“Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you are visiting Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts.”

 Calvino, I. (1997). Invisible Cities (New Ed.). Vintage Classics.

•The dérive starts on a slow note so I take a seat and have a cup of coffee. As the coffee slowly makes me aware of my surroundings the city becomes alive in front of me. More people out, more cars, more noise. Is it the coffee? Or is there a time of the day in which this neighbourhood springs to being? Did I just witness that?

•Sunday vibe. Sunday is a day that can be felt in very similar ways throughout the world.

•The incense, heat and walking make me a bit melancholic. This area does seem of earlier days.

•The market used to be an air raid shelter. Brutalist & functional in aesthetic.

•In this area residents make an effort to keep shared spaces. It gives me a sense of great communal living.

•I watch a girl put the day’s laundry inside, is this my signal for the rain that is about to come?

•Small spaces (dwellings) call for clever solutions. The tubes that poke out on the façades of buildings are used for putting sticks, on which the laundry is aired.

•At times I feel that this city is a ghost-town before 4 o’clock. People keep indoors until the heat ceases and it is bearable to step outside.

This is the last installment for this project. It was a great experience to submerge myself in the Singaporean cityscape over the last months. What I have sensed will be part of me for time to come.

Thank-you!

Project funded by FONCA (National Fund for Culture & Arts)-CONACYT (National Science and Technology Council). Mexico

The map images used for this work are from © OpenStreetMap contributors, CC-BY-SA. http://www.openstreetmap.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/.

“An oracle was questioned about the mysterious bond between two objects so dissimilar as the carpet and the city. One of the two-the oracle replied-has the form the gods gave the starry sky and the orbits in which the worlds revolve; the other is an approximate reflection, like every human creation…The oracle was interpreted in this sense, arousing no controversy. But you could, similarly, come to the opposite conclusion: that the true map of the universe is the city of Eudoxia, just as it is, a stain that spreads out shapelessly, with crooked streets, houses that crumble one upon the other amid clouds of dust, fires, screams in the darkness”

Calvino, I. (1997). Invisible Cities (New Ed.). Vintage Classics.

•As I was trying to decide whether to go left or right a lost tourist asked me “Where is Mustafa?”, something in his tone made the question sound rather different it was a mixture between desperation and frightfulness out of being disoriented in a strange street. It sounded more as if he was looking for a relative or a close friend rather than a mall.

•The knick-knack market next to the canal is probably a part of the city that most want forget.

•From the bus station one can ride express to Malacca, KL and Genting.

•The market with its putrid smell of salted meats and the indisputable sent of spices, chilies and nuts all kept together in a small space. A few steps away I can make out the smell of freshly grounded coffee, of course there is a mill in the market.

•All these scents are so deeply ingrained in me that they instantly trigger memories from when I was a child and used to accompany my grandmother to the market.

•Eating at Kandahar street where is obvious not many women eat alone yet I get the warmest welcome.

•The rain has forced me to stop at a Mexican restaurant out of all places.

•When I enter the Mosque I feel so inadequate because there is so little I know about this religion and its customs, my fear being that I will do something offensive out of ignorance rather than malignancy. As I walk around, I see men engulfed in prayer and this makes me think that an individual’s commune with a supreme being (whatever the faith might be) is a rather cleansing-therapeutic experience.

•After my walk in the Mosque’s main hall someone approaches me and tells me she volunteers as a human liaison to inform visitors about her religion (I think to myself that that is a great idea). I’m asked where I’m from which is meet with surprise as the countries are so far apart. She tells me she is from Europe, no surprise on my part. She then tells me that there is more to her religion than what is often thought of and portrayed in the media (I could not agree with her more). Then she asks me about the Aztecs, if I know any and their life in the pyramids.

•I leave with a rather sadden feeling because I realised that when there are clichés put upon us we tend to disagree with them and try to prove how fallacious they are, yet we might not give it a second thought at carrying on with tiresome ones when it comes to other people or cultures.

Project funded by FONCA (National Fund for Culture & Arts)-CONACYT (National Science and Technology Council). Mexico

The map images used for this work are from © OpenStreetMap contributors, CC-BY-SA. http://www.openstreetmap.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/.

“If I must explain to you how Olivia’s spirit tends towards a free life and a refined civilization, I will tell you of ladies who glide at night in illuminated canoes between the banks of a green estuary; but it is only to remind you that on the outskirts where men and women land every evening like lines of sleepwalkers, there is always someone who burst out laughing in the darkness, releasing the flow of jokes and sarcasm.”

Calvino, I. (1997). Invisible Cities (New Ed.). Vintage Classics.

•By way of the Harbour front I can take a boat ride and be elsewhere in no time.

•Understanding Muslim chic.

