Posted in Conference Blog on Mar 15th, 2010 No Comments »
At The Mobile City, we are currently researching the design processes that shape the cities of the 21st century, and bumped into an interesting paradox (also pointed out by others):
The experience of our present day city in every day life is increasingly a hybrid one – meaning that it is made up of both physical [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Mar 9th, 2010 2 Comments »
Last week our friends & collegues at Vurb and Non-Fiction organized an evening about the opportunities of Augmented Reality for architects. Layer-developper Johannes la Poutre presented some of his recent projects, and Ole Bouman – director of the Netherlands Architetcture Institute – was interviewed about SARA – an AR-app developped by the NAi.
It was an [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Feb 26th, 2010 No Comments »
I just visited an interesting panel on the Sonic Acts 2010 Conference called The Poetics of Hybrid Space.
When over here at The Mobile City we talk about Hybrid Space, we usually refer to the work of Adriana de Souza e Silva who in several articles has convincingly argued against the dichotomy between physical or [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Feb 3rd, 2010 1 Comment »
A little while ago I came across a manifesto called Not In Our Name, Marke Hamburg (Sign and Sight has an English translation). In this manifesto a group of 200 artists/squaters criticise their supposed role in the cycle of life of their city, Hamburg. Using artists as tools to ’spice up’ a city leads to gentrification, they say.
As [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Dec 21st, 2009 1 Comment »
On December 14th 2009 De Balie – an Amsterdam-based center for culture and politics – organized an evening about old and new cartographies. Participants were Ferjan Ormeling (Emeritus Professor Cartography, Faculty of Geographical Sciences, Utrecht University), Henk van Houtum (Associate Professor of Geopolitics and Political Geography, Head of the Nijmegen Centre for Border Research), Maarten [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Dec 6th, 2009 1 Comment »
(download as PDF >>)
How can architects relate to digital media?
The Mobile City keynote at the ‘Day of the Young Architect’: outcomes and further thoughts
written by Michiel de Lange & Martijn de Waal
Introducing the main questions
What do developments in digital media have to do with architecture? And how should architects and urbanists relate to developments in [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Nov 25th, 2009 No Comments »
The second issue of the RMIT journal Second Nature is about “Games, Locative & Mobile Media”. I wrote a short article about urban games and their importance for the issues we address with The Mobile City.
In this article I discern five possible ‘levels’ to understand urban games: (1) the city is often used as a [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Nov 20th, 2009 No Comments »
On November 6th 2009 The Mobile City organized the Sentient Rotterdam Workshop in collaboration with Mark Shepard. About 20 participants from varying disciplines came together to discuss the role of sentient technology in urban culture. Participants were divided in small groups of 4-5 people to work on a possible intervention in the city of Rotterdam [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Oct 27th, 2009 1 Comment »
At certain points in the history of architecture and urban planning, the internal debate on how to apply new technologies surpasses the boundaries of the discipline.
At those times, the hopes and fears found in the disputes between architects, policy makers, engineers and planners are extended to a broader discussion about urban and societal [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Oct 9th, 2009 5 Comments »
At Picnic I attended an interesting session called The City as an Interaction Platform that took this theme as its point of departure:
Cities have always been about providing frameworks of services to improve the quality of life for residents and businesses. How will social networks, mobile devices, reactive environments, and cloud-based data services transform the [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Oct 2nd, 2009 2 Comments »
This year’s PICNIC (September 23-25 2009 in Amsterdam) had some really great sessions and speakers. The Mobile City couldn’t possibly attend everything. Therefore I will zoom in on two sessions that were particularly interesting for our themes. One on Wednesday Sept. 23, about augmented reality. And the other on Friday Sept. 25, about eco-mapping. In [...]
Posted in Conference Blog, literature on Aug 8th, 2009 No Comments »
In The Cybercities Reader (2004) Stephen Graham – at that time Professor of Urban Technology in Newcastle – bundles a great number of seminal texts about the intersections of digital media technologies and urban life. Some articles were written especially for this reader. Others were previously published. The book departs from the premisse that “[t]he [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Jul 3rd, 2009 1 Comment »
Mark Shepard is a media architect and researcher. His current research investigates the influence of mobile and pervasive media, communication and information technologies on architecture and urbanism. He is one of the organizers of the 2006 symposium on Architecture and Situated Technologies. This fall, for the Architectural League of New York, he curates the exhibition [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Jun 25th, 2009 3 Comments »
I attended the Digital Cities 6 Workshop this week in State College Pennsylvania (put together by Marcus Foth, Laura Forlano and Hiromitsu Hattori, thanks for that!).
