Author: en-topia

New York Cityvision Competition – the city of the future

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This time the future of the contemporary metropolis was “put onto the table” by the New York Cityvision Competion (NYCV) which has recently announced its winners. The competition organised by City Vision challenged designers, architects, urbaners and planners, to imagine how will the big Apple look like in several years and to make suggestions in a very uncertain and unstable present. Perhaps this is the reason why most of the suggestions were not based on scientific evidences, but rather had a philosophical dimension which went beyond the urban context and its architectural goals and joined environmental worries with cinematographic scenes of the distant future.

In this context, the submission which achieved the first place by E. Giannakopoulou, S. Carera, H. Isola, and M. Norzi, offers an opportunity to ask ourselves whether a Manhattan covered with waste could be the city of the future, or the future of the city. On the other hand, the recent theories in preservation and the rise in construction of new museum spaces, give ground to the project of E. Pieraccioli and C. Granato to imagine the future city as a very well preserved monument of human heritage.

A personal favorite would be the submission of J. Tigges, F. Segat, A. Menon and N. di Croce who look at the architectural features of the city as immigrants, who are humorously moved with ships and planted into other capitals of the world, making a point about this very controversial today’s phenomenon.

The conceptual framework, is presented in several ways. Dramatic images, or superrealistic areal photos that communicate the same way as a cinematographic oeuvre. Many designs are inspired by illustrators such as Saul Bass (1920-1996) or François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters (La fièvre d’Urbicande 1985) and in some cases one could say that there are traces of the work of Superstudio (1966). Such images present a future known to many filmmakers, where the past is very much alive and nostalgia becomes an urban feature.

Entries and prizes:

Read more »

Continue reading »
urbanism, Virtual Worlds

New York Cityvision Competition – the city of the future

Posted on by

This time the future of the contemporary metropolis was “put onto the table” by the New York Cityvision Competion (NYCV) which has recently announced its winners. The competition organised by City Vision challenged designers, architects, urbaners and planners, to imagine how will the big Apple look like in several years and to make suggestions in a very uncertain and unstable present. Perhaps this is the reason why most of the suggestions were not based on scientific evidences, but rather had a philosophical dimension which went beyond the urban context and its architectural goals and joined environmental worries with cinematographic scenes of the distant future.

In this context, the submission which achieved the first place by E. Giannakopoulou, S. Carera, H. Isola, and M. Norzi, offers an opportunity to ask ourselves whether a Manhattan covered with waste could be the city of the future, or the future of the city. On the other hand, the recent theories in preservation and the rise in construction of new museum spaces, give ground to the project of E. Pieraccioli and C. Granato to imagine the future city as a very well preserved monument of human heritage.

A personal favorite would be the submission of J. Tigges, F. Segat, A. Menon and N. di Croce who look at the architectural features of the city as immigrants, who are humorously moved with ships and planted into other capitals of the world, making a point about this very controversial today’s phenomenon.

The conceptual framework, is presented in several ways. Dramatic images, or superrealistic areal photos that communicate the same way as a cinematographic oeuvre. Many designs are inspired by illustrators such as Saul Bass (1920-1996) or François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters (La fièvre d’Urbicande 1985) and in some cases one could say that there are traces of the work of Superstudio (1966). Such images present a future known to many filmmakers, where the past is very much alive and nostalgia becomes an urban feature.

Entries and prizes:

Read more »

Continue reading »
urbanism, Virtual Worlds

City portraits by Victor Enrich

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There is something fascinating in visualizing sentences. “Don’t talk about it, picture it”. Spanish artist Victor Enrich creates surreal city portraits. Images that resemble virtual landscapes, but with a touch of criticism that derives from capturing extremely intimate urban surroundings and manipulating them as he would do in a virtual environment. There is a little bit of magic in combining everyday architectural pictures with virtual ideas. Cities with a road that leads to the sky, a building that looks like a gun.. I particularly like the stranded urban block of flats and the stairs of the plaza hotel, that somehow lost their way to the top of the building and continued duplicating forward:

click to view images
Read more »

Continue reading »
Virtual Worlds, Visual Art

City portraits by Victor Enrich

Posted on by

There is something fascinating in visualizing sentences. “Don’t talk about it, picture it”. Spanish artist Victor Enrich creates surreal city portraits. Images that resemble virtual landscapes, but with a touch of criticism that derives from capturing extremely intimate urban surroundings and manipulating them as he would do in a virtual environment. There is a little bit of magic in combining everyday architectural pictures with virtual ideas. Cities with a road that leads to the sky, a building that looks like a gun.. I particularly like the stranded urban block of flats and the stairs of the plaza hotel, that somehow lost their way to the top of the building and continued duplicating forward:

click to view images
Read more »

Continue reading »
Virtual Worlds, Visual Art

Play around with the global data – WebGl Globe

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‘The WebGL Globe is an open platform for geographic data visualization. We encourage you to copy the code, add your own data, and create your own.’ – Chrome Experiments
It’s simple, it’s free, it’s open. The Google Data Arts Team has created a very interesting experiment indeed. What’s different about WebGl Globe is that it focuses on data. The graphic environment encourages the user to think about data visualizations on a globe, in contrast to applications such as google earth and Webgl Earth which due to the level of detail they offer, the imported by the users data are very diverse and get somehow lost in translation. It may sound limiting, but it marks itself as a tool for global spatial analysis and therefore it becomes ideal for thematic data collection. WebGL Globe can really turn spatial analysis into a fun, visual game. It’s all about an open DIY 3d globe, that can give access to an amazing variety of information and tons of creative ideas.

