links for 2009-03-26

'Soft infrastructure superpowers': Lift09 presentation

"Urban computing generally encompasses the study of people experiencing the city with technologies. Our approach is to benefit from people’s experience of these services, to gain a more thorough understanding of urban environments. In the recent years, the large deployment of mobile devices led to a massive increase in the volume of records of where people have been and when they were there. The analysis of the accumulated archives of such spatio-temporal data can derive high-level human behavior such as the estimation of mobility mode. Evidently, urban planers, traffic engineers, tourism authorities could profit from the pervasive deployment of new technologies to increase the understanding of how people and crowds explicitly consume space. "

"Velib is a community bicycle rental service in Paris (similar to the Vélo'v service in Lyon and Bicing in Barcelona). The stations deployed in the city offer bikes people can use for their small and medium daily routes within the city. As part our Tracing the Visitor's Eye project, and as follow-up to the work on Bicing in Barcelona, Mathieu Arnold granted us access to the infrastructure status (i.e. number of available bikes for each station) over several weeks. The resulting animation shows the spatio-temporal state of the system and the mobility patterns of its users. One intention behing these visualization is to explore how accumulated data can help people to grasp the availability and quality of the system over space and time (e.g. do not expect to encounter available bikes the different neighborhoods at certain hours). In addition we aim at revealing Paris, the life of its different neighborhoods, specific areas, their topologies and dynamics through its bike system."

"Originally commissioned for the exhibition “Wouldn’t it be Nice” at the Somerset House in London in 2008, The MacGuffin Library proposes the foundations for a library of MacGuffins, produced by first authoring a series of film synopsis’ which are used to inform a collection of sixteen objects, addressing themes stemming from a disparate range of interests and inspirations: Re-enactments, unorthodox fantasies, Borges and Carver short stories, forgeries, urban myths, the defining of high and low brow cinema, alternative histories, and the relationship between media and memory. "