Nevertheless, the article is pretty interesting if you are interested in urban spaces and consumerism in general.

Some of the highlights of the article could be:

In the mall, one can simulate normal social life around the commodity−form, to which the place owes its existence in the first place.

The experiences offered for consumption must be reconcilable with the images of the brands
represented and with the image of the mall as brand zone. The mall, then, is a pseudo−public space or a gigantic private space.

The values of the shopping malls, their sedation of experience and their controllability, are also becoming the values of the city.

Students will work on a two-part semester-long design project based on an information source of their choice. Basic programming or action-script skills are required.

The class will be conducted as a design studio with bi-monthly critiques. It will include some seminar discussions and guest visits by experts in the design profession.

All aspects of visual communication will be addressed, with an emphasis on typography, layout, color, and motion. Students need not have any formal design training, but should come with a particular interest in and commitment to honing their design skills.

It is looking great. For the first class we mostly talk about role of information in our lives. Here are the brief notes that I took: Impact of visualization is what we are going to cover in the class. Engagement is important, what form it can take is equally important.

Demetrie had a good point; Long term thinking of information visualization. We’re piling up all the database and it’s going to be really important how we use that data, reveal that data in different shapes.

Relentless design is a good design.
She wanted us to prepare a proposal for the next class about what we want to do in terms of visualization. Beside synthesizing piles of databases, I am also interested in connecting networks and visualization in a different context. Not only getting a big chunk of data and using it, but getting gradually expanding data from invisible devices that are put in our daily lives and getting data and visualizing them in an engaging manner. The examples I talked about the class are kind of the path I want to pursue.

• Information Design, 1st edition . Robert Jacobson, ed. ©MIT Press; ISBN: 0262600358
  A series of essays from a number of different fields on information design and interaction design. Some are excellent, some are misguided, but all are worth reading and arguing about.
• Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology Stephen Wilson ©MIT Press; ISBN: 026223209X. A fairly comprehensive overview of work bridging art and scientific and technological research in the recent past. Good reference of most of the major art/science collaborations of the last decade, and some interesting opinions on where art, science, technology, and critical theory meet, combine, and clash.
• Design Noir Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, ©2001, Princeton Architectural Press; ISBN: 3764365668

Stefan and I were talking about the subject of pioneers of Generative Art today, a subject which came up talking about Joshua Davis’ situation, and this reminded me of Philip Galanter. Check artificial.dk interview with him. He puts interesting perspective to roots of generative art there. Also It is funny because he was an instructor here at ITP couple of years ago! Guess what, Daniel Shiffman was his student by then.

Still, I want to brainstorm more about this area and come up with at least something I can put in my room and play when I got bored.

a workshop examining image processing and computer vision via the processing environment

There are lots of handful and new info about video sensing, I also learned new terms.
One is image quantization. one explanation is here:

Many people don’t have full-color (24 bit per pixel) display hardware. Inexpensive display hardware stores 8 bits per pixel, so it can display at most 256 distinct colors at a time. To display a full-color image, the computer must choose an appropriate set of representative colors and map the image into these colors. This process is called “color quantization”. (This is something of a misnomer; “color selection” or “color reduction” would be a better term. But we’re stuck with the standard usage.)

Quasimondo has a processing example of this here. And there is something called clustering algorithms which I still haven’t figured out what it is. I am going to dig more of those stuff in the summer hopefully.

Nowhere is a landscape in the condition of development. the users of the german search-engine METAGER erode rivers, canyons and valleys by their search-movements. search-requests, existing only for a fraction of a second on the internet, get inscribed in a block of pu-foarm (75cm x 75cm x 10cm) by a 3d milling-machine. the continuous stream of queries defines the rhythm of the machine.

Another example could be Email Erosion.

Email Erosion automatically creates sculptures out of biodegradable, starch-based foam using spam and email as stimuli. Based on email, the Eroder may elect to rotate the foam, raise or lower the Sprayer or erode the foam with a spray of water.

What I like about those pieces are mainly their ability to create something totally different from the actual source, transform this data more than mapping the data itself to a concrete material at least.

According to the Lev Manovich’s paper [Data Visualisation as New Abstraction and Anti-Sublime, 2002 .doc format] one of the earliest mapping project which revived lots of attention was Natalie Jeremijenko’s “live wire”.

The movement of the dangling wire is proportional to the number of packets on the network. That is, the more traffic on the local area network, the higher the frequency of the “wiggles.” The transceiver plugs into the network, and the dynamic behavior of the wire become an intuitive peripheral representation of the network activity. In contrast to a screen based graph of ethernet activity this device is a shared social display of information.

