Deep Mapping the Media City

Shannon Mattern | The New School wordsinspace.net | @shannonmattern

Rem Koolhaas, Asian City of Tomorrow, SMLXL

Alvar Aaltos Woodberry Poetry Room

Via Michael Chen + Justin Snider, Signal Space Urban Omnibus

Agbogbloshie dump, in Accra, Ghana. Andrew McConnell

Nicole Starosielski, Surfacing

Via Vimeo

Via CellCrypt

A city...is not a flattenable graph. In a city, networks overlap upon other networks
(Friedrich Kittler, The City is a Medium, New
Literary History 27:4 (1996): 719)

Brian McGrath/Skyscraper Museum, Manhattan Timeformations, 2000

16

Via DeviantArt

Christallers Central Place Theory

Via Archaeology Excavations: http://bit.ly/HJpck0

Via National Park Service, Tumaccori Dig, 1935

Daguerreotype via Archaeographer

Dhaka

of Urban

TION

William Henry Fox Talbot: West Front, York Minster, from Lendal Street, ca. 1845

Berenice Abbott: Newsstand, 32nd Street and Third Avenue, Manhattan, 1935

Charles Marville, Rue Basse-des-Ursins, le de la Cit, 1865; The Piercing of the Avenue de lOpra, 1865

Charles Marville, Rue de Rivoli, 1877

Adolf Loos, Villa Mller, Prague, 1930

Mies van der Rohes Photo Collages

Robert Venturi & Denise Scott Brown, Las Vegas Studio, 1968

Inception, 2010

Levittown, PA

from the hand-held camera at the end of the 19th century to the mobile phone at the end of the 20th, the city has always been a mediated construct.
Eric Gordon, The Urban Spectator (2010)

Serlio, Primo Libro, 1551; Paju Book City, South Korea, Phase 2 under construction

Alhambra Inscriptions, via Lucio Quadrio on Flickr

Ekklesiasterion, Public Meeting Place/Theater, Priene

INFRASTRUCTURAL ENTANGLEMENTS

Via http://bit.ly/GFclmm

Via igic.org

National Geographic Interactive, 1996

Via MakingMaps.net

Via LNL

Via University of Tennesse

Via The World Around Us

Peruvian Geoglyphs;

Ben Millen, iPhone Deconstruction [/Archaeology]

Telegraph Wires + Train Tracks; Fiber Optic Cables in Parisian Sewers

OPSYS/Alexandra Gauzza; for Harvard GSD, Landscape Futures

Visualization of the spread of post offices

Via Derek Watkins

Telegraph Wires + Train Tracks; Fiber Optic Cables in Parisian Sewers

Via GaWC Research Bulletin

Subjective Cartographies: Mapping Telecom Infrastructure in Bangalore

We build our subjective maps by combining different methods: photography, film, and sound recording; we use home-made tools and sensors to explore the visible and invisible electromagnetic city; we make measurements by taking water from street vendors and performing DIY biological analysis (with webcams made into microscopes); we adopt psycho-geographical approaches in exploring territory; we produce expressions of personal subjectivity; and we have meetings with experts and witnesses.
Ewen Chardronnet & Benjamin Cadon, Bangalore : Subjective Cartography, Mutations.

British Library Sound Archive; via Wikimedia

MULTISENSORY METHODS

Richard Pare, View of the Shabolovka Radio Tower, Moscow, Russia, 2000; Canadian Centre for Architecture Collection

Street side handbills, Puducherry; via Wikimedia

Via Touch

Kate McLeans Sensory Maps

Windchime Map of Boylan Heights, OH; By Denis Wood, Carter Crawford and Jimmy Thiem; in Wood, Everything Sings

DEEP MAPPING THE MEDIA CITY

Ian McHargs Dune Community Types, from Sea and Survival, 1969; Sequential sections through maidan edges, Filter/Collector: Anchoring the Edge in Mumbais Maidans. Nicholas Pevzner, 2009; via Pevzner & Carlisle

Oyster-tecture, MoMA Rising Currents Exhibition. SCAPE / Landscape Architecture, 2010.

Digital technologies have made possible the fashioning of more dynamic and flexible depictions of ancient spaces, all readily linked to metadata that documents the level of accuracy of restored components. A rich range of sensorial stimuli can be added to kinetic viewing to shape more robust recreations of the original environmental experience. Depictions of actual times of day, year, and century reaffirm the essential temporal aspects. Various experimental scenarios can be presented to ascertain the impact of alternative reconstructions, climatic conditions, and hypothetically distributed ephemera.
Diane Favro and Christopher Johanson, "Death in Motion: Funeral Processions in the Roman Forum, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 69, no. 1 (2010): 15.

Michele Tucci & Alberto Giordano, Positional Accuracy, Positional Uncertainty, and Feature Change Detection in Historical Maps Computers, Environment and Urban Analysis 35, no. 6 (2011).

A city...is not a flattenable graph. In a city, networks overlap upon other networks.
(Friedrich Kittler, The City is a Medium, New Literary History 27:4 (1996): 719)

attempts to record and represent the grain and patina of place through juxtapositions and interpenetrations the and historical and the attempts toof record represent the grain and patina of political place through contemporary, the and juxtapositions the poetic, the and interpenetrations of the historical and discursive and the sensual; the conflation of oral the contemporary, the political and the testimony, anthology, memoir, biography, natural poetic, the discursive and the sensual; the conflation of oral testimony, anthology, history and everything you might ever want to say biography, natural history and about a memoir, place . everything you might ever want to say
about a place. Mike Pearson & Michael Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology (New York: Routledge, 2001), 64-5.

Via igic.org

Subjective Cartographies: Mapping Telecom Infrastructure in Bangalore

Charles & Ray Eames, for IBM

city, county, state and other services support and protect neighborhoods. Here Boylan Heights, in gray, is seen nested within, smallest to largest, its service routes (newspaper, mail), city service districts (police, fire, garbage, planning), a state election district and county school attendance zones. By Denis Wood and Jane Norton

Visualization of the spread of post offices

Via Derek Watkins

Via Informality Takes Over

Bike Messenger Boys; Western Union Collection; Smithsonian

Its possible to walk all the way from Pacific Place, in Wan Chai, to the Macau ferry terminal in Sheung Wan (about 2km away) without setting foot once at street level.

Via SCMP

Via IFMR Finance

Via

Google Blur: Volkel Air Base, Netherlands: via Nicholas Jackson, 15 High-Profile Sites That Google Doesnt Want You to Se The Atlantic Tech (June 21, 2011)

Via Michael Chen + Justin Snider, Signal Space Urban Omnibus

Pirating Cable; Laying Fiber Optic Cable, via Wikimedia

OPSYS/Alexandra Gauzza; for Harvard GSD, Landscape Futures

PROTOTYPE

Nicole Starosielski

This and next several slides via Nicole Starosielski REDACTED!