Procedural Buff

[[This is a late entry to the 2008 call for mural proposals for Eastern Avenue in Baltimore]]

This project rewrites the creation of a neighborhood mural as an urban game, blurring the lines between graffiti, public art, and community interaction.



When the mural is added to or modified (1), the artist is awarded points. The changes are detected by a webcam (2), and the image is uploaded to the online archive (3). The handheld devices of the other players are notified (4), and given information about the location, color, and configuration of the pixels (5) to update. The first players to get to the mural and make the updates are awarded more points in the game.




[[based on a photo by Napalm Filled Tires on flickr]]

"There has always been one rule in the game that never falters, dont go over your history no matter how old or wack. I cant imagine going over a Vinny throw up just because, it is a known known here in NYC in which we try to adhere to, let the buff or time erase it, not to say toys dont kill shit but established writers know better." - MARE 139, South Bronx



[[Banksy vs. Robbo image credits: (1), (2), (3), (4)]]

The project outsources the production of the mural to the local graffiti and street artists in a combination of social network, internet archive, and street game. The mural is the constantly changing result of the interactions between the artists involved. The ephemerality of this kind of urban artwork is foregrounded, and the tendency toward competition between different artists and different styles is systematized and neutralized by the gamelike aspects. This is a mural that can never be vandalized.

Traditionally, the only neutral way that the wall can be refreshed is with a new coat of paint laid down by the property owner or law enforcement: "the buff". This project takes the elements of graffiti and street art that are usually deployed as deterrants: surveilance and concealment, and redeploys them as newly integrated components of a larger system, blurring the line between rivalry and collaboration.

[[for more on Banksy vs. Robbo, see Gaia's writeup here]]

A jpeg is worth 1000kb

ZORK, Colossal Cave Adventure, and the landscape of the text-based adventure game.

[[This essay first appeared in Gary Kachadourian's print zine "A Brief Survey of Video Game Landscapes"]]

Between its release in 1981 and 1986, the text adventure game ZORK sold almost 400,000 copies, making it the best selling title for its parent company, Infocom. ZORK is not strictly a *video* game, there are no images in it, only words. At 92 kilobytes, the game file is about 1/10th the size of a single still frame from a contemporary game with full motion video. But inside all of this text is an entire world, navigated by the player with simple commands in plain english: "open the window" "go up the stairs" "pick up the knife". The imagery exists within the player's mind, helped along with occasionally evocative text from the narrator:

>LOOK
Dam Base
You are at the base of Flood Control Dam #3, which looms above you and to
the north. The River Frigid is flowing by here. Across the river are the
White Cliffs, which seem to form a giant wall stretching from north to
south along the east shore of the river as it winds its way downstream.
There is an inflated boat here.

The game replaces the visual landscape with its own description, and this has been cited by many as the key to its longlived success and sales record. As computers became more and more sophisticated during the 1980s, graphics became more and more complex, and older games quickly looked outdated and obsolete. ZORK and other text based adventures never relied on images, and so never seemed stale.

This reliance on the verbal over the visual is exploited by the game's designers, clues to the puzzles are embedded in the things the narrator points out, and ambiguity is turned into confusion in some of the game's more difficult to navigate portions. In the maze, 16 rooms have an identical description: "This is part of a maze of twisty little passages, all alike." This sameness is effective blindness, and even though there are vital objects hidden here, the player is forced to grope through on trial and error.

The phrase "twisty little passages" is a reference to Colossal Cave Adventure, a mainframe based text adventure game that was the freely distributed predecesor and inspiration for ZORK. Created by two computer scientists, Don Woods and Will Crowther, Colossal Cave Adventure included its own 'all alike' maze, described in the same way. There was also a complementary 'all different' maze, using almost all possible systematic permutations of the phrase:

Little maze of twisting passages
Little maze of twisty passages
Little twisty maze of passages
Maze of little twisting passages
Maze of little twisty passages
Maze of twisting little passages
Maze of twisty little passages
Twisting little maze of passages
Twisting maze of little passages
Twisty little maze of passages
Twisty maze of little passages

This genre of game was created by and for computer scientists, Will Crowther, in an interview from 1994, speculates: "And why did people enjoy it? Because it's exactly the kind of thing that computer programmers do. They're struggling with an obstinate system that can do what you want but only if you can figure out the right thing to say to it"

The game is a landscape, but this isn't a landscape that can be appreciated visually, it can only be apprehended and understood structurally and functionally. The similarity of the game's structure to the flowcharts used by computer scientists is obvious, it is a network of nodes with paths between them that control how the landscape can be moved through. This resonance is underscored by the fact that, at the same time as the original version of Colossal Cave Adventure in 1975, Will Crowther was working for a defense contractor, helping to build ARPAnet, the networked computer system that would later become the internet.

