Last summer, I became aware of the work of Frank Dresmé, a Netherlands based designer and illustrator. Dresmé’s thesis, Project 360°, was a series of elaborate psychogeographic illustrations documenting specific routes through Amsterdam. These drawings were complex assemblages of architectural photography, illustrations of signage and street furniture and subjective annotation. Aside from their brilliant execution, what really struck me about the work was that Dresmé was reading the entire city as a unified construct. I’ve been staring at glamour-shot renderings and precious perspectives for several years now, and it is extremely refreshing to see this much energy poured into representing urban space on a whole rather than highlighting a specific structure as a “point of interest”.

This morning Dresmé posted a preview of a project that he currently working on for the City of Rotterdam. He has been commissioned to create a series of illustrations to communicate and promote future development in Rotterdam’s city centre. The dynamic images (two of which are pictured above) suggest a dense weave of architectural and infrastructural elements accented with typography and inhabitation. Where else but in Rotterdam could we see work like this being commissioned by a municipality?

This is one of the maps from the aforementioned Project 360°. Take some time to check out the portfolio of Frank Dresmé. Nestled away in his archives is an excellent PDF documenting his thesis work.

Originally from remixing rotterdam

[michael bartosik / model of parking lot usage patterns]

This past fall, my friend and peer Liav Koren began programming the Dorkbot Toronto artist tech-talk series. Since taking the reins (Kristin Trethewey ran the Toronto chapter of Dorkbot for the previous two years) Liav has curated a diverse range of events which have tackled distinct topics such as how technology-based art is deployed in rural and urban contexts, public space and emerging democratized tools. That last topic is of particular interest to Liav as he is pushing to organize a RepRap research group at Interaccess, a local artist-run, new media/technology focused gallery.

Of the talks given at the first three events, the talks given by Cary Peppermint, Stan Krzyzanowski, Patricia Rodriguez and Michael Bartosik have really resonated with me. These artists not only presented great work, but were able to hyper-articulately contextualize their intent, process and the means of production driving their various creative practices.

[wieslaw z. michalak / imaginary places #6 - saddamiat al tharthar, iraq]

The next Dorkbot explores car-based work with Kim Adams and Steve Laurie (Thursday February 21st) and the April event is entitled Geography and will feature talks from Laura Nanni and Wieslaw Z. Michalak. If you are in Toronto, perhaps I’ll see you out at these events.

If you are interested, you can keep tabs on Dorkbot Toronto and subscribe to their email list here.

Originally from dorkbot toronto

steve.wilde posted a photo:

A random tap somewhere! – I must clean my lens. had to tidy up a blob or two n these last two shots and I’ve spotted them on a couple of others.

Originally from ! [Flickr]

For the past two nights I’ve been sitting in my studio, obsessively scrutinizing Jonny Greenwood’s magnificently bleak score for There Will be Blood. The first time I heard the shrill syncopation of Prospectors Arrive, the centrepiece of the work, it immediately reminded me of a project I came across last year that I had intended to write about here on Serial Consign.

The above image is the score for two movements of Circalles, a 2007 composition by Martijn Tellinga, a Netherlands based sound artist and electroacoustic musician. Circalles is Tellinga’s second experiment with what he refers to as “Compositional Objects”, a term that resonates with his clinical manipulation of the clusters of modulating tones that populate these works. If the graphical representation of the work doesn’t make it clear how overtly spatial the composition is, it should be noted that the piece was originally prepared for presentation in an 8-channel environment. (a stereo excerpt is available on Tellinga’s site).

I’m quite impressed with the correspondence between these score/graphs and the experience of listening to the work, beyond that I am also curious about the extremely architectonic language Tellinga uses to describe his work. A choice moment from the statement for Node, the piece that preceded Circalles:

Manifest as the compositional undercurrent and categorical architecture, to compose becomes to interpret and articulate musically evocative and aesthetic form that is induced by these structural formations: the extraction of the particulars and the exploration of their structural interdependency.

Nothing sets my heart a flutter more than dispassionate music writing! I guess I can file “Compositional Objects” in my music-thinking toolkit alongside “Sound Blocks” and Unit Structures.

Be sure to check out Tellinga’s site as he has a provocative body of recordings and installations worth examining.

Originally from structure-image, possibly for music

Régine Debatty recently posted a fantastic interview with Alessandro Ludovico on the freshly redesigned We Make Money Not Art. Ludovico is extremely active throughout the new media world as a theorist, educator and practitioner. I’m particularly fond of Neural, a magazine and companion art blog (pictured to the left) that he edits. I’ve been enjoying Neural for several years now and beyond the excellent art and media writing the publication also features engaging discussion and reviews of contemporary electronic music (a rarity in the digital art world).

While the entire interview is quite interesting, I was particularly stimulated by Ludovico’s description of his writing project(s):

Sometimes I think of Neural as an info-gallery, the best info-gallery I’d want to read. If you want, it’d be defined as my personal narrative of the digital culture evolution, formed by important chunks of information condensed in a limited space… I always thought that the more cultural efforts (including blogs and magazines) are made to discuss (and then implicitly promote) digital culture the more we’ll get out of the actual ghetto… The aim of Neural is to vehiculate meaningful ideas within local and international networks.

While I’m not sure about vehiculation, Ludovico certainly captures the spirit of collaborative, distributed art and technology writing across the net.

Allessandro Ludovico has also (co)authored several high profile projects that critique the intersection of capitalism and online culture, if you’ve never seen Google Will Eat Itself and Amazon Noir they are both worth spending some time with.

