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.

Paper presentation at CAA 2013

“Towards an Open Source Model for Design Research” co-presented with Christopher Moore of Concordia University at the CAA (College Art Association) Annual Conference, New York, NY. February 2013.

Presentation of case study of my research project “Ad-Hoc Atlas” and it’s outcomes as part of ““Design Cities Berlin” with DesignInquiry.

View the paper here.

From the Ad Hoc Atlas Berlin, "Model of Berlin Prototype Semiospheric Metabolic Reader displaying continuous feed sample data", 2013

FAX exhbition

My piece Partial Facsimile was included in the San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries' exhbition FAX, "an evolving exhibition from the Independent Curators International that began in New York in 2009 and has been traveling ever since. The SFAC Galleries invited 22 Bay Area artists to reconceive the fax machine as a thinking and drawing tool. Each participating artist transmitted their fax-based work to the gallery via our working fax lines. The results are displayed alongside works by artists, graphic designers, architects and other cultural producers from around the globe.”

Detail: Fax of pages from Walter Benjamin's Arcade Project, chapter Modes of Lighting.

“Ad Hoc Atlas Montréal” at KSBDA International Design Conference

“Ad Hoc Atlas Montréal (Detail)”, Exhibition of Korean Society of Basic Design & Art during Summer 2012 International Design Conference, hosted by San Jose State University at the Natalie & James Thompson Gallery of 35 invited artists and designers from Asia and the San Francisco Bay Area.

"Dérive Vieux Montréal, St. Laurent", 2012.

Work in “Je Me Souviens” at Portes Ouverte Montréal, Concordia University

Some of my work from in “Je Me Souviens” at Portes Ouverte Montréal, Concordia University of work from the “Design Cities, Montréal” project in May 2011.