The Mixed-Reality City

by Matthew Merrill

www.theaccessiblecity.org

NEW NOLLI

in 1784, Giambattista Nolli created a revolutionary map of Rome based off of a simple proposition.  Utilizing a figure-ground representation, he depicted the entire city, with one major exception: the interiors of all of the churches - the centers of public life at the time - were represented as the ground.  With this simple change, the map was no longer just a catalog of buildings, but began to depict the urban experience within.

Since that time, public life in cities has significantly changed, but our understanding of public space has remained severely outdated.  Public space is commonly understood as government-owned space made accessible by law or decree - such as with parks or libraries.  But the contemporary experience of public space is much different; some of the most publicly accessed places - such as shopping malls and parking lots - are privately owned, while some of the most publicly inaccessible spaces - such as airports - are publicly owned.  Though ownership typically establishes “publicness”, the disconnect between the two requires a new understanding of public space, and new ways of mapping it.

In the Accessible City, this new understanding of public space looks at accessibility, and not ownership, as the determining factor.  Any space that can be publicly accessed is now, to a varying degree, considered public space.  And those spaces which remain inaccessible are considered private. 

To test this new definition, I chose to focus on a particular site - Downtown Crossing - and did an intensive analysis within.  I went into every storefront and saw how far I could get, opening doors, walking to restricted rooms, and exploring hidden places.  I mapped the plans of these places that I accessed, and recorded the qualities of each.

I then used this information to create a contemporary Nolli map.  All the inaccessible spaces were represented as dark figures, and all of the accessed spaces are represented as the ground.  However, unlike Nolli’s map, it does not simply show a binary relationship; rather, the ground is represented as a gradient of color, showing the degree of accessibility of spaces.  Thus, the urban experience is not just switching back and forth between the public and private spheres, but rather continuously occupying space which usually has, to varying degrees, characteristics of both. 

As such this maps brings a new light to the urban experience.  It shows a gradient of public experience, as determined by the accessibility of space.  And it transcends the scale of architecture, showing a level of detail smaller than the individual building, but aggregated to depict an urban experience.  Thus is both more descriptive, and more expansive, than a single building.

SITING

For the analysis, the selection of the site was of utmost importance.  The site needed to have a diversity of typologically distinct spaces, in order to demonstrate differences in how public spaces function.  Equally as important was to include a traditionally-conceived public spaces, to see to what extent they do or do not conform to their expectations. 

Downtown Crossing was ideally-suited to meet these criteria.   The diversity of uses within a continuous, large city block meant that the character and relationship of the spaces could be elucidated  by juxtaposing them against the geometry of the highly regularized rectangular city block in which they are contained.  The typologically-distinct spaces included:

- theaters
- various restaurant types
- subway entrances/exits
- parks
- hotels
- residences
- various store types
- offices
- food courts
- department stores
- parking lots
- indoor malls
- government buildings

JUDGING CRITERIA

What constitutes a space?

Since the project is concerned comparatively analyzing spaces, delineating the boundaries of this space is of primary importance.  Thus the project became just as concerned with the barriers qualitatively influencing the type of space as much as the spaces themselves.  But what constitutes a barrier?

This question ended up being one of the most difficult to answer.  People’s movement through space is highly conditioned by their individual response to it.  A near infinite number of stimuli in one’s milieu do not directly affect one’s behavior, but rather are mediated by internal cognition mechanisms.  Thus, the determination of what constitutes a barrier, and thus what constitutes a space, is highly subjective.   Any criteria applied to quantitatively analyze the space had to acknowledge the fact that this project is more a diagram of an individual’s response to their surroundings rather  than an aggregate of society’s views. 

This was initially deemed limiting, as the information did not seem universally applicable to a larger audience; as opposed to other mapping projects that utilized data aggregated from sites like Twitter or Foursquare, this did not reveal social patterns or tendencies.  However, what it lacked in universal relevance, it gained in personal significance; the depiction was highly revelatory of how one moved through a space, showing how far they were willing to penetrate into the building.  And though it was a depiction of an individual’s movement,  by utilizing the Google maps platform, the project leaves open the ability to aggregate additional user’s information.

But simply cataloging the series of transgressions was not sufficient to determine how public each space was.  As such, a series of eight criteria were applied to each space to determine this.  These included:

1 - Physical obstruction - are there physical barriers - such as a doors, counters, or other obstructions -  limiting one’s access?

2 - Legal consequence - does one have the legal right to enter the space?  Are there legal repercussions if one does?