Originally from alessandro ludovico / neural magazine

Recently, I’ve been thinking about information visualization in print journalism. This has been inspired in equal parts by recent comments made by Mike Danziger at Visual Methods and some of the research of Alberto Cairo.

This past weekend I came across an incredible project by DDD Infographic and Walid Raad, which was published in Bidoun last year. The project (pictured above) diagrams a UN investigation into the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in early 2005. This infographic consolidates and schematizes a complex event with geopolitcal implications, and is able to communicate this narrative in the space of a few pages.

[the players connected to the assassination of rafik hariri]

I touched on the idea of mapping and diagramming in forensics with my Anatomy of a Crime Scene post last spring, but this expansive territory (crime scene investigation, telecommunications, organizational hierarchies and geography) is deeply intriguing. Be sure to check out the high resolution image of this fantastic infographic on the DDD site.

Originally from anatomy of an assassination

While wandering the net this year I’ve encountered an abundance of great writing, media and commentary. Some of this material has made enough of an impression on me that it remains with me in my day to day thoughts. What follows are some personal highlights from content published this past year.

[bruce sterling - man of many decals / photo: brianfit]

Culture / Politics

While most of the techno-chatter emanating from South by Southwest this year was about Twitter, it was Bruce Sterling’s closing talk that left a real impression on me.

This fall, Naomi Wolf delivered a fantastic lecture, The End of America: Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot, which meticulously outlined the erosion of civil liberties in post-9/11 America.

I’ve been too busy reading about database aesthetics to get to Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine yet, but I certainly enjoyed the short film Alfonso Cuarón created to promote the book.

Aside from Left, Right & Center, techPresident is probably my favourite source of analysis on the buildup to the 2008 American presidential election. This site continues to yield nuanced, non-partisan discussion and commentary on the various Republican and Democratic hopefuls through the lens of mobile technology, social media and web presence.

Online Culture / Social Media

My favourite text on the ascent of Facebook was penned by Ian Bogost of Persuasive Games. His essay, A Professor’s Impressions of Facebook, was a thoughtful meditation on strong and weak ties and how they are qualified through social networking.

Once Brad Fitzpatrick initiated the conversation about interoperability, many great posts on the topic followed throughout the rest of the year. My personal favourite is probably Jyri Engeström’s Opening up the Social Graph.

Mark Marino just published Writing in the Margins, a concise text on the connections between annotation-oriented social bookmarking and proto-hypertext authors such as Borges, Calvino and Joyce.

[joel sanders, karen van lengen and ben rubin / mix house]

Architecture / Urbanism

Undoubtedly my favourite text on urban space penned this year was Geoff Manaugh’s Greater Los Angeles, in which he absolutely nails the absurd quality of everyday life in Southern California. This text is a piece of standout writing, even by BLDGBLOG standards.

Bryan Finoki conducted an illuminating interview with “military urbanism” theorist Stephen Graham. This two-part discussion addresses the city after terrorism and considers the influence of globalization and “defense” and “control” architecture on urban space.

The discussion at Digital Urban continues to blur the line between architecture, gaming and digital representation. It is not so much a matter of identifying a single post as stating that this blog is right in the thick of an emerging field.

Gaming / Simulation

Gamasutra has recently begun a series of posts documenting early gaming platforms. I’m generally not that nostalgic of a creature but I was completely enthralled by their history of the Commodore 64. I cut my teeth on the C64 and I really enjoyed this reference.

This past fall Mike Danziger launched Visual Methods, a blog to document his research on “information visualization for the people” at MIT. His text Visualizing Halo 3 is an exploration of Bungie’s gameplay-analytics visualizations for the multiplayer version of the popular first person shooter. Mike’s review of these tools was quite lucid and left me wondering why there isn’t more writing like this coming from within the gaming community.

Joe McNeilly wrote a provocative feminist reading of Portal, part of an add-on pack for Valve’s Half-Life 2. It was also quite hilarious to watch the (male-centric) digg community respond to this very popular review.

[philipp steinweber & andreas koller / similar diversity]

Art / Aesthetics

Paul Prudence’s dataisnature is a key reference for the world of software art. That said, it was really refreshing to read about his experience encountering László Moholy-Nagy’s Light Space Modulator.

Alex Munt delivered the most lucid readings of “Lynchian space” that I’ve encountered in a while with his short essay Inland Empire: The Cinema in Trouble?

Mitchell Whiteslaw conducted a sprawling interview with Mark Fell last month. Fell is one half of SND, one of my favourite musical projects from the Mille Plateaux years.

It has been super-fascinating to watch Marius Watz steer his Generator.x project towards the intersection of generative art and digital fabrication. I particularly enjoyed his rundown of the Project to Surface show in NYC this summer. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes of the Beyond the Screen workshop & expo at Club Transmediale in several weeks.

Ongoing Projects

I’m an enthusiastic participant in Burak Arikan’s Meta-Markets project. I think this economic simulation, which facilitates the exchange of units of social media, is the most engaging web project I’ve encountered this year.

The CONT3XT.NET bookmark driven curatorial experiment TAGallery continues to impress me [see previous post for some commentary on the project].

For pure fun, ffffound! is something I use and explore every day.

Curating this kind of a “best of” list is somewhat of a doomed endeavour. I’ve attempted to pull together a lot of my favourite material from the year and no doubt forgot just as many engaging posts and projects as I included. If nothing else, hopefully some of these links are new to you folks.

Originally from (some of) the best of 2007