| |
|
| |
The Mother City |
| |
| |
October - December 08 |
| These pages are updated on an ongoing basis with the progress of my MFA Documentary Media thesis project. My thesis advisors are Alex Bal and Steve Daniels. David Green has also been of great help with this project. |
| |
| ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ |
| Ocotober 7, 2008 |
 |
| |
Figure 21: Example of width and height measurement. |
| |
|
| |
 |
| |
Figure 22: While pulling routes on Google maps, I came across these two suburban conditions. The houses that line the arterial road (seen here second from the right) turn their backs to the road, rather than the previously traditional front facing orientation. Also sidewalks are reduced from two to one.
This has an impact on choosing routes. In order to obtain an accurate reading of the elevation intended for the public I'm going to have to intentionally deviate from the otherwise more direct routes while travelling through suburbs of this nature. |
| |
|
| |
 |
| |
Figure 23: I'm currently retrieving the city limits for each of the 22 cities to be documented (New York pictured here). The strategy for the driving route is currently to drive from city limits 'A', to the tallest building, to city limits 'B' (choosing the two points at city limits with the greatest distance between them). The route will incorperate _____ (number) of attributes described in each of Le Corbusier's and Wrights' conceptual elements of a well functioning city. |
| |
|
| ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ |
| October 8, 2008 |
 |
| |
Figure 24: Cities to be documented in The Mother City as of October 8, 2008. |
| |
|
| |
Safety: As I've been tracing driving routes through each city, I've had to confront the issue of safety while driving through dangerous neighbourhoods in certain American cities. One solution to the problem of safety is to just omit the unsafe cities and go to only cities that will not cause safety issues. Another is to look atradiating lines of Toronto, doing an analsis of only Toronto. I'm currenly leaning more towards the first solution, so I'm now trying to find out which are the cities to avoid. |
| |
|
Data collection routes:
X Toronto
Ottawa
X Montreal
Quebec
Buffalo
Rochester
X Boston
Providence
Hartford
X New York
X Philadelphia
Baltimore
Washington
Detroit
X Chicago
Milwaukee
Indianapolis
Louisville
Cincinnati
Columbus
Pittsburgh
Cleveland
Those marked with an X are the 6 cities that I will be beginning with, and adding to if necessary. |
| |
| ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ |
| October 22, 2008 |
 |
| |
Figure 25: I've been saying for quite a while now that people are not represented in this project--but after taking a second look at my test images it is clear that they are in fact represented quite clearly. Click the image to see in greater detail. |
| |
|
| |
 |
| |
Figure 26: Installation mockup. Changed as of October 29, 2008. After re-evaluating my thesis statement I found that this installation scheme did not deliver an appropriate environment in which to concieve of the metropolis in its entirety. I imagine that it would in fact reinforce the problem of fragmentation given the inablity to see each of the monitors in the same field of vision. |
| |
|
 |
| |
Figure 27 : Installation scheme, corresponds to figure 26. The installation environment will have 22 LCD monitors arranged side by side, spaced evenly around the circumfrance of the space. One speaker will be placed above each of these monitors. Each speaker, and the monitor below it will depict a representation of a city. |
| |
| ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ |
|
 |
| Figure 27 (#2): This was a briefly toyed with scheme for the installation. It has been rejected for a number of reasons including difficulty managing the volume of content requred if using portable DVD players the desire to create many installments with individual directives instead of one piece with multiple directives. |
| ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ |
| November 6, 2008 |
 |
| |
Figures 28 & 29: I'm currently trying to output my sketches to .mov files but I'm having difficulty with the resolution in the videos. The problem is a strange one though: the sketch looks great, the .mov file on my computer doesn't, but when I uploaded it to my website and played it from that server it looks ok. See that video here. |
| |
 |
| |
|
| ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ |
| November 8, 2008 |
 |
| |
Figure 30 : This is the beginnings of a device that will measure location with time stamps. The white plastic cases at top house a magnet and a reed switch. The magnet will be attached to the wheel of the car, and the reed switch to the undercarriage. Each time the magnet passes the switch the switch changes states (from open to closed). This signal is sent through a processing sketch that will in turn record (to a text file) the time of day at which the switch changed states. The information gained will look something like this:
0 metres: 10:00:00 AM
1 metres: 10:00:01 AM
2 metres: 10:00:04 AM
3 metres: 10:00:09 AM
4 metres: 10:00:20 AM
5 metres: 10:00:34 AM
6 metres: 10:00:60 AM
7 metres: 10:00:98 AM
8 metres: 10:01:51 AM
9 metres: 10:02:20 AM
This information will be placed into a second processing sketch. Instead of drawing the stills at a regular time interval, the sketch will draw the stills at regular metre intervals. Thus, the resultant image is one that privileges space over time (the buildings rendered will be of an accurate spatial scale). |
| |
|
| ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ |
| November 9, 2008 |
 |
| |
Figure 31: I am contemplating adding human experience to the project by tracking the spatial movements of Torontonians. One of the initial motivating factors in creating this piece was to give opportunity to the individual to conceive of the metropolis as a whole. The metropolis is a monster in its size and I believe that most metropolitans experience only a fraction of the city they inhabit. A repercussion of this is that one's understanding and mental picture of our urban cities is murky at best.
Further, why is it that these limited spatial narratives exist? Is the metropolis too great a scale for human living? |
| |
|
| ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ |
| November 10, 2008 |
Merged Video Streams I've successfully created a processing sketch that can export to video three stills streams, stitched both horizontally and vertically. Click here to see the video. |
| |
|
| ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ |
| November 20, 2008 |
Digital Painting I'm now conceiving of the final product not as an installation but rather as a 'digital painting.' This is an object that can be picked up and hung on a wall... fall off of a wall, taken off the wall, and moved to another, all as a single object. The object would be plugged in. That's the difference. I'm working on a mock up of this. More to come shortly. |
| |
|
| |
Aliases Naming conventions for the citizen aliases will be derived from the influential architects urban planners and critics of the 20th century (Frank, Jane, Ebenezer, Pierre, etc). |
| |
|
| |
 |
| |
Figure 32 Digital painting. Approximately 9 x 9". |
| |
|
| |
 |
| |
Figure 33 Detail of the exposed circuit board. |
| |
|
| |
 |
| |
Figure 34 Detail of km/hr clock and GPS key diagram. |
| |
|
| |
 |
| |
Figure 35: The newest incarnation removes the digial km/hr displays, and replaces them with a metre scale marked with question marks. This version also includes text to the left which goes into more detail about the project. I haven't yet decided which I prefer in terms of aesthetics, or which serves its didactic function better. |
| |
|
| ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ |
| December, 2008 |
 |
| |
Figure 36: Test of footage on Rob Lendrum's portable DVD player. None of the problems that surfaced with resolution on the .mov file appeared in this test. It seems as though it's merely a problem with the computer's ability to play the file. |
| |
|
| |
 |
| |
Figure 37: Detail of portable DVD player screen. |
| |
|
| |
|