Will Crowther was also an avid caver. In the 1970s, he was part of a team mapping undocumented portions of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. Using surveyors techniques, nodal points are connected by clear paths in a network, this bare bones structure of vector lines is then fleshed out with the specific qualities of various rooms and passages in drawing. Portions of Colossal Cave Adventure are said to be so similar in structure to portions of the actual cave that first time visitors familiar with the game can navigate easily.

ZORK didn't come with a map, early players drew their own. The smallest complete map available on the internet today, is, at 480 kilobytes, about five times the size of the game itself. After 1983, Infocom finally released its own map for ZORK, the key shows the five types of passages that connect the nodes: "Normal Passaway, One-way Passageway, Narrow Passageway (baggage limit), and Passageway returning to room of origin".

Text based adventure games work because landscapes can be understood in ways that have little to do with vision. It isn't the specific form of any one object or space that is memorable here, it is the structure of the underlying system. But this disconnect between form and structure is bridged when it is understood that the structure itself has a form, a branching self-similar network that is as intricate as any graphic representation.

The landscape in ZORK is what it does, and it can only be appreciated and unlocked by interacting with it. The keys to the puzzles are often found when the player takes control over the same kind of network flow that generates the landscape, finding ways to open and close new connections between points. The aesthetic is the product of the constant mix up between the operational and the picturesque, between infrastructure and ruin, between interaction and observation:

"You are standing on the top of the Flood Control Dam #3, which was quite a tourist attraction in times far distant. There are paths to the north, south, and west, and a scramble down. The sluice gates on the dam are closed. Behind the dam, there can be seen a wide reservoir. Water is pouring over the top of the now abandoned dam.
There is a control panel here, on which a large metal bolt is mounted. Directly above the bolt is a small green plastic bubble."

[[Much of the background information on Colossal Cave Adventure was found in Dennis G. Jerz's excellent essay "Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original "Adventure" in Code and in Kentucky"]] [[The original game is available for free download from Infocom here]]

DSC07660

DSC07660, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

Series of prints to be shown at The Depot, 1728 N. Charles St., Thursday, Jan. 28, 9 pm.

It's the Monkey Hustle Art Show, check the facebook invite here.

This work is based on drawings that can be seen at the Baker Artist Award site here (only three days left to nominate yourself over there, btw).

... also, check them out on tiny apparatus.

(and here)

Losing My Edge: Architectural Informatics (and others)

(Disclaimer: This is quick and unconsidered)

It is fascinating to watch other disciplines inch closer and closer to the territory that was once claimed by architects. As the profession of architecture continues to shrink, the ground that is ceded does not remain unclaimed for long, and there is new and interesting territory to be discovered at our borders that we no longer seem to have the resources to explore.

Sustainability Consulting, Strategic Masterplanning, Landscape Architecture - all of these other disciplines are very interested in architecture: its literature, its history, and its scope of services. Now add to that the relatively new fields of Service and Interaction Design. Recent articles here and here (and here(and here!)) have all implied that there is a strange relationship between services, distributed computing and cities, with a parallel strangeness in the design of interactions and the design of buildings.

Despite having several friends who are actively working in these fields, I admit that it is sometimes very difficult to understand what it is that they actually do (besides organize, attend, and speak at conferences). Many of them have backgrounds in architecture, and almost all of them are avidly reading Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, Archigram, Situationists - all of this neglected literature from the 60s and 70s that architects themselves had almost forgotten, in our (perhaps bubble-powered) accelerated criticality (and the inevitable post).

So there are all of these people moving in this direction, and there are a few general observations that are worth making about that:

- They seem to think that they have something to learn from the theory and practice of architecture, so let's help them figure out what that is.

- They are creating their own discourse from scratch, outside of academia. Architectural discourse has been supported by schools for so long that it is difficult to remember any other way. The fields of Service and Interaction Design seem to be supported by something more like the feudal corporate patronage structure that architects relied on in the Renaissance. That's very interesting, no? Not the least because despite any purse or apron strings linking them to the corporate world, they still seem to want to talk about ideas, even some of the more out-there quasi-marxist corners of critical theory that academic architects like to frequent. That's kind of fun, right?

- They have no history. Though some might disagree, this is probably a good thing for now (but not for much longer).

