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Cartogrammar.com | Blog » Flickr as a paintbrush
Andy Woodruff from Cartogrammar uses average color in Flickr photos to map the colors that people take the most pictures of. The above for example, shows the common colors of Harvard Square. Why all the red? It’s because there’s so many brick buildings.
(via FlowingData)
… two architects, Ms. Cheng and her husband, Brett Snyder, have created a virtual map to guide users around Manhattan to sites where projects they describe as “visionary” were planned but never built.
The map is available as an interactive iPhone application, Museum of the Phantom City, that uses GPS technology to detect when a user is near any of the roughly 50 notable sites, triggering a feature that allows the user to learn about the proposal through the architect’s foiled designs and words.
“It’s a wall-less museum where the art isn’t even there,” Mr. Snyder said. “The juxtaposition of what could be against what is.”
Ms. Cheng said that while some of the projects were well known and others less so, they all pushed technological, aesthetic and social boundaries of their time. “Visionary architecture has aims beyond the building itself,” she said. “It seeks to transform, even revolutionize, the society around it. It should have an air of the fantastic, the extravagant and the prophetic.”(via An iPhone App to Tour the City That Never Was - City Room Blog - NYTimes.com)
Data is, we imagine, an immaterial thing; or at least ethereal, made of light and electricity, processed at superhuman speed, transmitted in real time. The everyday world we move in seems dense and slow by comparison. The landscape is slower again; thick, heavy and persistent. At the moment however those two domains, the fast lightness of data and the heavy slowness of the landscape, are urgently linked. We are faced with the prospect of momentous change in the landscape that is somehow both slow and fast; too slow for our real-time culture to grasp, and too fast for the living systems of the landscape to adapt to. This paper presents a handful of works that dwell in that disjunction, between landscape and data; not solving it at all, but at least forming links, complicating assmptions, and recasting the relationship between two terms that seem to neatly encapsulate our future.
In Watching the Sky a camera looks out my office window, at the sky and the landscape. A banal view over a university campus to a bushy ridge in Belconnen. The camera takes an image every three minutes; four hundred and eighty images in twenty four hours. Tethered to a computer, the camera records for weeks at a time; the computer accumulates thousands of images. I think of the images as data, traces of change in the world outside the office window. I visualise, or re-visualise, this image data in the simplest possible way; an automated process “cuts” a narrow vertical slit from the same location in each image, and compiles all these slits together (this is a digital imitation of an analog photographic technique known as “slit-scan”). In the rectangular visualisations the slices are tiled from left to right. In the radial visualisations slices are gradually rotated so that a twenty-four-hour period spans one complete revolution (the “seam” is at midnight).
(the teeming void): Landscape, Slow Data and Self-Revelation
Water flowing under glaciers can act as a lubricant, causing land ice to accelerate into the sea and add to rising sea levels. “The implications for the flow of ice are potentially quite significant,” says Andy Smith of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK. Those lakes with no clear drainage channels are of particular interest, he says, because they could be spreading a thin film of lubricating water under glaciers.
