Elastic Centroids

Back at the end of June, I visited the geographic center of New York City. It's a pleasant spot, under the elevated portion of the J. The summertime afternoon light filters down, and bounces off the brightly colored signs and storefronts that line the long run of Broadway. Right at the corner, there's a classic Fenced Lot.





If you need an excuse to see it for yourself, here's a good one: it's part of Neil Freeman's Centroids and Asphalt, created for the Elastic City series of walks. Freeman's work, often with GIS and graphics software, is generated from the difficult-to-see geographic, historic, and material data that compose the structures and streets of cities. The large scale patterns and forms that Freeman finds here are somehow comfortingly familiar and displacingly beautiful at the same time.



(All Streets, Centered, Chicago, by Neil Freeman)


Neil's walk integrates these same concerns: material flow, plant and animal life, social history, and organizational geometry - all in real world terms, all within a few blocks of central Brooklyn.





The best thing about this exploration is that it's conducted *with* the walk's participants, rather than *to* them. A session in front of a rowhouse, listing the inputs and outputs of one specific building, had us all speculating about the difference between a private monopoly and a public utility, privileges and rights, discrete deliveries and continuous flows ...

As Elastic City's founder, Todd Shalom, says in this interview with Neil and Urban Omnibus:

"Walking tours bore me– that’s what podcasts are for. In contrast to traditional walking tours, which seem to re-tell somebody’s or some group’s past experience through data and facts, Elastic City walks strive for a more embodied experience in the present moment. These walks offer to widen the perspectives for participants."

Neil's walk will be held a few more times throughout the end of the summer. There's one tomorrow.

Some Notes

2010-08-02 16.18.20, originally uploaded by ske765book.

More with less: managerial and visionary expertise to examine existing inventories, find efficiencies, and build consensus around reconfiguration.

We like cheap because we like the aesthetics of efficiency.

Moving between disciplines requires a special kind of work in translation and metaphor.

Small and/or weird, and/or free

“Kill the brand, transfer the equity.”

Using default , conservative language to reinforce search engine results, talking to machines, not humans.

“In the bubble”

“Actionable”

“Mission Driven”

Show us what we are and we tell you it’s wrong, we want to be seen as the kind of thing that we aspire to.

Show us who we think we are (Show us what we want to be).

Means over Ends: We draw something that looks cool, without remembering that it looks cool because it’s rare, and it’s rare because it’s expensive. When the time comes to figure out the implementation, we talk ourselves out of it because of the expense and difficulty.

In house labor is cheaper than field labor.

“This is unique, this is a parking garage in Kansas City.” “Do you like it?” “Yeah, it’s different.”

Different variation of a theme: discrete elements hung on an abstract diagram. Switching back and forth between levels, accepting givens and then exploding them to modify them at a global level. No, exploding is different, exploding is “make unique”, embedding something in the world at the next lower level. Editing the rules is fundamentally different, jumping one level up. Model lines and symbolic lines, an overlay of cognition back onto perception. You need a limited reference space (with a scale, conventions, etc.) in order to create and manipulate *stuff*.

We present the big ideas and people either decide they like them or not, then we spend two hours talking about details and politics of parking or carpets or something.

“Slipping” in reference to a deadline implies the future is a pit, an event as something hanging on the edge, slipping down. An indefinite delay or cancellation as a bottomless drop, like falling up into the sky …

These projects generate collateral eddies and flows, that are sometimes tangential to the primary direction, and sometimes swell up and swamp the original vector.

“My favorite reports.”

Ancient Magical Invocation of Doom: “Okay, we’re done, all we have to do now is print.”

“That way we’re improving student life, which was our fourth priority! Oh wait, that’s our third priority, increasing storage space was our fourth.”

Object --> #^# <-- Field

Less new construction, more internal rearrangement – phasing, planning, and adaptive reuse.

Thinking Small.

“They don’t learn to be better designers, they learn to be better operators.”

“Openness to an open-ended process.”

Those moments in meetings where people say: “what do we do next?”

Sphären_a

Sphären_a, originally uploaded by ske765book.

Just a quick update to point at a new collection of my drawing and photography work assembled on Cargo Collective: link. Those following same here will see a few new things.

Also, there's a tumblr that I finally started using: 7UM6L5

Bigger and better news soon ...

Adaptive Reuse

I'm thrilled to have an article in the current issue of the ACM's Interactions Magazine: Adaptive Reuse: Things, Containers, and Streets in the Architecture of the Social Web. Many thanks to Contributing Editor Molly Steenson for assistance and advice.

From at least the advent of the homepage, the words used to describe online places have been explicitly architectural and urban. If online organizational structures and real-world architecture have anything in common, this set of similarities has nothing to do with the qualities of form, space, and material that are usually appreciated in buildings. To speak in terms of information architecture, or cyberspace, is inadequate to describe the ways in which all of these structures, built or unbuilt, are produced and sustained by the social and economic systems that surround them.

The piece is, in many ways, a companion to an older article, from 2006, written as the result of a semester long research project in social media, enclosure, and architectures of control: "You must be logged in to do that!":

One does not escape the physical body into a noncorporeal cyberspace as a jailed man escapes from a prison into the wide world. If a body is recomposed as information, it is all the more subject to the specialized techniques of control: distributed surveillance, data aggregation, and the continuous modulation of production and access.

In the newer piece for Interactions, I'm particularly grateful to be able to reference some unpublished work by two friends and colleagues: Kio Stark's recasting of 'users' as 'constituents' returns the production of place into a more humanistic and democratic context; and Eric Leshinsky's usage of the term 'cultural containers' condenses the essential isomorphisms in the way spatial enclosure operates, both online and off.