- They bring an entrepreneurial startup culture with them. A lot of the work in this area is coming directly out of computer science by way of the old dot.com and web 2.0 pathways, but the thing is, these aren't the casualties, they are the survivors. Many of the people involved with these offices have lived through several busts, and they are thriving. They know about venture capital, public offerings, and bootstrapping. They have business plans. This is kind of exciting, yeah?

For Archinect's '09 predictions last year, I hoped that there would be this massive flow outward from architecture to other disciplines: underemployed architects as secret agents, implanting methodologies into other fields from the inside out. It hasn't happened. Instead, we've lost even more ground to others who are doing the things we do, and it's like the song says: "... to better-looking people with better ideas and more talent ... and they're actually really, really nice." They want to be friends, they want to talk about cities and buildings.

So in the New Year, let's all spend more time hanging out: architects can trade some of our thoughts on cultural context, historicity, and the public realm for some of you all's ideas about agility, narrative, strategery, and business planning, and we'll all hopefully learn a lot.

RC V-D_s

RC V-D_s, originally uploaded by ske765book.

Circles x Voronoi/Delaunay. This will be the last of the circles drawings for a little while. The complete series is on the Baker Artist Award site here.

RC-1a

Untitled-1a, originally uploaded by ske765book.

Ziger/Snead's Classroom of the Future

I've just posted a medium-sized writeup of my office's entry to Architecture for Humanity's Classroom of the Future challenge. This was a fun quick case study, based on the principle that every element should serve at least two functions (or even better, three or four), and that the whole piece should act as one integral machine, made of off-the-shelf components.

A Brief Sketch Concerning Monsters

Given that there are things out there, in the spaces between concept and matter and social messiness, we recognize the Monster as distinct from (in an incomplete list) the Diagram, the Machine, and the Ghost, in the following ways:

A Monster is a complex, hybrid, semi-autonomous thing whose actions are unpredictable, but interpretable. Monsters can behave destructively if their motives are misunderstood, but if a Monster is seen as an actor within a larger, unfolding story or narrative, and if the maker is able to recognize and work within that same myth, then the unpredictablilty of the Monster becomes productive. Examples include Frankenstein (yes, that's his name), Godzilla, and the Sea Serpent. It is primarily a set of agencies.

[[[A small piece of a larger thing, more later, but quick references include David Simon ("The institutions are the new Greek Gods"), H.P. Lovecraft ("vast, cool and indifferent"), Perspecta 40 {who got it wrong, but more on that to follow} ("Contemporary architecture is in many ways a monstrous thing."), Bruno Latour, ("If the demon is such a terrible threat, it is because it divides in two, if the demos is such a welcome solution, it is because it divides in two."), ZORK ("It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue."), and of course, k-punk ("To call capital a 'self-engendering monster' is not at all to speak metaphorically.")]]]

Baker Artist Awards 2010

Voronoi Square Magnets, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

Putting this out on all channels: there's now a pretty complete collection of my drawing and installation work on the Baker Artist website: link. Regular followers of this site will see a few things I've posted before, but it's great to have it all in one place and arranged in way that (kind of) makes sense. Check it out, and if you like it, vote for it. (The whole site is great actually, tons of amazing work, and a sophisticated interface and backend)

For more on the above drawing, see this explanation.

Constellation Energy

(photos by Eric Leshinsky)

This is an installation for Axis Alley, an open air exhibit in Baltimore, curated by Sarah Doherty in the fall of 09. The site for the show is a nameless (literally) alley street between Hargrove and Calvert, running north/south for only three blocks in the Lower Charles Village neighborhood. The majority of the houses backing up to the alley are vacant, and most of these are owned by the city of Baltimore. The alley, and the backyards of the houses, are visited by drug users, prostitutes with clients, the homeless, and anyone else looking for a temporary quiet spot off the busy north/south streets that cut through these blocks.



The lights are solar powered pool floats, they comprise a light detecting diode, a light emitting diode, a small solar panel, and a battery. During the day, they soak up sunlight, at night, they give off a soft blue glow, more atmospheric than functional. Another series of solar powered LEDs was reconstructed from a set of christmas lights. These were taken apart, soldered back together with extra wire, and threaded through the mat of wild vegetation in the yard, forming another network on the ground.

The title of the project, Constellation Energy, is a nod to the local power company, and also a kind of personal shorthand to help think about ideas of sustainability and autonomy. In an imaginary green world, where every household can use their own energy, grow their own food, and recycle their own waste - where every unit is potentially a closed loop like each of these lights, what are the motivators that bring the nodes together?



