Minimal paths, pneumatics / Frei Otto
Cantenary Bifurcations / Thomas Wong
Artesanal Voronoi / Seven Six Five
Complex City / Lee Jang Sub
Three 3 / Kat Masback
Vector Fields / Biothing
John Whitney, Matrix III (1972), Music by Terry Riley
1982 Discovery
1983 Marlboro Country
1986 Suburban Sublime/Playboy Mystique
1989 Upward Mobility
1990 Urbanite Fantasy
Following a friend's recent interest in Thing Theory, I dug up my copy of Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things from the storeroom (not quite a junkspace but definitely a pile of space-junk). Leafing through I was reminded of the array of (typo)graphical techniques employed by the book's designer Lorraine Wild, with the visual linkage device above being my favourite.
I see this as a form of what I would call augmented textuality; a superposition of layered semantic relationships on text. Having recently read the thought-provoking iA article on bringing web design concepts to newspapers, I'm wondering if the web couldn't learn something from book designers in terms of augmentation. In this example, I think there's scope for a javascript-based implementation to draw Bezier curves between anchors in HTML using canvas to achieve the visual linkage effect.
Wild also uses type variations in a single text body to convey meaning, with a number of typefaces reserved for particular neologisms or words imbued with specialist definitions in Sterling's lexicon. I find it a bit naive/obnoxious, depends on your typographic stance. The web-based alternative might be to re-examine link typologies, since the consistency mantra in web design tends to crowd out attempts at applying multiple link styles to a single body, creating a homogeneity of linkage on a site-by-site basis that is bemusing if you take a step back. With regards to keywords and specially loaded (technical) terms however, I probably prefer the approach taken by the English language version of Henri Lefebvre's Rhythmanalysis,
The text of which possesses a good rhythm, induced by both typographic and linguistic techniques. A mix of bold and italicised emphasis abound, the former reserved for words with significantly enhanced meanings in the hands of Lefebvre. It's simple but makes a difference. That the book itself is on rhythm makes it doubly effective.
A disproportionate amount — disproportionate given how much online text I've read daily over the past decade — of the ideas that have influenced me over the years have come from books or essays. A lot of that no doubt has to do with copyright and IP, but some of it is down to the forms of communication themselves. Whereas the web has naturally gravitated towards networked/collaborative knowledge systems, the essay, in contrast, is standalone and demands sustained attention.
The essay and the academic research paper are still amongst the foremost textual knowledge communication formats around, despite having a fairly antagonistic relationship with the web, the former seemingly sidelined by the blog post and the latter still published as a PDF or print artefact. I'll reserve my ideas on modern research publishing for the web (itself such a huge topic) for another time, but I simply think there's scope to improve on these knowledge forms in Webby ways, without stripping them of their fundamental offerings. For example, I would love to see a web publishing engine dedicated to the essay form.
Here's a quick implementation of some crude augmented textuality techniques using HTML5 and Javascript, applied to a Rem Koolhaas essay, the hyperbolic diatribe, Junkspace, from 2001:
→ View Augmented Junkspace Demo
The techniques are completely web native (though you'll need recent versions of Firefox, Chrome or Safari to view them). You could argue this is no longer an essay but a thinly disguised term frequency vector smattered with relational graphics, a set of wordnets or a pliable series of strings. Perhaps. I would apologise to Rem if it wasn't a calculated attempt at altering the state of the text through superposition, an uninvited act of post-production.
If you're an IE user, I guess you can make do with this graphic for now:
- Michael Jackson, Original Solo Recordings, 1972-1997 (view medium size, view large size)
Last week I was at Music Hackday, messing around with music data at The Guardian offices in Kings Cross, London. The outcome is this Michael Jackson doughnut, which spans the whole of his solo recording career, showing which of his tracks have been the most popular & loved by Last.fm listeners, as well as which releases have been the most influential and loved. The graphic was programmatically produced and could be produced for other artists quite easily.
