This blog is a research platform organizing projects, examples, and thoughts surrounding the idea of an urban mapping which reads the city as a network of individual activities and relationships in time rather than as a static form. This research looks at the city both from within and from above as kind of urban cat-scan. 


Friday, November 04, 2011

Video: A Murmuration of Starlings - The Atlantic



Video: A Murmuration of Starlings - The Atlantic

This fascinating video of birds in flight is a great visual example of the power of group dynamics in perceiving and synchronizing instantly. According to Brandon Keim from Wired, these like crystal formation and avalanches are "systems poised on the brink, capable of near-instantaneous transformation" and are called "scale-free correlation".

Saturday, March 26, 2011

Living Axon and Datascapes- 90,000 hours of A/V analyzed



I have not posted in a while as I have been so busy with too many exciting projects. I have come across many things that belong in this blog but today's find led me to post again. This project by Deb Roy of MIT (via a former student) touches on various layers of the research and experiments I and my students have been working on. I saw in it pieces of so many of our experiments which all started with a/v which eventually became the origination of this blog. This project by Roy, The Birth of a Word, has a fascinating example of the data that can be drawn out of audio and video imagery and how it can inform us. It also shows a bit of experimentation with how the imagery can be filtered in order to become useful. I am terming the imagery where you move through the house as "Living Axonometric", in the spirit of one of our projects, "Living Section".