A lot of this was heavily influenced, conceptually and visually, by an older piece from Bryan Boyer that I've never been able to get out of my head: Form Follows Fable. Boyer suggests that it's the power of stories in the cultural imagination that forms and reforms the network:

"To be comfortable telling stories is to desire a shared existence, a "we" amongst the autonomous stars, that is OK with continual re-invention and happy to be part of multiple constellations."

(image by Bryan Boyer)

On the site, other things got linked into the network: the big Ailanthus tree, the powerlines and cable TV wires that criscrossed the airspace overhead and clung opportunistically to the masonry walls, the other vegetation that intertwined itself in turn with all of that, forming fat braids with the cords which were then wrapped with copper mounting wire from the glowing spheres, the vines that sprout leaves to catch the sun and then bud off into brightly colored berries.



I never saw the space finished and glowing, these photos at the head of this post were taken by a friend. This is a project that was complete for less than 24 hours. Sarah, the curator, was watching me wire the lowest light to a chainlink fence when she predicted: "someone's going to come along and smash that with a brick". By the next evening, that's exactly what had happened, and by the time I made it out to the site to replace it, all of the globes wtihin easy (even some in not-so-easy) reach had been stolen. The copper was cleanly snipped with wirecutters. Someone had even taken the small solar panel for the lights on the ground. By the time I had returned again with replacement lights, mounting them all overhead with a ladder, the feral vegetation that sheltered the smaller lights had been weedwhacked, short fragments of wire and broken LEDs were mixed everywhere with shredded Paulownia.


(photo by Sarah Doherty)

Other friends pointed out the unintentional resonances with the human environment that I had overlooked: these vacant houses had likely already been hit by scrappers, looters who strip houses of all the wiring and piping that can be ripped from the walls. In that context, copper wire wasn't the best choice as a mounting system. Maybe worse - the blue lights, again, unintentionally, looked a lot like the iconic blue light police cameras that are all over the city. These are known colloquially as 'blueberries' and are so recognizable that people base halloween costumes on them.

This is all well. It's a space that is probably someone's outdoor temporary home. In one sense, this unasked-for light, however pretty, is the light that invites destruction. It is the thing that effects change in the environment that then asks for reaction and change in kind. If it can't survive that reaction, then it doesn't deserve to be in public. And in still another sense, as these lights start to act like plants - soaking in sunlight, clinging to and intertwining with their environment, it's appropriate that they are then treated like plants - they are trimmed, clipped, and even harvested.

As interesting as it is to think about iconic (or even atmospheric) objects dissolving into the networks of formal resonance and systemic connection that create and sustain them, it's useful to remember that there are always other contexts and networks present, too, overlapping and invisible, but no less relevant than the ones we seek to address directly and dialogue with.



[[For more on Axis Alley, see the flickr photo pool here, or the Baltimore Sun slideshow here and story here, for more outdoor installation art, see Invasive Species]]

Circles

This is an open question: What is this fractal? It's a method for filling a 2D plane with circles in an orderly way - circles made of circles, all the way down. There are published examples of similar systems, like the Apollonian Gasket, the Kleinian Groups, Indra's Pearls, but I've never seen this particular arrangement before, and I've been looking for over ten years. Is this a trivial variation on something already known? Or a new and undiscovered thing? I have no idea. I found it while doodling in math class.



As a teenager in the 90s, my brain was warped and wrinkled by rave flyers, computer graphics, and pop science. I remember zooming in and out of the Julia Set on an Amiga 500 while still in middle school. In high school, these patterns were reinforced with heavy doses of techno music, Mondo 2000, and chaos theory. Hence the embarassing caption to the drawing above, which was made in college calculus class. At the University of Maryland, they wouldn't let anyone enter the architecture major without a B or higher in calculus. It took me three tries. If someone had sat me down and said "look, calculus is all about the always-imossible reconciliation between the grid and the curve, a constant becoming that has to get infinitismally small before its realization," then, I might've got it the first time round.



When the architecture faculty introduced us to Autocad, one of the first things I did with it was to try drawing this thing accurately. The basic rule is to draw a circle around every intersection, which creates four more intersections, and so four more circles, always smaller than the last round. What I couldn't figure out in sketchbooks was whether or not the space left over would be circular too, and whether the centers of the circles were really precisely at the intersections, or shifted slightly. These questions were related - shifting the centers made for circular voids, but I couldn't decide if that was breaking too many rules, or if the whole thing really hung together like it seemed to.