3 - Required membership - does one have to be a member (ie. employee or gym patron) in order to access the space?

4 - Signage - are there signs instruction one not to enter the space?

5 - Pay-to-play - does one need to be a paying customer to access the space?

6 - Potential customer - does one’s actions need to posit the intention of purchasing in order to access

7 - Temporality - what proportion of the day can this space be accessed?

8 - Surveillance - was the space noticeably monitored by video or live personnel?

Some of these questions had binary solutions, while some of them - such as temporality - could be more accurately measured across a sliding scale, allowing for a more precise measurement of quality.  Utilizing transparencies, these spaces are then layered to show, in aggregate, the degree to which the user deemed the space public or private.  With the online interface, any one of these criteria can be isolated to understand the comparative qualities of the spaces for each category.

Utilizing similar representation conventions as Nolli, this project nonetheless offers a much greater level of information and complexity.  Rather than simply representing spaces in the binary poche/non-poche fashion, this map represents a gradient of poche, showing how penetrable spaces are, based not on typology, but on actual experience.  Thus the map is more relevant, and descriptive, of urban realities.

UNIVERSAL PLATFORM

Though a static depiction of space would have been revelatory, the project had greater ambitions.  By utilizing a customized Google map as a base for which the analysis is uploaded and displayed, the project makes the information universally accessible.  Anyone with a browser can go to www.theaccessiblecity.org to view the map, and can easily manipulate scale and view using standard Google Maps tools. 

But this was also done to make the project scalable, by serving as a base for which additional analyses and data can be added.  By utilizing this universal platform, it allows for the expansion of the project to potentially envelop user-submitted data.  In doing so, it could allow the project to show not just an individual’s movement through space, but also, potentially, aggregated societal views and interactions within space.

PARANOIA AND PUBLIC SPACE

Field research for a project like this - involving accessing spaces one does not have the legal right to enter, opening unmarked doors, and photographing restricted spaces - logically raised suspicion and concern.  In a post-9/11 era, users were much more suspicious of my activity, particularly in government buildings.  Operating under a mindset in which the government is deemed a perpetual target of terrorism, government and civic buildings - which traditionally were deemed the most public - are now some of the most restrictive.  The Massachusetts State house, for instance, employed a massive security apparatus - including security guards, metal detectors, and video surveillance - that served as a significant barrier to access.

However, these public buildings are burdened with the competing goals of trying to maximize state security while also allowing access and transparency characteristic of a participatory, democratic system.  And while one could cynically state that, in contemporary experience, the latter goal is entirely symbolic, that did not bear out in experience.  Though there were a significant number of barriers when initially entering the Massachusetts State House, once the user was inside they had relatively free roam of the building; I was able to access mechanical rooms, private rooms, and other vulnerable spaces in the building with ease.

But over the course of the project, paranoia surrounding public spaces, and the security infrastructure put in place to control it, significantly changed.  Midway through the project, just a mile away from the Downtown Crossing site, a number of bombs were detonated at the Boston Marathon finish line.  12 years after 9/11, terrorism paranoia regained legitimacy, particularly in a local context.

And as a corollary to the project - which expanded the pedagogical understanding of public space to those spaces traditionally deemed private -  the bombings expanded the realm in which terrorism was deemed an imminent threat.  It was no longer just civic buildings, but rather all publicly-accessed space that was threatened by terrorism and subject to public paranoia.  Researching the final project, I could not sketch a floor plan or take pictures of a space for more than a minute or two without being asked by a passer-by what I was doing, and a number of times I was asked by police officers to explain, in detail, my intentions.

And it is in this new security context that the project gains new relevancy.  In depicting spaces in terms of accessibility, it reveals those spaces most at risk of terrorism.  And this proves to be both a benefit and a liability.  On one hand, it serves an educational purpose, showing officials (and the public) a more relevant map of where these acts of terrorism could potentially take place.  On the other hand, it gives those inclined to commit such acts better knowledge of the area and potential sites.

Albeit controversial, this project posits the view that the expansion of public knowledge is a moral obligation.  Just as with any technology that aims to expand public knowledge, this depiction of the accessible parts of a city has the potential to be used for both benevolent and more nefarious purposes.  How this knowledge is used remains to be seen.

New New Topographics

John Cage - Which, if I understand it at all, has been a function of twentieth century art- to open our eyes….Just seeing what there was to see.

22nd & Mission, San Francisco, CA

          So much of the debate around Google Street View is concerned with privacy: even when the law does not require it, Google has taken to blurring out faces and in Germany even entire buildings. Google’s business practices in general have engendered suspicion, even while people continue (in some cases begrudgingly) to use their systems.