The workshop started from the notion that with the advent of urban informatics, it is now possible to collect large collections of data about the behaviour of people within the [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Jun 9th, 2009 3 Comments »
Mobile Monday #11 themed “Visions on Mobile” took place on June 1 2009 and had some great speakers: Alan More, Jamais Cascio, Andrew Grill, Joe Pine, Howard Rheingold, and Robert Rice – yes, all guys with visions in the mobile world
Photo by Anne Helmond
As MoMo is a kind of trend-watching event, the main [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Jun 4th, 2009 1 Comment »
A few weeks ago I attended a presentation at the MIT6-conference by Michael Epstein, the CEO of Untravel Media, a Boston-based company that produces location based storytelling media. Or as Epstein himself calls it: terratives – a combination of territory and narrative.
Untravel’s portfolio includes terratives for the New England Aquarium and the MIT Campus [...]
Posted in Conference Blog, literature on May 8th, 2009 6 Comments »
As part of a new effort of The Mobile City to compile an ever-expanding overview of literature relevant to our themes, I will review this oldie-goldie published in 1960. I particularly assess its enduring relevance for understanding the current relation between mobile & locative media and the city.
In this book, Lynch argues that people [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Apr 30th, 2009 1 Comment »
Recently I visited a seminar on Mediated Space at the Harvard School of Design. The organizers turned the usual approach to this topic – how is our experience of space changing, now that media ranging from mobile phones to urban screens have all but colonized our every day urban life? – around. Rather they, [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Apr 25th, 2009 1 Comment »
You might have seen the documentary series “Britain from Above” (if not, go check out it’s excellent website). It showed us some beautiful computer generated visualisations of GPS data overlayed on a satelite map of great britain.
Director Cassain Harrison explained how he had surprisingly little trouble getting access to these sources after he asked politely. [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Apr 24th, 2009 No Comments »
One of the oldest terms to think about the influence of both transport and communication technologies on the experience of time and space is “time-space compression”. This notion expresses the sense that the experience of time passing by is accelerated while the importance of distance diminished. Geographer David Harvey made the term famous, although it [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Mar 29th, 2009 No Comments »
Last week I visited an interesting presentation at Harvard’s Urban Mobilities Group. They had invited Austrian cartographer Georg Gartner who gave a talk about his ‘semantic wayfinding‘ project.
Semantic wayfinding is an approach to navigation media that takes human thinking, language and action as a starting point for the design of wayfinding technology and mapping [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Mar 14th, 2009 No Comments »
Found via Textually.org > Engadget Mobile > Make (nice trail):
Artist Jorge Colombo (Portugal) made a couple of cityscapes by drawing with his fingers in an application called Brushes on an iPhone. He also posted a short movie showing in speed-up how he created his drawings. You can see all of the drawings on [...]
Posted in Conference Blog, literature on Feb 24th, 2009 2 Comments »
I just finished reading Marcus Foth’s Handbook of research on Urban Informatics. It’s an edited volume as thick as a fist, packed with essays that when taken altogether give a great overview of this exciting new interdisciplinary field of research and design practices.
So what exactly is urban informatics? Roughly said, the field includes a wide [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Feb 18th, 2009 No Comments »
John Markoff wrote an article in the NY Times “The Cellphone, Navigating Our Lives”. He calls the cellphone “the world’s most ubiquitous computer”, since the 4 billion subscriber mark has been reached recently – or even a while ago according to another research agency. Although it is a fact that most of these 4 billion [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Feb 16th, 2009 No Comments »
With the coming addition of the Dutch part of Google Streetview, my street won’t be the same.
Well, that’s not true. Here in Holland these pictures-of-streets services have been in use for some time. But those pay-services were focused on official use, often being used by government agencies and businesses. But now, with Streetview, these imaging [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Jan 30th, 2009 No Comments »
Last night I attended Michael Naimark’s interesting lecture at the Rotterdam Film festival. This year’s edition of the festival wants to broaden the discussion on ‘screen culture’, and Naimark took up on this theme by focusing on maps and globes as important elements of our contemporary screen culture.
Naimark talked about two different directions that [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Jan 28th, 2009 No Comments »
This week I visited the international filmfestival in Rotterdam. For this year’s edition the festival left the confinement of the city’s film theatres and expanded onto three urban screens erected in the city’s public space. During the festival three specially commissioned films are projected on landmark skyscrapers in the centre of Rotterdam to address the [...]