The trick that made it work was an inversion - in Autocad, it's impossible to draw the filled circles around the intersections first, without knowing where the centers really are, but it's possible to draw the voids first and work backwards from there. One of Autocad's many methods for drawing circles is as a three point snap. For any three points, there is one and only one circle that hits all of them - circumcircles, again. And luckily, one of the Object Snap (OSNAP!) settings is tangent to a curve; this means that you can easily draw a circle that's tangent to three other curves, without doing the math. Not that this drawing was easy, the image at the head of this post is a print from a .dwg with over 10,000 objects, the iterations are 9 levels deep.



This view of a hand drawn version shows the two types of circles, filled and void. The whole pattern could be made from either all filled, or all empty; the other kind is emergent from the constant reiteration of the one. The trick of drafting the thing by hand is again all about finding the right tools, and then reckoning. For the larger circles here, I improvised with a thumbtack and a piece of wire, the intermediate were drawn with a compass, the smaller were done with a circle template (always tricky to find one at the right radius), and the very smallest were filled in freehand.



The hardest part of building the thing by hand is to find a center and a radius that will hit all of the adjacent circles at a tangent. In these drawings, I'm trying again and again to find some kind of geometric or proportional rule that will locate the next center point, and while there were a few promising patterns at the larger scale, they all broke down eventually, leaving trial and error as the only way through, but stll it works. That's why this is partially a plea to anyone else who might have more quantitative information about these geometries: help put this in context. What kind of thing is it?



(for more process drawings, click here)

Closed Loop

closed loop, originally uploaded by ske765book.

Closed loop ecosystem diagram for a Stanford Torus space colony of 10,000. From T.A. Heppenheimer's Colonies in Space.

Mapping the D.center

Organizational mappings for the D.center Baltimore, produced in the spring of '09 by Jillian Erhardt and Ryan LeCluyse, from MICA's Center for Design Practice.

Crossposted from the D.center blog, posting it here partly because I really like this set of diagrams, and I think they look great lined up in thumbnail form. It's interesting to note that, as is fitting for a quasiexistent entity, operating through a kind of applied decentralization, these diagrams are almost all reducible to some form of directional graph. And as such, they remind me of the work of Mark Lombardi, about whom I've been reading a lot lately, more to follow on that.

Design Convo #12: BIKES

Please join us for Design Conversation #12 : BIKES this Thursday evening.

Open discussion on frame building, bicycle design, bicycle infrastructure, bike collectives, bike lanes, and all things cycling. A/V system available for impromptu presentations. Free; cash bar. See attached.


Thursday October 8 2009
The Windup Space - 10 W North Ave @ Charles Street
6:30 pm - 8:30 pm


Questions? ben.stone@gmail.com | thewindupspace@gmail.com | blog.dcenterbaltimore.com

Please note that DC 12 has been shifted from the usual first Wednesday of the month to the first Thursday.

Analog Voronoi Grid Distortion with Magnets

Using a magnetically distorted grid of washers as input sites for the Voronoi diagram.



(See also: How to: Draw the Voronoi Diagram)

2009-09-20 21.01.44.jpg

2009-09-20 21.01.44.jpg, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

How to: Draw the Voronoi Diagram

As has been written here before, Voronoi diagrams, as a geometric model are fascinating because they can be used to describe almost literally everything: from cell phone networks to radiolaria, at every scale: from quantum foam to cosmic foam. Even the regular lattices and solids, cubes, tetrahedra, and the ways in which they combine, can all be seen as special cases of three dimensional Voronoi. It's hard not to get mystical about it, but it's really just the contemporary equivalent of the endless ideal gridded space of modernism or the renaissance, just more exotic and malleable. Geometry is Culture.

Drawing Voronoi diagrams by hand has renewed my interest in the stuff. There are lots of scripts out there for making instant vector crystal foam in just about any modeling or CAD platform, but it's more interesting for me right now to slow it down, take it step by step, and really try to understand the geometries involved. More a heuristic than an algorithm, executing it demands and reinforces the kind of zoned out close attention that almost becomes the whole point of drawing in the first place. The artifact that you get at the end it is just an unexpected bonus: the physical record left by the process of thinking out loud on paper. Below is a rough pseudocode (thanks, mike!) for building it up from a set of points.


(1) Input Sites (2) Connect Nearest Neighbors (shortest line wins) (3) Find Center Points
(4) Draw Perpendicular Bisectors (5) Trace Cells (6) voila

(1) The input points, step one, are called sites, labeled here A, B, C, etc.

