Just finished teaching “Critical Urban Media Arts: An Experimental Workshop in Urban Research, Mapping and Representation” with Brian at Columbia University’s School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. The course was presented by the school’s Spatial Information Design Lab and resulted in Periplurban, an experiential urban dictionary.

Recently completely my paper “Towards a Synaesthetic Transparency: Janet Cardiff’s Her Long Black Hair as a Walk Between Acousticd, Temporal and Ontological Spaces” 

This paper was written for Eve Blau’s fantastic course “Transparency.”

Listen to two excerpts from the walk audio:

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Some very exciting news! Yellow Arrow :: Capitol of Punk, the interactive documentary we made in 2006 about Washington D.C. and its punk music history, is going to be exhibited at MOMA in New York this spring. The project is a part of the larger exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind,”from February 24–May 12, 2008 on The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Gallery, sixth floor. The exhibition was organized by Paola Antonelli, Curator, and Patricia Juncosa Vecchierini, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design. Here’s the description of the whole show:

In the past few decades, individuals have experienced dramatic changes in some of the most established dimensions of human life: time, space, matter, and individuality. Working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, gleefully drowning in information, acting fast in order to preserve some slow downtime, people cope daily with dozens of changes in scale. Minds adapt and acquire enough elasticity to be able to synthesize such abundance. One of design’s most fundamental tasks is to stand between revolutions and life, and to help people deal with change. Designers have coped with these displacements by contributing thoughtful concepts that can provide guidance and ease as science and technology evolve. Several of them—the Mosaic graphic user’s interface for the Internet, for instance—have truly changed the world. Design and the Elastic Mind is a survey of the latest developments in the field. It focuses on designers’ ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and social mores, changes that will demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior, and convert them into objects and systems that people understand and use.

The exhibition will highlight examples of successful translation of disruptive innovation, examples based on ongoing research, as well as reflections on the future responsibilities of design. Of particular interest will be the exploration of the relationship between design and science and the approach to scale. The exhibition will include objects, projects, and concepts offered by teams of designers, scientists, and engineers from all over the world, ranging from the nanoscale to the cosmological scale. The objects range from nanodevices to vehicles, from appliances to interfaces, and from pragmatic solutions for everyday use to provocative ideas meant to influence our future choices. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

Here is an initial experiment in extending “The Colors of Berlin” into a sound/video piece. Presented September 15 at the 2007 Conflux Festival.

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Video editing: Jesse Shapins

Design: Celia Di Pauli, Pedro Recarey, Philipp Schwarz and Jesse Shapins

Sound design and recording: Kara Oehler

Photography: Pedro Recarey and Jesse Shapins