Doug Fritz of the Google Data Arts Team shared a couple of lines about the project: ”Thanks to WebGL, we’re able to display thousands of moving points at high frame rates by using the user’s graphics processing unit (GPU) for 3D computations. Each state of the globe has its own geometry and we morph between them with a vertex shader, saving precious CPU resources. Additionally, to make the globe look nice, we took advantage of the possibilities of GLSL and created two fragment shaders, one to simulate the atmosphere and another to simulate frontal illumination of the planet”. So, here is what some Java script, and the latest technologies in open source (including WebGL and Html5!) can produce.

Visit http://code.google.com/p/webgl-globe/ to get started. Note that you do need a relatively strong graphic card though.
Features:

Latitude / longitude data spikes
Color gradients, based on data value or type
Mouse wheel to zoom
More features are under development…

    Continue reading »
    data visualization, WebGL

    Play around with the global data – WebGl Globe

    Posted on by

    ‘The WebGL Globe is an open platform for geographic data visualization. We encourage you to copy the code, add your own data, and create your own.’ – Chrome Experiments
    It’s simple, it’s free, it’s open. The Google Data Arts Team has created a very interesting experiment indeed. What’s different about WebGl Globe is that it focuses on data. The graphic environment encourages the user to think about data visualizations on a globe, in contrast to applications such as google earth and Webgl Earth which due to the level of detail they offer, the imported by the users data are very diverse and get somehow lost in translation. It may sound limiting, but it marks itself as a tool for global spatial analysis and therefore it becomes ideal for thematic data collection. WebGL Globe can really turn spatial analysis into a fun, visual game. It’s all about an open DIY 3d globe, that can give access to an amazing variety of information and tons of creative ideas.

    Doug Fritz of the Google Data Arts Team shared a couple of lines about the project: ”Thanks to WebGL, we’re able to display thousands of moving points at high frame rates by using the user’s graphics processing unit (GPU) for 3D computations. Each state of the globe has its own geometry and we morph between them with a vertex shader, saving precious CPU resources. Additionally, to make the globe look nice, we took advantage of the possibilities of GLSL and created two fragment shaders, one to simulate the atmosphere and another to simulate frontal illumination of the planet”. So, here is what some Java script, and the latest technologies in open source (including WebGL and Html5!) can produce.

    Visit http://code.google.com/p/webgl-globe/ to get started. Note that you do need a relatively strong graphic card though.
    Features:

    Latitude / longitude data spikes
    Color gradients, based on data value or type
    Mouse wheel to zoom
    More features are under development…

      Continue reading »
      data visualization, WebGL

      mapping music / music mapping

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      Music Mapping

      The tube as a music instrument. Alexander Chen composed an interesting musical piece by using data from the tube. “Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA’s actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop. The visuals are based on Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 diagram.”
      Conductor (2011) by Alexander Chen. View at: http://www.mta.me

      Mapping music

      Composer Dmitri Tymoczko of Princeton University  has developed a way to represent music spatially. “Using non-Euclidean geometry and a complex figure, borrowed from string theory, called an orbifold (which can have from two to an infinite number of dimensions, depending on the number of notes being played at once), Tymoczko’s system shows how chords that are generally pleasing to the ear appear in locations close to one another, clustered close to the orbifold’s center. Sounds that the ear identifies as dissonant appear as outliers, closer to the edges.” 

      Visualizing music


      “Mam Player” turns midi files into artistic, musically related, bar-graph scores. In the World Wide Web, there are hundreds different types of music visualizations, and that is because midi (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), is basically a musical data file. “MIDI data is stored as the various trigger instructions for any given sound source” .

      For more information about how this visualization was produced:
      Visualization produced by Steven Malinowsky
      http://www.musanim.com/ProductionNotes/ClairDeLune.html
      freeware “Music Animation Machine Midi Player” for producing music visualizations:
      http://www.musanim.com/player/

      Continue reading »
      Visual Art

      mapping music / music mapping

      Posted on by

      Music Mapping

      The tube as a music instrument. Alexander Chen composed an interesting musical piece by using data from the tube. “Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA’s actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop. The visuals are based on Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 diagram.”
      Conductor (2011) by Alexander Chen. View at: http://www.mta.me

      Mapping music

      Composer Dmitri Tymoczko of Princeton University  has developed a way to represent music spatially. “Using non-Euclidean geometry and a complex figure, borrowed from string theory, called an orbifold (which can have from two to an infinite number of dimensions, depending on the number of notes being played at once), Tymoczko’s system shows how chords that are generally pleasing to the ear appear in locations close to one another, clustered close to the orbifold’s center. Sounds that the ear identifies as dissonant appear as outliers, closer to the edges.” 

      Visualizing music


      “Mam Player” turns midi files into artistic, musically related, bar-graph scores. In the World Wide Web, there are hundreds different types of music visualizations, and that is because midi (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), is basically a musical data file. “MIDI data is stored as the various trigger instructions for any given sound source” .

      For more information about how this visualization was produced:
      Visualization produced by Steven Malinowsky
      http://www.musanim.com/ProductionNotes/ClairDeLune.html
      freeware “Music Animation Machine Midi Player” for producing music visualizations:
      http://www.musanim.com/player/

      Continue reading »
      Visual Art
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