(2) The next step is to connect the sites to all of their nearest neighbors without making a line that crosses another. This is known technically as the Delauney Triangulation, and it's maybe the most difficult part. One way to do it might be by brute force - connect every site to every other site, make a true all-to-all rhizomatic meshwork, and then start deleting lines that are too long. This is how a machine might attack the problem, but it becomes too hard for a human to execute when the number of sites jumps into the double digits. Another algorithmic method is to start with a test triangle of sites and draw their circumcircle, the circle that hits all three sites, rejecting the triangle if the circle contains another site within it.


Image via wikipedia

This also takes too long, and circumcircles are hard to draw, so I found a method that's faster, and still mostly accurate. Since no lines on the Delauney triangulation can cross, just eyeball it until you run into a condition as in the above, where you have to decide if FD or AE is correct, the shorter line always wins. This is obvious in the example, but sometimes this needs some careful measuring in the field.

(3) Step three is to find and mark the centerpoint of every line on the Delauney graph.

(4) The fourth step is to draw the perpendicular bisector for each Delauney line. This is where careful accuracy, in finding the centerpoints, and in drawing a tight 90 degree angle, pays off. If everything has been done correctly, there will always be three lines converging at a point, unless the input sites are on a perfectly regular rectangular grid. Drawing the last line of the three and watching it land exactly where it's supposed to is extremely satisfying. Watching it miss can mean going back all the way to step two and flipping the Delauney graph for the triangle. Some mistakes are instructive, reminding you to take your time and think about the moves, but some are more interesting, for being completely inexplicable. A few places in these drawings, I've run into conditions that should work out, but just don't: evidence of some hidden monster in the process, a flaw in the heuristic, or a breakdown of the pseudocode.

(5) The fifth step is to retrace the outline of each Voronoi cell from the perpendicular bisectors. There will be one cell for every site, and at the end, each cell is just the set of all surface area points that are closer to its site than any of the other sites, as illustrated in the last panel: A' -> A, B' -> B, etc.

(6) Sit back and congratulate yourself while contemplating your hard earned tangle of fat distorted honeycomb.



I've found in practice that it's best to use different colors for the input sites, the Delauney lines, and the bisectors, unless driving yourself completely crosseyed mad is something you have the time and inclination to do. Blue and red mechanical pencil leads are pretty easy to get. I made this drawing to practice, using a pepper grinder above the drafting table to get random input sites:



The wall drawing below was made for the Current Gallery's Abandon Ship show. It measures about 3' x 5'. The input sites here were the roughly patched holes and marks left by all the previous exhibits and shows in the space's three year existence as a gallery. Before that, the building was a chocolate factory. This piece will be demolished along with the rest of the show when (if) plans move ahead to build a hotel on the site. I was very glad to get the chance to do a wall drawing, having just visited again, for the second time, Sol LeWitt's ephemeral 'Drawing Series—Composite, Part I–IV, #1–24, A+B' at Dia Beacon. These pieces foreground the disconnect and shifts between the different types of time at play here: the almost instantaneous time of conception, the time spent to absorb the system, process the clues, unlock and understand the method, and the implied slow time spent to execute the drawing itself: a person, on a scaffold, pulling graphite repeatedly across painted gypsum. I wonder if the assistants were well paid.



The five hours or so it took to carry out the Current Gallery piece were well spent: not an all nighter, but a late nighter. Friends brought food and beer, with other people coming and going, cutting holes in the building's floor, plastering the backside with xeroxed drawings, and making Seussian maggots crawl from the walls and ceiling.

[[Edit: If anyone else has tried this, put some pics of it on the web and post a link in the comments]]

[[[Edit 2: for more, see also: Analog Voronoi Grid Distortion with Magnets]]]

View Night Small

View Night Small, originally uploaded by ske765book.

Installation proposal for Axis Alley

Anatomy of a Container Ship

Anatomy of a Container Ship, originally uploaded by ske765book.

3000 years worth of Urban Form: A (too brief and easy) History

(partly from notes on the Urban Development as Counterinsurgency lecture by John Duda of the Baltimore Free School)

Grids as a simple way to control the landscape – Stars as a spiky outer shell – Cracks as the fabric within the shell is compressed and densified – Networks as this dense fabric is reopened and ventilated – Flows for the density to drain further – Softness of the regulatory and fiscal pressures that continue to drive the flow – Holes open up as the fabric is vacated … and now, the dominant formal strategy seems to be all about the infilling or refilling of those holes, along with the repurposing of the scrap left behind.