Sketchup and Google Earth tests

Revising the video I made of the Dérive that Chris Fox and I took during the DesignInquiry/DesignCity/Detroit inquiry this past February. Taking the geolacated images from that overlay the GPS track of the journey and adding them as skins to large screens that will hover over the Detroit landscape of present and 1872. The movie will still be a Google Earth tour flyover, as in the original, but with these large images taken through the windshield of Chirs' car. Working title for the video is appropriately "Intrepid."

Field research in Detroit

Documentation of typographic artifacts in the urban landscape as part of DesignInquiry's Fall 2104 residency at MOCAD.

All cities (and all places that humans inhabit) are marked with language and specifically the word. The way these words are styled, the messages the letterforms speak by way of their form, signify forces in the urban landscape. These styles are types. Typologies of letterforms. What they say, and where they say it might tell us something about the city and the forces and agents at play. This has been an experiment that might reveal something about the shifting cultural and economic landscape of Detroit (in some cases specifically gentrification.)

Cutting and sorting. 

Organizing typologies.

Organized typologies with reference map.

Detail: typologies organized by aesthetic values and color coded by region.

The images can be viewed in location here.