Different Data Detroit (+Stockholm) at Nordes

The latest iteration of Different Data - Different Data Detroit (+Stockholm) at NORDES 2015: Design Ecologies, Stockholm, Sweden (June 7–10, 2015.) With Rachele Riley and Dan McCafferty.

"For Nordes 2015, we will bring the outcomes of our work in Detroit (with DesignInquiry at MOCAD) to Stockholm and merge these two ecologies on the walls of the exhibition space over the course of the conference. We propose that the discursive relationship between these two cities is nascent and  probable, on various levels. There are connections that we can presuppose (structure, form, system, mythology) and those that can only be realized through discovery. These connections must surely run deep, even if they are forced by our subjective measurements and if only as action (which is enough). They are hypotheses that remain to be realized. In keeping with the methods of Different Data, the Detroit (+Stockholm) project will  be both methodical and poetic, creating a link and a layering of the two cities in both factual and speculative comparisons."

View the project description

Networking and checking in with the mothership.

Checking the data.

Different Data Detroit: Presentation at Cumulus 2015, Milan

Rachele Riley and I presented our paper “Different Data: Experimental Design Research for Mapping Cities” at Cumulus Milan 2015: The Virtuous Circle as part of a panel on Experimenting/Prototyping to discuss our approach to and consideration of ‘different data’ and critical design. The paper reviews the project Different Data in its first installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) during a three month residency with DesignInquiry. The project was done in collaboration with Patricio Davila, and Dan McCafferty. Our paper will be included in the proceedings and published by McGraw-Hill Education.

Detail of Different Data Detroit installation at MOCAD, October 2014. 

View of installation in progress of Different Data Detroit at MOCAD, December 2014. 

Video still from Different Data Detroit, in collaboration with Rachele Riley.

Intrepid, the video

intrepid from Joshua Singer on Vimeo.

A tour through a Detroit landscape. This is the result of research of the graphic cultural landscape of the D and basis for various components of Different Data with Patricio Davila, Dan McCafferty, and Rachele Riley as part of the DesignInquiry residency at MOCAD.

A test for the revised movie for MOCAD. "Intrepid"

From Ad Hoc Atlas

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.

Paper Presentation at the Mediated City conference at Woodbury University

Related fairly directly to the atlas work, "The Graphic Semiome: A Theoretical Examination of the Picturing of the City" was a paper I presented at the Mediated City conference at Woodbury University October 2014. Co-organized by the journal Architecture_MPS.

Abstract:

We are immersed in a landscape of visual messages. An ecology of signs, these images and image-texts speak to us as pictures informed by cultural consciousness and memory. The German word for picture is “bild” which shares its origins with “build.” We understand our environment by assembling it or by “picturing” it; building dialectical images and dimensions of reality. We are continually navigating our world by re-picturing it from the continual flow of both established and new image-texts. Images within the city and of the city are catalysts forming and reforming the city through this process of picturing. Using the model of the Semiosphere, a self-regulating ecological system structured by language, we can model urban space as a metabolism comprised of the narratives and mythologies of culture. This paper will outline a model for an urban semiosphere and graphic semiomes within this semiotic ecology.

Google image search “Los Angeles punk rock”, June 2014

Joshua Singer Interviewed at San Francisco State University

Part of the San Francisco State University Campus Arts & Lectures 2014. Interviewed by Larry Eilenberg, Chair, Theatre Department, SF State University. I discuss the Ad Hoc Atlas project.

Ad Hoc Atlas: Volume Two, Version One: Montréal and Berlin, at Nordes 2013

My book the "Ad Hoc Atlas: Volume Two, Version One: Montréal and Berlin", was displayed at the exhibition at the 5th Nordic Design Research Conference: Nordes '13: Experiments in Design Research: Expressions, Knowledge, Critique, Copenhagen, Denmark. The book is an Iris printed, 163 page, hand sewn, coverless (theoretically, it is unfinished) book of experimental design research projects conducted in Montréal and Berlin with DesignInquiry (in Montréal and Berlin of course). It is part of a larger ongoing project, The Ad Hoc Atlas.

View most of the book (photo documentation.)
View the whole book (readable.)

Coverless cover. The Ad Hoc Atlas is an unending series of prototypes. 

View of layered Montréal. 1920s industry atlas, GIS tracks of dérives through the city, traffic congestion, 3D monuments in situ.

Chapter opener: historic map layers, GIS tracks of dérives through the city, geolocated images of design artifacts.

Documentation: snapshots of Berlin's semiosphere at various times.

Illustration of semiographic metabolic readings.