Some notes on how to read this information graphic: The size of each slice is proportional to the number of plays of that particular track or release compared to the total number of plays of Michael Jackson's material on Last.fm. The darkness of the slice indicates how loved that track or album is by the listener base. Tracks are organised by album, by date, starting with his first solo record, Ben, from 1972.
Some notes on the metrics: The graphic takes into account 6 months worth of Last.fm listening data, that's 3,606,823 individual plays of his tracks by 1,432,458 listeners worldwide. The loving data spans a shorter time period, a little over two months; this period contains data which falls both before and after his death. The love data for releases is normalised by track count, so the darkness of the blue hue expresses the average number of loves per track on said release.
In the case of (countless) albums featuring re-releases of original works, such as Number Ones, I have aggregated play counts and merged them into a single play count for the original recording (e.g. Billie Jean). This is why you don't see releases like HiStory (Book 1) or The Essential Michael Jackson in the graphic. The playcounts on original tracks which are featured on those records, however, do contribute to the tracks shown in the graphic, as I'm trying to get a feel for which of his original recordings are the most influential overall.
Some notes on the tech: I spent much of the 4-8 hours it took to produce the software coming up with ways of cleaning the data. The gap in the doughnut represents the proportion of plays which relate to live versions, endless remixes (official & unofficial) and collaborations (duets etc). I chose to keep these in the dataset in order to represent proportionally how much attention goes towards that kind of material. I also stripped a lot of seemingly badly tagged, or dubiously attributed tracks using a bunch of filters aided by my observation of the dataset. I used simple Levenshtein distances to merge tracknames together and a few simple transforms to help the merging process. The merging operation was crucial because some tracks have been officially re-released over 30 times and the metadata can vary a little each time. The graphic was produced using PHP & Actionscript with JSON as the transport mechanism between the two.
Popularity and love data is from Last.fm, release dates are from Musicbrainz and Discogs was used for authoritative discographic data.
Lastly, just a note on the motivation - MJ was primarily a childhood experience for me (I was 6 when Bad was released), and the hours I've spent with the dataset have given me the time to reflect on what a grip his older material has had on my generation's collective identity. As the notion of a mainstream, backed as it is by broadcast media, gives way to thousands of niches in disparate networks, it's hard not to see MJ as a relic of an age of mass cultural experience that is slowly receding into the distance. R.I.P. MJ.
I wrote a patch in 2003 to draw Lindenmayer (L-system) root structures. I recently re-visited it to play around with it. I've posted an image gallery, as well as other approaches to representing L-systems (series b, series c) and the Actionscript source code as part of a library including source for generating the kind of flakes I posted back in December. Code for generating cellular automata structures will be added to the library in due course.
The interface between natural and synthetic structures raises its own questions about what we perceive as natural - we have an increasingly volatile conception of nature, and perceptions will alter radically over the coming years and decades thanks to genomics. I like the play in Autechre's EP covers, which are rigorously 'programmed' but betray some resemblance to natural formations,
I overdosed on xmas spirit and found myself writing a patch that draws pentagonic snowflakes. Feliz navidad.
The cosmic General Assembly, Chandigarh, designed by Le Corbusier
On this last trip to India I took some time out to wander North, to Chandigarh, the Punjabi capital. It's a 50's modernist urban planning experiment commissioned by Nehru on the dawn of the partition, as a psychological replacement for Lahore, offered as the state capital to the displaced Hindus and Sikhs. My family were largely displaced from Lahore and the surrounding areas, and some of them ended up in Chandigarh.
An Indian garden city inspired by the Chicago school of urban planners, Chandigarh was conceived and executed by a number of Europeans and Americans, finally (and most famously) by Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre, who, together with a number of Indian architects, worked on a completely integrated design solution for the modern Indian city, from bus stop to manhole design to theatres & cinemas, administrative buildings, residential blocks, commercial complexes and transport infrastructure. This is planning from scratch, on an overwhelming scale.