            But we would be foolish not to acknowledge the massive work that the company has assembled. 5 million miles have been photographed in 50 different countries. There is bias in the work—as there is in any photograph—but I would argue that there is less bias than most. Because production is automated, there is no one (artist or otherwise) composing and framing individual photographs, choosing which moment to capture or how best to expose it. The work is produced within a structure—both ideologically and physically—and the result is a proprietary collection of photographs taken on sunny days from about 8 feet above the middle of the lane. The automatic production, like a Taylorist work of art, leads to such standardization that any strangeness captured by chance is the subject of internet fascination.

8776 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA

            Without ignoring Google’s authorial role or denying the particularity of the project, we can still acknowledge it as one of the most complete collections of streetscape photographs ever assembled. Just as Ed Ruscha’s book Every Building on the Sunset Strip, self-published in 1966, had a particular (and closed) system of capturing and representing that West Hollywood street, looking at it now gives us a useful impression of how that space looked and felt on an average day that year. After all, neither his work nor that of Google is concerned with Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment. Instead, they capture longer periods of time; Street View is (as of yet) a relic of the late 2010’s, as today we might read a work like Ruscha’s as a slice of the generalized “60’s.”

Second Street and Fourth Avenue, Ashland, WI

            The New Topographics exhibition at the George Eastman Center in 1975 was a landmark for American photography, one where 9 young photographers shared their contemporary landscapes. They photographed in black and white (save for Stephen Shore) and attempted to capture the world around them in Henry Wessel’s words as “the things photographed existed in the world.” Lewis Baltz, who also exhibited, hoped “that [their] photographs are sterile, that there’s no emotional content.” Their works were affective, or must have touched a nerve, as the show resonated powerfully with audiences and critics; the whole of the exhibition was purchased by the Eastman House, and is still shown, complete, internationally.

Gower and DeLongpre, Los Angeles, CA           

If these photos are either emotionally or factually insightful, and can be so easily rephotographed (to borrow from another 70’s photographic movement) using Street View, then there must be something powerful within Google’s material.

Church and Worth, New York, NY

            Even taking as subject those photographs that are powerful or beautiful in their own right, an illustration of a lapse in time may be enough to utterly reconfigure our understanding of the photograph.

West Side Highway, New York, NY    

        Or of a single morning.

6th and Western, Los Angeles, CA

            Or of a small-scale war on Western Avenue in Los Angeles. We can collapse years in a single image; it forms a bi-stable impression of a place through time that tells a story of reconstruction, of a Korean-American community’s persistence in the face of struggle.

            We are forced to grasp at an unencumbered image of the city that Giacomo Balla depicted in a moment of crisis; paintings are charged with the emotion and intellect of the artist, where photographs are among the ultimate works of “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Benjamin’s sense. Street View, as an assemblage, will allow future scholars of the Occupy movement to image Downtown Oakland in that era, if not that critical moment. 

16th and Telegraph, Oakland, CA

     Why are the realities mixed? Why do people perceive public spaces differently?

    On one hand, the nature features possessed by the public space provide raw material for people to create the mixture. On the other hand, the different background and previous experience people carry around with them offer the initial power to mix. For a book worm, the books inside the bookstore windows are door to paradise, while for a tree, they are dead bodies of their peers and the window is a grave yard. For tourists, the signage stores are different places to meet, while for typeface designers they may be cases to learn from. There are always more than one way to use and describe the same thing, and more than one thing to fit into the same description. With different aspects exemplified, references built and various interpretations made, the mille-feuilles of public space is created, and people are stuck within one or several particular layers.

    The deciphering of the mixture often happened naturally and silently as the images of the space caught by people’s eyes and then melt into their minds with other existing fragments experience and memory. By creating our own stories and listening to those of the others, an opportunity is opened up to better understand both the space that physically keeps the mixture and people that mentally create and decipher it. No matter how irrelevant it seems for the other people, each interpretation inspired by the physical world is a corner of the iceberg “Veritas”. The stories leave hints and reveal the mental world of the storytellers. The interpretations of physical realm become bridges between the diverse layers of the space as well as people’s mental world.

    In early experiments before the final project, I focused on the signage of stores around Harvard Square, trying to trace back the history and story behind the icons and typefaces. I also tried to research the content of Harvard different school shields. I had expected some coherence of context or value behind the designs to produce the most persuasive and pertinent visual representation of the institution. However, it turned out that design is not natural science with a chain along which you can deduce from the origin till the other end.

