Today, these remnant parcels represent an essential archipelago of opportunity.
Once each site’s urban performance is maximized its design can be engaged & extended for local benefit. Based on existing models of community design, as well as new research in digital democracy, we propose place-based media to shape opinions, engage communities, and even aggregate finances and funding. The final outcome is a network of urban places and virtual space combined.
I dig the digital overlays on paper maps & on video of the sites (near mid-video), and idea of online community engagement with small urban lots. (Yes, my mind is on Loveland lately, why do you ask?)
It’s my new book! 144 whole pages jam-packed with your favorite art. It’s so exciting to finally be done and flip through a copy. You can order one too!
Last week I was working on Loveland inch viz at the Marsh Cafe in the Mission, where they happen to be producing a showcalled Loveland. Last time I mentioned a 2D-yet-linear progress bar, showing each inchvestor’s share with colors! and squares! Thought I’d share some steps along the way towards real placement on the 9′ Plymouth grid, experiments with placing rectangular plots. A random scattering…
And more clustering tendencies…
The empty swath in the middle is a walkway to provide pedestrian access to all parts of Plymouth, as originally taped down on the studio floor in Detroit. (We don’t want visitors trampling the miniature city…)
Some big news this week: early investors’ square inches will become square feet once we reach 10,000 and colonize the next patch of land. For now play with it on the web over at makeloveland. Keen observers will notice that the whole arrangement reshuffles every few minutes – just to keep things interesting…
Check out these sweet generative typography experiments using Processing / Geomerative over at Caligraft. I always loved doodling serif letterforms myself…
They remind me of John Langdon’s ambigrams, calligraphic creations that have extremely clever rotational or mirror symmetry.
Here’s an interview with him, and a whole magazine (Ambigram) with articles, galleries, and automatic generators.
I’ve been finding a lot of good electronica mixes (mostly minimal techno & tech house, summer sounds for a rainy winter week) for my programming soundtrack & thought I’d share some links.
The Loveland project is a curious experiment in micro-property ownership and augmented reality. You buy square inches in Detroit (and simultaneously on the internet), to build as you please. It’s picking up lots of momentum and interest, so follow the ongoing saga at the blog, 7 Billion Friends, and inchvest here!
I’ve been talking with Jerry about how to visualize inches and inchvestors and give people something to explore and play with, using Stamen’s SFMOMA ArtScope as inspiration with its zoomy grid and magnifier. The viewer I sketched in Processing.js feels like a good start and should be live within a few days!
Over coffee today we talked visual storytelling and map presentation styles, and I remarked how much tiled inch-rectangles resemble fields like these Dutch tulips.
Not only the light and shading technique, but the organic surface details are reminiscent of electron micrograph images. These next few come from my favorite EM photography gallery, Eye of Science (see also cool nano photography, Dennis Kunkel, Google images).
Hi, I'm Larry Sheradon. I make art with code and ink, shoot photos of tiny worlds, and live in San Francisco.
Write me at sheradon (at) gmail (dot) com.
