Monday, October 12, 2009

Urban Screens: Greg Smith's SlideShow (About)

I've been exploring how different disciplines adopt technology over the past few years and along the way, I've come across people who are doing interesting things, bringing new perspectives to the transdisciplinary technological space. 
About Greg Smith

"Greg J. Smith is a Toronto-based designer and researcher with interests in media theory and digital culture. His work is invested in exploring how contemporary information paradigms affect representational and spatial systems. These dynamics have been explored in a range of mediums including drawing, visualization, writing and editing. Greg is a principal designer at Mission Specialist, he co-curates and edits the digital arts publication Vague Terrain and is a contributor to Rhizome."  


Greg has a Masters in Architecture and a B.A. in Philosophy.


Urban Screens

The text for this slide can be found on Greg Smith's site, Serial Consign.




In the text for this presentation,  Greg reviews how urban space has been represented over the years.  He uses Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project as a springboard.  In the middle, he talks about the turf war between the convergence of players in the Ubicompworld: "...and with microblogging of course comes the mobile nation—in case you didn't notice this is happening right now. Ubicomp is becoming less of a buzzword and more of a turf war. We've got telcos, regulatory bodies and hardware and software providers locked in a scrum with us consumers stuck in the middle."   He ends with a pausing point,  directing us to DIYcity.




Here are the image credits, as listed on Greg's website:




  1. Disturbed City - Mattia Casalegno & Michael Langeder [see Vague Terrain 13: citySCENE documentation]
  2. Parisian Shopping Arcade - photographer unknown
  3. Index of The Arcades Project (left), Walter Benjamin in the Bibliothèque National - photo: Gisèle Freund (right)
  4. OpenStreetMap, map of Parkdale
  5. twittervision - David Troy
  6. Mobile phone array - photographer unknown
  7. -
  8. GTA IV, screen capture - Rockstar Games [see previous post]
  9. Basketball Game - photographer unknown
  10. Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities & Venice
  11. CityMurmur New Orleans - Writing Academic English
  12. One Block Radius - Christina Ray & Dave Mandl
  13. EveryBlock - Adrian Holovaty [see previous post]
  14. In the Air - Nerea Calvillo & collaborators
  15. FixMyStreet Canada - VisibleGovernment.ca
  16. New York Nearest Subway, iPhone application - Acrossair
  17. Layar Reality Browser for Android - SPRXmobile
  18. The Networked Omniscient - Evan Allen & Matthew Worsnick
  19. DIYcity - John Geraci
  20. JT Switchboard - photo: Joseph A. Carr.



RELATED


About Mission Specialist
"Mission Specialist is a small Toronto-based design studio specializing in print design and web presence. Our goal is to provide elegant and efficient design solutions for small businesses and creative professionals. Beyond the expected experience in print and web, we have a diverse background in photo editing, grant and proposal writing, SEO & web marketing, usability and typesetting - we can bring a range of skills to the table that will enrich any project. We are interested in providing individuals and organizations with modular, expandable frameworks for commerce, archiving and self-publication." Mission Specialist is Jordan Hale and Greg J. Smith.



About Vague Terrain
"Vague Terrain is a web based digital arts publication that showcases the creative practice of a variety of artists, musicians scholars. The project aspires to sample the focus and methodologies of academic and art journals and the tenacity and specificity of independent record labels to examine contemporary digital culture in an immediate and accessible manner. Content consists of curated visual, audio and written works, and now a companion blog. For better and worse this project is neither peer reviewed nor funded."


About Rhizome
"Rhizome is dedicated to the creation, presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic practices that engage technology.....


DYICity
"Our cities today are relics from a time before the Internet. Services and infrastructure, created and operated by the government, are centrally managed, non-participatory and closed. And while this was once the best (and only) way for cities to operate, today it leads to a system that is inefficient, increasingly expensive to maintain, and slow to change."



"What is needed right now is a new type of city: a city that is like the Internet in its openness, participation, distributed nature and rapid, organic evolution - a city that is not centrally operated, but that is created, operated and improved upon by all - a DIY City"
DYICity Groups

Posted by Lynn Marentette at 6:26 AM
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)