Posted in Conference Blog, literature on Jan 23rd, 2009 No Comments »
Mimi Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Ken Anderson have an interesting chapter in the edited volume by Rich Ling & Scott Campbell (2009) “The reconstruction of space and time: mobile communication practices” which recently came out. The chapter is called “Portable Objects in Three Global Cities: The Personalization of Urban Places”. The authors explore how people [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Jan 12th, 2009 No Comments »
A GPS recorder is like a camera in the sky with a very long shutter time. That at least was what Cassion Harrison, the director from Britain from Above claimed at the AnyMedia workshop at the International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam last November. It’s a metaphor that I’ve been playing with ever since, and especially now [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Jan 2nd, 2009 No Comments »
The BBC has a 5-minute radio item about computer generated architecture.
Architect Thomas Witzke (?) at Zaha Hadid’s office talks about paralel computer modeling in building design. He says computer programs originally used for the animation industry and car design and ship building are now used by architects. So projects are now entirely conceived in the [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Dec 23rd, 2008 No Comments »
(image source: Vabellon)
Clearly, the mobile phone is used to ‘optimize time’ – at least, this idea of “making the most of NOW” is one of the strong rhetorics about mobile media: to do something useful with in-between moments that is ‘lost time’ otherwise.
Increasingly, is seems mobile media are being deployed to optimize spatial mobility too. [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Dec 22nd, 2008 1 Comment »
In 1938 Chicago School Scholar Louis Wirth wrote the now famous article ‘Urbanism as a way of Life’. According to Wirth, the modern metropolises that had emerged in the preceding half-century or so, weren’t only striking for their until then unparalleled sizes and shapes. The social and economic clusterings of the industrial city had also [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Dec 7th, 2008 1 Comment »
During the last museumnight in Amsterdam the Amsterdam architecture institute Arcam decided to have an evening about the situationists. Apparently the Dutch situationist Constant had (co-)written a pamphlet fifty years earlier about his ideal city. The pamphet, it was revealed, could just as easily be interpreted as a joke instead of as an actual serious [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Nov 3rd, 2008 1 Comment »
Saturday November 1 2008 I attended the closing debate of the Urban Play project that took place during ExperimentaDesign 2008 themed “Space and Place: design for the urban landscape”. The event explored the role of designers in shaping the urban landscape, and the Urban Play project – organized by Droog Design – specifically focused on [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Oct 16th, 2008 No Comments »
On October 28th Rob van Kranenburg’s book The Internet of Things A critique of ambient technology and the all-seeing network of RFID will be launched (5:00 pm, Waag Society, Amsterdam) A pdf download is already available at the Institute for Network Cultures website.
The main point of Kranenburg’s essay is that:
Cities across the [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Oct 2nd, 2008 No Comments »
Adam Greenfield is one of the most interesting thinkers on many of themes that we regularly address at The Mobile City. He is head of design direction for service and user-interface design at Nokia, and is currently working on a book called “The City Is Here For You To Use: Urban form and [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Sep 26th, 2008 No Comments »
Wednesday Sept. 24 I went to one of the sessions at PICNIC ‘08 called “The Visible City”. This session was about ways of visualizing mobility patterns in the city. From the announcement:
What if an entire city could be visible from above, like we see it from an airplane? Not simply buildings and squares, but also [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Sep 13th, 2008 1 Comment »
source: http://technology.newscientist.com
Here’s a new project in the surveillance race: gait analysis by using satellites that can identify people’s shadows. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California are working on developing this technique that should be a next step in fighting terrorism. ‘Normal’ gait analysis is done by CCTV (closed circuit television). Where camera’s must film [...]
Posted in Conference Blog, literature on Sep 12th, 2008 No Comments »
I just read two books – written almost 40 years apart – that signal the same urban problem: cities and towns in the United States are becoming increasingly segregated into monocultural lifestyle enclaves – like flocks to like. This made me wonder what role locative and mobile media might play in this process.
In his recent [...]
Posted in Conference Blog on Aug 14th, 2008 No Comments »
Is there a number of crucial or core works in locative media? A corpus of best practices? At the International Symposium on Electronic Art it seemed that there might be; many presentations referred to the same set of examples. Some other presentations came up with ways of classifying locative media in different categories. Here [...]
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