Top: The Secratariat façade, Middle: General Assembly detail, Bottom: Original tape showing the 'modulor' measurement scale
I was surprised to find Corb's writings to show a deep contemplation of proportion - he talks of building Chandigarh "in human proportions" and applies this to everything from road length to window dividers, tree height to about 10 different scales and qualities of housing. He used his own measurement scale ('modulor') based on the golden ratio, devised a set of traffic categorisation principles to be used in road layouts and oversaw the construction of an artificial lake and landscaped areas of the city. I've generally regarded Corb's inability to execute a usable, human architecture problematic but in this project he evidently injected a lot of useful ideas alongside his sheer intellectual energy. His cousin worked on Chandigarh until his death (long after Corb had returned to Europe) and is probably the unsung hero of the project.
Top: The city pavilion, Middle: Corb on Sukhna Lake, Bottom: Sukhna Lake today
I came away thinking of Chandigarh as a quiet triumph, in that it largely delivers and functions; utopian visions giving way to pleasant, usable spaces. The overriding aesthetic of unmaintained cubes of concrete is stunning, the landscaped areas put to good use by the residents, the traffic and housing density incredibly low by Indian standards, the noise pollution well contained. Astonishingly, much modern private residential housing in the city seems to have absorbed the modernist aesthetic (Corb's trademark strip windows are a particular favourite), as if the immersion in the lines, façades, materials & forms of the original architects has somehow overcome the place, gripping it despite the decades that have passed.
As you wander around, you are slowly overcome with a quiet sense of well-being that I can only attribute to a consistent design vision carried out on an unprecedented scale. If nothing else, it's an affirmation of the central role of design in all aspects of everyday life.
Top: Corbusier's 'Open Hand' logo for the city, Middle: High Court building, Bottom: A commercial block in the pedestrianised city center
There is consciously very little sensitivity to Indian tradition in the design of Chandigarh - Corb built a cosmic general assembly building that takes inspiration from Mughal endeavours past, but other than that, the city was from day one to be a "new city, unfettered by the traditions of the past" (Nehru). This place of 800K inhabitants, which was conceived on a completely empty plot of land in 1949, despite its grubby look and feel, still seems ahead of its time in today's smog-ridden, noise-polluted, poorly zoned urban India.
Interestingly, Chandigarh has been listed as a potential UNESCO World Heritage site, something which I imagine would have appalled Corbusier; a spirit ever in favour of creation over preservation.
Hand-crafted on the cusp of the digital age, this poster has been re-printed by Blanka from the original drawn in 1968 by Wim Crouwel. I like his alphabets.
I reject the argument that ornament increases the pleasures of life of a cultivated person, or that it is beautiful. I prefer undecorated gingerbread. Modern people will understand.
Above: Spread from 'Tokyo and my Daughter'. Below: Images from 'Tokyo Suburbia'
Takashi Homma is a japanese photographer. I really like 'Tokyo And My Daughter' and 'Tokyo Suburbia'. He's about to publish a volume which aggregates a selection of his work on Tokyo to date.
Three Landscape Studies (2004)
Studies in Cellular Automata
Using a Cellular Automata program I wrote a couple of years back. Click on a thumb for a larger version.
Three of the following interface elements are from the new look Delicious, and the other three are from Flickr.
Hieronymous Bosch, Center panel, 'The Garden of Earthly Delights', circa 1504
Worth seeing in in the context of the entire triptych and with the shutters closed. Bosch has consistently fascinated me for a decade now (I've been lucky enough to see originals of his in Venice and Madrid), and I finally got round to picking up a great publication on Bosch's life & work.
A parquet deformation is a continuously evolving tessellation. This one is taken from Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas
Carsten Nicolai processes muzak culled from hotels, airports & in-flight airline programs in xerrox.
I love the Guardian front-page redesign. I find it immensely browsable, with enough points of focus and the right balance of images and text. What other mainstream newspaper would invite Fidel Castro to blog on their site? (Link)
This image is copyright David Shrigley. Don't even think about it. The lawyers will come with their stoats.
It's been on my mind.
For those who like bears and fractals (if this isn't you i suggest a long hard spell of reflection) - i bring you the bear/fractal/mode page. The animation is from this collection of fractals.