The subjective understanding and selection have great impact on final products. The dynamic randomness caught my interests and I wanted to know how far the boundary and how different people could be while perceiving the same but mixed reality. So for the final project, I decided to use images collected images around Harvard Square and remixed them with my own understanding and interpretation to create a set of cards to make a storytelling game based on the board game “Dixit”.

There will be 4-6 players. Each player has a same number of cards (4-5). One player is the storyteller for the turn. He looks at the cards in his hand, makes up a sentence triggered by the content of one card, and then say it to other players. The other players select amongst their own cards the one that best matches the sentence made up by the storyteller. Then, each of them gives their selected card to the storyteller, without showing it to the others. The storyteller shuffles his card with all the received cards. He then randomly places them face up on the table. The goal of the other players is to find which image is from the storyteller amongst the displayed ones. Each player secretly votes for the card that he believes belongs to the storyteller. Those who are correct will get credit, and whose card are mistaken as the storyteller’s will also get credits. As for the storyteller, he will get credit unless everybody or nobody is correct. This will prevent the storyteller to make a sentence too obvious, too vague or entirely irrelevant for the card.

 

    By inviting people to take part in deciphering the mixed realities, I hoped to explore the boundary of both the physical and mental world, and offer a more interactive and engaging way for people to share memories, know the multiple layer of both the physical and mental world, and know each other, especially for new friends and blind date. The cards can also be used as postcards particularly for Harvard Square. People’s preference of a particular card is a sign of resonating and will represent their perception of the space, and convey the perception by sending it to others.

Public space is often used as a platform for the expression of sentiment. Often this sentiment becomes synonymous with the identity of that place for a period of time, effectively turning it into a reservoir for those feelings and ideas. An extreme example is Tiananmen Square where 23 years later there are still candlelight vigils held for the victims of the massacre despite the Chinese government attempting to play down the events of that terrible day.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/05/world/asia/anniversary-of-tiananmen-crackdown-echos-through-shanghai-market.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

As the story of Tiananmen Square has propagated throughout media and recorded history, it has since become an international symbol for public righteousness, authoritarian oppression and the adversarial relationship between the two.

Looking at public space through this lens of sentiment may give us a way to see the roots of public space as it is practiced. Sentiment is the reason we do anything in the public realm: it embodies our aspiration, fear, anger, excitement and love. It drives us to publicly do things together (or alone), to demand change in our world, to add to our world or to enjoy our world for exactly what it is. Sharing sentiment overtly (ex: protesting) and ambiently (ex: public displays of affection – Tom Wolfe wrote an excellent essay on this in “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby”) justifies the existence of public space in terms of shared civic experience.

So what happens if we treat public space as a reservoir for sentiment in literal terms? Would the identity of that public space become more concrete? Would it become more nuanced? Would it ebb and flow over time like tides?

Michel De Certeauwrites “There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits there in silence, spirits one can ‘invoke’ or not. Haunted places are the only ones people can live in – and this inverts the schema of the Panopticon.”

That is the direction of this experiment – to treat public space as a reservoir for sentiment, to treat it as though it were haunted by that sentiment. The site for this experiment lies in the newly redeveloped Harvard Plaza. The means for this experiment lie in sound sculpture.

Because the site is newly defined in its character and experience, the shared experiences and sentiments associated with it are yet to be clearly defined. This makes it a strong candidate for such an experiment.

 The use of sound allows participants to leave notions of sentiment in the form of spoken “wishes” (wishes were selected because of their embodiment of sentiment, both civic and personal, both aspirational and vulnerable, and because of the symbolic physical impact that they leave on public space – often in the form of coins in fountains or parts of statues worn away).  When a participant leaves a wish at the sound sculpture, they are given the experience of the space around them being defined by sound: ambient voices stating wishes rise on one side of the space surrounding them, climax with a single voice all around them stating its owners wish in total clarity, and then ambient voices fade away on the other side of the space. The voice that is fed back to the participant in full clarity is the voice that furthest away from the participant in terms of time – this voice is continually redefined, since the number of voices stored is finite and continually cycling.

The space surrounding the participant becomes a wishing well of sorts. The latest version of these sound spaces surround newly defined seating areas in the plaza – the idea was to work off of the plaza’s architecture and patterns of use specific to social interaction or prolonged occupation.