2010-04-27 12.02.08.jpg

2010-04-27 12.02.08.jpg, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

But Today We Collect Gizmos

"To understand the advertisements which appear in the New Yorker or Gentry, one must have taken a course in Dublin literature, read a Time popularizing article on cybernetics, and have majored in Higher Chinese Philosophy and Cosmetics"
- Alison and Peter Smithson, on advertising

"Its function was to bring instant order or human comfort into a situation which had previously been an undifferentiated mess."

- Reyner Banham, on gizmos

To respond to a problem, it's necessary to bring some kind of model to bear on it, and be ready to discard or change that model if it isn't working. A gizmo is a temporary, easily available, means of organizing an undifferentiated continuum. We collect gizmos because we need to bring many models to bear on the problems we are presented with.

Underneath lies that basic confusion about the American Network landscape - is it a wilderness, or a paradise? For us it would be the objects on the beaches, the piece of paper blowing about the street, the throw-away object and the pop package.

The landscape is informational, the desert is networked. If it is all constructed, or at least made from parts of constructs, the ground can be mined for patterns. Even the navigational gizmos themselves are little else but temporary constellations within social, material, and informational networks. There is the persistent rumor that the skins of the Powerbook G4 and the Guggenheim Bilbao were only feasible to produce during a global dip in titanium prices, after Russia flooded the market in the late 90s. Tablet computers are nothing if not devices to sort through the tangle of text and publishing outlets available, and bring reading back under some kind of manageable control.

Ordinary life is receiving a powerful impulse from a new source. Where thirty years ago architects found in the field of the popular arts mechanical engineering technique and formal stimuli, today we are being edged out of our traditional role by the new phenomena of popular arts advertising interdisciplinary consulting.

Unlike the singular, algorithmic machine, which allows only the variation of parameters, the gizmo is multiple, modifiable, hackable, even (especially) disposable, it is in permanent beta. It is a heuristic, not an algorithm: not the be-all, but the good-enough. The minimum of skill is required in its installation and use, and it is independent of any physical or social infrastructure beyond that which can be ordered from a catalogue and delivered to its prospective user.

The application of a heuristic gizmo is an act of pattern recognition - the intuition that some set of undifferentiated circumstances is isomorphic to some other set that was previously encountered, even if the context was wildly different. A City is Not a Tree, but a maze is, or at least certain types of them are, very much like trees. Simply connected mazes are topologically identical to trees, or in another sense, circles. Mazes of this type can be navigated with a heuristic called the Right Hand Rule: tracing your right hand along the wall of a simply connected maze, you will eventually lead yourself out.

If a maze is connected in 3 dimensions, or is disjoint, other methods must be brought into play, like the Pledge Algorithm, the Random Mouse, or the Recursive Backtracker. Name it, then we'll know what it is. What if you don't know what kind of maze you're in? What if you don't even know that you're in a maze at all? The field of metaheuristics is concerned with ways of determining which heuristic is applicable to a given situation. It turns out that the best way of doing this is often trial and error, with a comprehensive collection of gizmos to draw from. Someone's got to decide whether to hit the Black Box with Maslow's Hammer or Occam's Razor.

It has been said that things hardly "exist" before the fine artist has made use of them, they are simply part of the unclassified background material against which we pass our lives. The application of gizmo metaheuristics requires a certain kind of approach to interdisciplinary work and expertise: try it first, then read the manual. Like a western tourist using chopsticks, there is an attitude of being cheerfully out of one's depth, but willing to learn, and eager to add this new technique to the repertoire and impress the folks back home.

Why certain folk art objects, historical styles, or industrial artifacts and methods become important at a particular moment cannot easily be explained. Techniques, when named, abstracted to their simplest form, and packaged up (Sears catalogue style), seem to want to travel. What can we learn about sustainability from the closed-loop space colony ecosystem diagrams of the the 1970s? How can we talk to civil engineers about the emerging trend of micropractices in stormwater management? A collection of gizmo metaheuristics enables a more fluid code-switching, and a more useful exchange of knowledge within and between disciplines.

Gropius wrote a book on grain silos,

Le Corbusier one on aeroplanes,

And Charlotte Periand brought a new

object Gundam to the office every morning,

But today we collect ads gizmos.

#lgnlgn

#endofarchitecturetexts

#remixrevisitremaster

The Plant: Inputs & Outputs

The Plant: Inputs & Outputs, originally uploaded by ske765book.

The Plant is a sustainable strategic development masterplan proposal for Baltimore. At the the building scale, The Plant is a mixed use prefab construction, containing a small meeting, office, and retail space for a nonprofit cultural institution, with apartments above. At the scale of the block, The Plant generates surplus energy for its neighbors, food from an onsite garden, and improved water quality. Income from The Plant, along with added equity from the block’s other properties, is able to effect change at the municipal level, helping fund a prefab construction supply startup, which is then able to export new techniques and technologies to other postindustrial cities in the larger region.

The Plant was created for the Baltimore Bioneers Conference in the fall of 2008, by the Visionary Green Design and Development Panel: Lisa Ferretto, Eric Leshinsky, Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, Prescott Gaylord, Thibault Manekin, & Fred Scharmen

Click Here for a fullsized version of this diagram.

Click Here for more information.

(see also)

Crossposted from D:center Baltimore for Manifesto/Manifest.

DSC07916

DSC07916, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

Triangular voronoi grid distortion with magnets - this will likely be the last of the Voronoi series for a while. View the rest on the Baker Award site, where there are only two days left to browse and vote.

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.