SurfaceCities is a research and teaching initiative, established to study our changing images of cities in the context of a new visual culture developing around information technologies. The website hosts a range of projects and papers developed by faculty and students in the Department of Architecture at Cornell University. They are using information technologies to explore new ways of reading and handling cities for a variety of purposes, from environmental activism to extreme commuting.

Their approach is to create dynamic, graphic and situated projects that extend or challenge established theories of urbanism. This work cuts across numerous fields (architecture, information science, and urban studies) in order to challenge traditional conceptions of the city that are static, depersonalized, and focused primarily on built form. In addition, it suggests new configurations of people, computers and cities that shift the discourse on human-computer interaction towards human-computer-environment interaction.

The publishing nerds at Slice Magazine hit the subways, parks, bars and streets, and document what people are reading and wearing on their blog, Cover Spy.

Example:
Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu
Male, 20s, red plaid pants w black oxfords & consciously-poetically shabby coat, G train

Image from the Crop Mob Flickr page.

Crop mob is primarily a group of young, landless, and wannabe farmers who come together to build and empower communities by working side by side.  Crop mob is also a group of experienced farmers and gardeners willing to share their knowledge with their peers and the next generation of agrarians.

Many crop mobbers are apprentices or interns on sustainable farms in the Triangle area of North Carolina. The need for community participation matches a desire for community among young people interested in getting into farming. The crop mob was conceived as a way of building the community necessary to practice this kind of agriculture and to put the power to muster this group in the hands of our future food producers.

Any crop mobber can call a crop mob to do the kind of work it takes a community to do. They work together, share a meal, play, talk, and make music. No money is exchanged. This is the stuff that communities are made of.

How can you increase the immersion of data? The bachelor thesis “Experiencing Abstract Information” by Jochen Winker and Stefan Kuzaj introduces theoretical principles, and shows them using interactive examples.

There are four essential parts in making abstract information experienceable: information itself, relevant senses, fitting emotion and a direct reference of the presentation to the information. With their method you can not only design fitting media, but also check existing media for their potential.

To demonstrate the systematics, they built three interactive installations. By using them you become an interactive diagram in a virtual mirror, cause virtual water-pollution in a water-basin or compare the time you have to work in different countries to buy a big mac or bread. All of these installations show a different approach of immersed data transfer.

Flyfire, a project initiated by the SENSEable City Laboratory in collaboration with ARES Lab (Aerospace Robotics and Embedded Systems Laboratory) aims to transform any ordinary space into a highly immersive and interactive display environment.

In its first implementation, the Flyfire project sets out to explore the capabilities of this display system by using a large number of self-organizing micro helicopters. Each helicopter contains small LEDs and acts as a smart pixel. Through precisely controlled movements, the helicopters perform elaborate and synchronized motions and form an elastic display surface for any desired scenario.

With the self-stabilizing and precise controlling technology from the ARES Lab, the motion of the pixels is adaptable in real time. The Flyfire canvas can transform itself from one shape to another or morph a two-dimensional photographic image into an articulated shape. The pixels are physically engaged in transitioning images from one state to another, which allows the Flyfire canvas to demonstrate a spatially animated viewing experience.

Each day, we are surrounded by seemingly insignificant objects, taking them from one place to the other, or leaving them on a table for weeks, without paying any attention to them. We ignore or forget them, using things only when we need to, making sure they don’t interfere or inhabit our space. But what if they were not so stable and subservient? What if they could swivel, bounce or even fly. And what if they did so all at the same time?

Julien Vallée and Nicolas Burrows want to imagine a place where objects could live and move, harmoniously, and of their own accord. Without interfering with each other these objects would bounce, roll, turn and cross each other’s paths. This experiment is about re-discovering our daily surroundings.

Above  is the making of the interactive video that was originally made for the If You Could Collaborate exhibition. Each object is assigned to a letter on the keyboard, and can be activated or deactivated at any time. The online version will be soon available to play with at dansedance.com

The Attractive City Generator was conceived and developed as a part of a research project at the ETH in Zurich, at the chair of Computer Aided Architectural Design. It is a tool to educate people how cities could be created in many ways and different settings in a very playful way.

The goal is to make people aware of social conditions in an urban network and encourage them to take part in decisions – involve people into the process of urban planning . The urban planners are only setting the basic rules for the city as a basic framework. Instead of using a mouse or a keyboard, the application is designed much more intuitively and contextually for the user.

Cre­at­ive Cit­ies seeks to ini­ti­ate con­ver­sa­tion about why inclus­ive, sus­tain­able and cre­at­ive cit­ies are bene­fi­cial, and neces­sary in a rap­idly urb­an­ising region, and to use pro­jects, research and opin­ions to sug­gest factors that aid the devel­op­ment of cre­at­ive cit­ies. They seek to identify and cel­eb­rate the local skill base of cit­ies in the region and to high­light the value of devel­op­ing tra­di­tional skill sets and indus­tries to con­nect with a global know­ledge economy.

The blog doesn’t seek to provide neat “solu­tions” to the diverse issues faced by cit­ies across the region, or to impose the val­ues of one city on another, or to replace the in-depth and ongo­ing work of experts in this field.

Rather, they seek to use a short-term strategy to plant a seed in the minds of a broader audi­ence about the ideas around cre­at­ive cit­ies, and to con­nect that audi­ence with sources for fur­ther inform­a­tion about issues of sus­tain­ab­il­ity, inclus­ive­ness and the poten­tial of the cre­at­ive eco­nomy with par­tic­u­lar ref­er­ence to cit­ies in East Asia.

Thir­teen coun­tries are included in the scope of the Cre­at­ive Cit­ies pro­ject. They hope to secure con­tri­bu­tions from them all and to high­light the skill sets, strengths and unique con­di­tions of major cit­ies in each of these countries. The countries are: Aus­tralia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malay­sia, New Zea­l­and, Phil­ip­pines, Singa­pore, Taiwan, Thai­l­and, Viet­nam and UK.

In this installation YesYesNo teamed up with The Church, Inside Out Productions and Electric Canvas to turn the Auckland Ferry Building into an interactive playground. Their  job was to create an installation that would go beyond merely projection on buildings and allow viewers to become performers, by taking their body movements and amplifying them 5 stories tall.

They used three different types of interaction – body interaction on the two stages, hand interaction above a light table, and phone interaction with the tracking of waving phones. There were six  scenes, cycled every hour for the public.

How To Explain It To My Parents is a Documentary series by Lernert & Sander in which nine abstract artists explain to their mom and dad what their work is all about.

Above, episode 1 with fantastic artist Arno Coenen.