For the simulation of the experience that this sculpture would give, a Max/MSP composition was produced that used anecdotal wishes gathered from plaza occupants. Speakers were placed around the room used for the simulation so that space could be defined by sound.

Feedback for the project was wonderfully useful. Possibilities of the sculpture as an instrument or a spatial instrument were introduced, as were notions of the sculptures’ functional transparency and its implications for interaction. The relationship between space and sentiment was questioned. Of course physical model of interaction needs to be developed further as well.

I’m looking forward to exploring the direction and possibilities of this project over the summer.

This project is an attempt to visualize South Koreans’ notion of North Korea and North Korean defectors in South Korea. North Koreans have no access to the Internet due to the government’s strict control over disseminated information. They get only government information; no individual citizens can provide anything to counter the government. Furthermore, for more than half a century, South Koreans have been indoctrinated through anticommunist education and have invented an image of North Korea as a county lacking in substance. As communication technologies have developed, more accessible information has allowed people in South Korea to begin forming different points of view about North Korea. But this illusion-making process is still operating, even online. Repeated infusion of distorted images reproduces and reinforces a stereotype of North Korea and North Korean defectors. This project reveals South Koreans’ biased notion of North Korea by contrasting different Google image search results from various search words in both English and Korean.

The top-ranked 100 Google image search results are used as a source of input that has influenced South Koreans’ perception Google search results are products of mass participation that reflect the notion that already exists, but the results also reproduce and reinforce, implicitly or explicitly, the formation of social consciousness. The number 100 is a symbolic number of images are deemed as a sample that represents the infinite number of online images. Also, it enables us to make a clear comparison by allowing easy quantitative analysis. For instance, 15 images among the 100 implies that that theme of images comprises 15% of our notion of North Korea.

I brought intangible online images into tangible forms of representation by printing them and cutting out important parts by hand. The rough edges of the pieces reveal the trace of manual work, thereby reinforcing their tangible substance. By exhibiting the images in a physical form, I intended to make people encounter the images more critically. At the level of personal experience, holding, analyzing and cutting the images made me contemplate the meaning of each image. Also, the process of categorizing the cutout pieces and organizing them for display allowed me to structure the images and to conceptualize the ideas. This process gave me a more objective point of view than my preconceived notion of North Korea, and it helped me detach from an emotional response.

By cutting out the dominant components from the image, those parts are cut off from their detailed context so that the message of the image is simplified, aiding way we receive the connotative messages of the images. These cutout pieces are organized in categories to show the differences between search terms. Categories were determined by the dominance of the theme, the difference of the implications the images conveyed, and the uniqueness of a certain theme. Images categorized into a theme convey collective messages that have unique connotations from one another. People will be able to intuitively perceive the differences, including multiple layers of the messages for which words afford no explanation.

The comparisons of images reveal South Koreans’ self-centered point of view in which they deem themselves to be benevolent helpers who are affluent and powerful. From this prominent point of view, South Koreans label North Koreans as helpless, poor citizens and view North Korean defectors as inferior members of society who were rescued by South Korea. To break with this self-centered position, it is important that South Koreans recognize how distorted this notion is. To disseminate the results of these comparisons, I made leaflets that can be released in both physical and virtual space to inform people about my analysis.

The form of a propaganda leaflet, which has been used by both Koreas to spread their ideologies, is used as a metaphor for the effects of online images on the formation of social subconsciousness. The mechanism of propaganda bombing is a way to disseminate hearsay information. The purpose of the propaganda bombing is to instill doubts in a person about the opponent’s regime or to insinuate themselves into a person’s favor, so that it embeds itself in people’s daily lives as an ordinary experience. In that sense, it is similar to the way Google images exert influence on viewers.

As an onsite performance that symbolizes the dissemination of images in virtual space, I blew counter indoctrination leaflets in the classroom at the end of my presentation. To finish my work, reaching an audience specifically in South Korea, I have to return to online space to propagate my analysis of the results of my work that reveals how South Koreans’ notion of North Korea is distorted.

- Joungwon Lee

Google Filter commenced in filming a large-scale LED advertising screen in an effort to understand the nature of the color changes emitted from moving light images. I sampled film stills from the footage at points where color differentiation was at its most acute, but my systematic approach of addressing the same point within each still did not produce compelling results. The differences in color throughout various structures within the composition existed in dynamic interplay with one another, and one point was not a measure of the entire effect. Therefore I began submitting the images to Google’s ‘search by image’ function, and it was at this point that I was able to understand the change in color tone as the screen progressed over time, as well as the ratio of one color to another within a single frame. 

