping malls and the like. A trap street (examples) is a

deliberate cartographic error introduced into a map so as to catch acts of copyright infringement by rival firms.

So you put deliberately false information into your cartographic work and then monitor the maps created by competitors and watch for your honeypot cartographic features to show up on work they claim to be their own. As mentioned in the post, as the mapping of interior space becomes more widespread the introduction of trap rooms, trap corridors, trap stair etc will become commonplace as firm seek to protect their work and the deals they have made for the interior geo-data. In turn, people we be left wondering how to occupy the spaces they see in some of their maps, but not others. The best bit comes at the end,

But I’m also curious about less practical things, such as what cultural, even psychological, effects the presence of trap rooms might actually have. Games could be launched, the purpose of which is to find and occupy as many trap rooms as possible. New paranoias emerge, that the room featured above your apartment on that new app you just downloaded is not really there at all; it’s a trap room, and you can’t sleep at night, worried that you actually have no neighbors, that you’re the last person on earth and every building around you is a dream. There are panic attacks by people walking home alone at 3am when they become overwhelmed with the suspicion that they are actually walking inside a trap hall—a corridor that has never been real—losing consciousness and falling to the ground as irrational fears become too much for them.

Approximately 1,376 Silos, Water Towers, and other Cylindrical-Industrial Buildings

by Jenny Odell

Be sure to check out the other satellite collections as well the ministry of approximate travel

what is approximate traveling? In order to travel approximately, I made use of any source of information I could find online, relying especially on Google Street View, photo databases (Panoramio, Picasa, Flickr), review sites (Yelp, TripAdvisor, CitySearch, Insider Pages), and virtual tours of monuments, restaurants, hotels, etc. I transported myself into one place after another, both by writing a travel narrative and by superimposing myself onto photos I found online. The people I “met” were disgruntled hotel reviewers, restaurant ravers, and anyone who took the time to upload their story in one form or another to a site like Google Maps.

Trackable Beverages This tap water “isoscape” map shows how hydrogen and oxygen isotopes vary throughout the country. Geographic factors like latitude, altitude and proximity to coasts all play a role in this isotopic variation. The cities on the map show where the researchers tested tap water along with bottled water, soda and beer. ACS/Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry

These geographically specific signatures show up in human hair making a record of you travels a real possibility.

To test this theory, the scientists analyzed tap water from 33 cities and looked at isotope patterns in Dasani bottled water, Coca-Cola Classic and Budweiser. They found the beverage isotope pattern from those cities matched the tap water pattern — which makes sense, because many beverage companies produce their drinks regionally instead of in one main location. For example, if you drink a Bud in Utah, it probably came from the Anheuser-Busch plant in Fort Collins, Colo., not St. Louis.

via fresser

Photo by Alastair Blackwood

The Box is back in the UK. For a period of over a year the BBC monitored their very own 40 foot shipping container as it travelled around the world carrying goods across oceans via intermodal transport. It was all to try and tell the story of globalization through the one defining symbol of the interconnected system of global trade – the intermodal shipping container.

It started it’s journey loaded with Scotch Whiskey headed for Shanghai China, and visited ports in Singapore, Bangkok, New York and Los Angeles and long stay at idle in Yokohama. Along the way it provided the context for discussions about piracy, the decline of the global economy and it’s effect on global trade and highlighted to the kinds of goods being made for cheap overseas and shipped to the west.

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

Senex Prime on flickr

I don’t remember seeing this in particular at the Swiss EXPO.02 but a number of artists working together under the name Waterproof “imagined a(n) (im)possible scenario wherein the water level in Switzerland rises to 1400 meters (4600 feet), turning the landlocked, Alpine country into an island nation, its rocky peaks rising above a vast ocean.”

The series of images over at Pruned show an imaginative take on how the Swiss might deal with their new situation.

via Pruned

Proximity is a simple iPhone app that works as an alarm clock except the alarm is not set for a time but rather a location. It is aimed at commuters and others that end up sleeping while they are moving in some sort of transport. It is a great mobilization of two things that are usually understood as fixed: You sleeping in bed and your alarm clock on the bedside table are in a fixed location. A standard proximity sensor that is fixed in location sensing when moving things get closer than a pre-selected distance threshold.

I really like the transposition of a specific location where one would usually have a specific time, attaching an alarm to a where rather then a when. It is a bit of genius.

Proximity by Geoff Pado

New York City of today isn’t exactly as we had imagined it. Through history there have been many possible futures that have gone unrealized. The Museum of the Phantom City presents these Architectural and Urban Design proposals as one moves through the city to the intended locations via an iPhone app that is available no in the app store. The Van Alen Institute is holding a walking tour on Sturday October 3rd, the day the full site launches.

Get the Museum of the Phantom City: Other Futures iPhone app

LEGO’s Experience Wheel shows the mapping a complete experience by surfacing the points that are critical to a good experience and where there is opportunity to improve, differentiate or optimize the delivery of the experience, in this case a fictional flight to NYC by a company executive. Bruce Temkin outlines what he like about this particular approach :

• It’s great to have a formal approach to describing/designing experiences
• It starts with the description of a specific customer (in the center)
• It recognizes the life cycle of experiences: before, during, and after
• It’s easy to use and simple to understand

See a large version, or buy as a poster

map is trademark Byte Level Research

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

Newark Gateways by Pentagram Architects to create a series of gateways to the city of Newark New Jersey. Painting a series of cartographic type symbols into the Newark streetsccape, in actual physical space, with the intention that they will eventually be incorporated into google earth & google maps satellite views. There are two very interesting ideas at play here – deliberate alteration of the physical environment to affect the display of its digital representation, and the cartographication of the physical space, placing the visual language of representation into the actual.

Map symbology has a long and storied history. The process of representing the three-dimensional world as flat and map-like requires a notational language. Our proposal places a new set of distinct symbols “on the map” by creating them for the Google Earth point of view. With paint and little else, Newark can define itself, celebrate its entry points, and address a global audience, all in one stroke. The painted “events” are visible and engaging on Google Earth, while the real locations would be signed with images from above that explain the colors and patterns on the ground.

tokyo jogging is a mashup of wiimote and google streetview. Lets you “run” in Tokyo, in your web browser.

The possibilities of this are pretty interesting. Combined with the tv screen on the treadmill or exercise bike at the gym you could run world famous marathon routes and in places where running isn’t usually feasible, say, run the length of the New York Thruway.

via @oliver76

Serendipity is looking in a haystack for a needle and finding the farmers daughter

- Julius Comroe Jr.

Monaco Grand Prix Track Drawing by Tim Knowles

A series of drawings generated by an apparatus in the back of a moving vehicle, a system of sliding rails and elastic holds a pen
on to paper and records the forces at work within the vehicle. As the car moves much like a ball on the back seat of a car,
as you break the pen moves forward, you turn left the pen moves right, etc.

Virtual Cable technology that draws route information in an augmented reality display. The 3 dimensional display is created with lasers and mirrors (didn’t fully read that section) and is generated from standard route information output by numerous GPS and SatNav systems available today. The remarkable part about it is the simplicity of the system. “Follow the red line around until we tell you to stop.” The danger may be, as we have seen before, that the information is followed blindly, although keeping ones eyes on the road, and slightly above it, may be better for safety than trying to focus on small map screens, or to decipher the robo-voice directions to bear left in point-five-two miles.