In his paper, Malovich points out that data visualization arts should be carrying certain reasons in their work. One of them is arbitrary versus motivated choices in mapping. He questions the artist’s mapping selection since the computers allow us to easily map any data set into another set. He suggests to foreground the arbitrary nature of the chosen mapping as one way to deal with this problem. Another question he stresses is the conceptual elegance and poetry that is lacking in the works. He gives the modern art as the example showing us the ambiguity always present in our perception and experiencee, to show us what we normally don’t notice or don’t pay attention to. He expects same kind of approach in visualizations.

The more interesting and at the end maybe more important challenge is how to represent the personal subjective experience of a person living in a data society. If daily interaction with volumes of data and numerous messages is part of our new “data-subjectivity,” how can we represent this experience in new ways? How new media can represent the ambiguity, the otherness, the multi-dimensionality of our experience, going beyond already familiar and “normalized” modernist techniques of montage, surrealism, absurd, etc.? In short, rather than trying hard to pursue the anti-sublime ideal, data visualization artists should also not forget that art has the unique license to portray human subjectivity – including its fundamental new dimension of being “immersed in data.”

Funny when I was searching for live wire project in google, I have come up with Sculpting with Data class that Tom Igoe taught in Spring 2003. I am kind of surprised that class is not being offered last year or this year.

First, we built networks to help us find information. Google is a great example of this: pop in a few keywords and get back all the matches to your search.

Second, we are currently building networks to help us acquire knowledge. Knowledge is more than just information; knowledge is information plus context. Knowledge is information which has been sifted by human hands (or, more precisely, human minds), sorted, organized, and structured, so that the next person who comes along seeking knowledge can quickly and effectively absorb it.

And according to this technologist, philosopher and artist Mark Pesce, if knowledge is information plus context, understand is knowledge plus experience. Understanding is not data; it cannot be stored by a computer in any meaningful way. It resides within us, within the chain of experiences that makes us what we are. We can know a fact, but until we have lived through that fact, we have no understanding of it. Also one of the main properties of this approach is, the understanding should be dynamic, blogs as we see are first but static examples of those third era. According to the writer, this is the point where it comes to mobile.

This is rather an interesting point, I remember Josh Knowles was trying to build some kind of digital social network where evey person writes his/her expertise and interest fields. So that if you need any help at that time, you would know whom you are going to contact with.

In his concept of a mobile digital social network he tells more in details with examples. Liverecord is a mobile java application which allows you to submit your quality tips to a backend server. The server could be accessed through top tips from your friends while you share your quality with them. This could be a growing system pretty quick if you make it to read a tip you should write a tip approach.

So I was thinking personally that, the social networks sites that I am connected, I am getting away from describing myself in my profiles. Not that I don’t like, I don’t like that fact that if I start to list I feel like I am getting restricted somehow. It could be the first cautious approach towards those applications, and what I perceive in general is, how much you explain yourself, you are getting that much response.

So this third era is also supporting that view. It is how much you express yourself, so that people can take the most out of from you although I see some flaws and dangerous points at that. This is more likely the potential ultrapost-consumer approach at some point if people realize that their experiences are learnt. It all comes to teacher’s ethics maybe.

Anyway it was an interesting read. It would be nice to test it with an example application based on textmessaging.

Vodafone’s receiver magazine is a neutral space where pioneer thinkers challenge you to discuss exciting, future-oriented aspects of communications technologies. Started four years ago as a platform for exchange about how innovations in this sector affect societies worldwide, receiver is now established as one of the industry’s key idea generators.

word! I was reading an old (2002) but gold paper from Usman Hoquenamed invisible topographies. There are some good points about mobile phones.
Mobile Phones are not only communication tools, but also sensors of the invisible electromagnetic environment that surrounds us. A new term is Hertzian space. He is also talking about the emergence between architechture and art. He explains that new technologies encourage us to think designed spaces not of static silent structures that surrounds us but rather of fluid dynamic fields beyond the edge of our natural perceptions.

This link is a source listing Wireless Arts.

Couple of links that I have found through googling some names on the paper.
Varieties of Wireless Art

He mentions about a design theorist, Anthony Dunne, saying “material responses to immaterial electromagnetic fields can lead to new aesthetic possibilities for architecture.”

His project Sky Ear is exploring the hertzian habitat above Greenwich Park in London.

I like this paper because it is revealing how we can use mobile data in an artistic and informative way rather than trying to come up with new ideas of using it just inside of it.