This, of course, is a description of color from the point of view of a computer algorithm. I am intrigued by the images output by Google – often they capture nuances that belie the work of the computer at hand, occasionally it produces a whole set of equivalents that faithfully capture the essence of my input without any similarity of content. 

‘Cambridge’, on the website, is an example of a Google formulation: an algorithmically contrived interpretation of a filmed city walk, whereby a frame selected every ten seconds is input to image-search, resulting in myriad variations of a given color scheme, form pattern, or shape association reference.

The most recent addition to the project is the inclusion of Google’s word search mechanism, thus adding a verbal component to the imagery if the original material allows. As I transcribe into the search engine, I record word structures that are compelling in their implicit ubiquity – they would not have been sourced had they not been previously searched. By lending Google the autonomy of ‘choosing’ images and sentence fragments, the engine begins to formulate a distinct narrative.

 To assert the symbiotic value of image and verse it has been important to select from conventionally produced filmic works that incorporate both mediums. The decisions that were made in creating the qualitative product of a film are important in garnering robust output imagery, and the contrived narratives I sample are deliberately framed, colored, and imagined. I have employed perfume advertisements – Chanel No. 5 (1983), Thierry Mugler Angel (1993), L’Eau D’Issey (2011) – becausethey are short, possess several different shots or scenes, are artfully administered, have dialogue, and are reflective of a niche society.

To communicate that which is intangible has been the objective of perfume commercials through the decades. Brands invest a significant portion of their advertising allowances to deploy exaggerated imagery and melodramatic narrative that is often articulated through voices and phrases which might ring despotic in their fervent promotion of product.

Because it is impossible to convey scent through audio-visual media, the content of the films become an essential visualization of the brands’ intended perceived message: the smell has become the brand. These short films – often between thirty seconds and one minute – are highly controlled productions. The frame of a still, the distribution of light, and the selection of colors present within an image are specially designed to reinforce the product and brand at hand. The results, then, are direct reflections of the meticulously researched desires of the contemporary culture at hand.

I present a selection of commercials representing well-known perfumes with the intention of exploring their visual and semantic data through the by-products of Google search filters. By distilling frames and linguistics into separate blocks of information, the aggregate elements that define a cultural index can be precisely represented. The subsequent recombination of the meta-data sets allows for discordant and diverse reinterpretation.

Ultimately I found the visual documentation of the city to produce the most fruitful rendition of Google Filter. I plan to continue documenting cities in this format, and revisit selected images over time to measure differences in Google’s output as their image database constantly changes – perhaps the project can unravel as a small study of the evolution of the search engine itself.

www.google-filter.biz

 

Ashley Mendelsohn

We understand space through narrative. Today, social media platforms like twitter allow large communities access to personal narratives. This phenomena results in fragmented and ever-evolving collective perceptions about place. 

Spatial proximity can now be almost the same as proximity in time. Sites and events that once needed to be physically attended to be experienced can be experienced in real time virtually. 

While formulating this research agenda, I considered analyzing the Boston Marathon as a case study. Following the bombings, I decided to continue with the investigation - analyzing the relationship between the events of April 15th and the site itself. I was particularly interested in how events shapes perception of space. The Boston Marathon, as an event in itself, influences the way that attendees view the city. Specifically, the use of roads and the threshold of the finish line - which is a permanent fixture in the city. The bombings undoubtably had a tremendous effect on not only those who attended and participated in the marathon, but also people across the world. The role of social media and it’s relationship to both the bombing as an event and the site surrounding the finish line became the driving force of this investigation. 

The current stage of this project focuses specifically on visualizing tweets that refer to spatial landmarks at the site of the finish line. The following animation breaks the site into spatial landmarks (buildings, roads, and the finish line) and scales each element individually to reflect the number of times each respective landmark was referred to in tweets on specific days. 

visualizing tweets spatially from adm37 on Vimeo.

It was clear before creating the animation that the number of tweets would increase drastically on the date of the bombing. However, the specific spatial breakdown of those tweets was unexpected. The result of this case study not only directly relates to specific events that occur on site, but also the general perspective of landmarks within the site. Specifically small roads that perhaps lacked a collective narrative. 

The project can evolve in a range of ways. The extent and influence of unexpected events is a topic that I am personally interested in. Therefore, potentially extending this form of analysis to a range of large-scale events, ranging from hurricane Sandy to some of the work of Artichoke or Red Moon Theatre, would be interesting. This method of documenting could also be employed on a large city scale. I’m looking forward to pushing the project further.