•25, 30, 40% off. Take it home now or forget about it forever.

 •At a certain corner of the boardwalk workers take their cigarette break. They all look weary, bored like they have seen better things.

•Impressed by the level of commitment, there is a line in the bookstore.

 •As I step out into the blasting humidity I’m confronted by the port’s colossal presence. It is a city within itself.

 •Pimm’s and lemonade for a refreshing break.

 •Watching people enjoy the rooftop’s wading pools in the evening, there is something about the harbour that won’t let me leave it.

Project funded by FONCA (National Fund for Culture & Arts)-CONACYT (National Science and Technology Council). Mexico

 The map images used for this work are from © OpenStreetMap contributors, CC-BY-SA. http://www.openstreetmap.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/.

“With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else. ”

Calvino, I. (1997). Invisible Cities (New Ed.). Vintage Classics.

•The MICA building is a blast of colourful colonial vestige.

 •In the corner of Victoria and Stamford there is a vast open strip, but everyone is too much in a hurry at this time of the day to sit down and enjoy it. Opposite the strip, I found a great building urging passersby to see it yet it’s falling apart.

 •As I pass the National Library, I see the strangest star inspired façade, it is quite arab mosaic reminiscent yet global consumerism inviting.

 •In this city-state there is a scarcity of land and this has pushed developers to find inventive ways to create gardens, mastering them in rooftops and vertical form. It amazes me how certain buildings have plants growing in the must odd places.

 •Shopping as an entertainment. There are as many places as one can imagine all fit for as many budgets and needs; the accumulation of things to own must continue. (Bugis )*

 •There is another Singaporean Brutalist dream in the corner of Queen and Albert in the form of Chen Yen Court.

 •As I walk for a couple of blocks battling the heat and humidity out of nowhere a truly alluring building makes itself seen. The fact that it is positioned in a vast empty space (a rarity in this city) makes it all the more enticing. I don’t know if the building’s hold on space is by chance or because it has some type of rights over it.

•In between skyscrapers there is a little lane that you would not give it a second thought. In this lane people, average workers, eat the must delicious treats and drink refreshing juices.

 •As I walk once more towards the concrete whale and get a glance of the port, I get the feeling that it watches over the city at a distance or rather it keeps it.

•Walking to Esplanade and surrendering to the air conditioned ambiance.

•In the evening the river does become something else, it is used by the people that live here as a part of their daily routines. This makes my stroll all the more enjoyable.

*This is not a condition unique to this city.

Project sponsored by FONCA (National Fund for Culture & Arts)-CONACYT (National Science and Technology Council). Mexico

The map images used for this work are from © OpenStreetMap contributors, CC-BY-SA. http://www.openstreetmap.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/.

Calvino, I. (1997). Invisible Cities (New Ed.). Vintage Classics.

A brief thought on field notes

The field notes here posted are non-specific in theme they are impressions and notions felt while on the dérives, some are just bullet points some are fully structured ideas. The themes of the notes range from the psycho-geography of the visited areas, architecture, food to anything else that was seen or heard. The dérives can be very sensorially charged, I find it that keeping a log book will aid me at  making some sense of what was experienced.

What was written

•Colonial: old world longing, new world crafting and aesthetic.

I do acknowledge that the concept of Old world/New world is cultural colonialism in itself. I make use of it for a lack of a better concept on my part.

•The Duxton Plain complex is a perfect example of the urban capsule-vessel. Many subjectivities in one place. I wonder what type living (in the sense of home/space/self) does this create.

•In the immense high rising dwellings there isn’t much room for individuality to be shown yet the intrinsic human need to do so prevails. In Tanjong Pagar Plaza it is shown through its windows, either by the design of the gratings or the print and colour of their drapery. I feel that this is not endemic of Singapore.

•Ann Siang Hill and its surrounding winding lanes; up and down the hill they go each lined with peddlers of sophistication.

•As I walk through the market, I’m not amazed by its structure or how things are arranged and sold. What is unbelievable are the similarities to other places I’ve been in. I feel that this is the true globalising unity (not branded experiences) but this market and other markets elsewhere; there is more parities to us than disparities.

•Recycling, like in so many other places gets done for economic reasons rather than environmental ones. If it gets done whatever the motive it is a good thing.

•Saw a very minute and delicate looking woman in the People’s Park but she could eat chicken and gulp beer like there was no tomorrow, she was remarkable.

Project sponsored by FONCA (National Fund for Culture & Arts)-CONACYT (National Science and Technology Council). Mexico

The map images used for this work are from © OpenStreetMap contributors, CC-BY-SA. http://www.openstreetmap.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/.

“Such is the power, sometimes called malignant, sometimes benign, that Anastasia, the treacherous city, possesses; if for eight hours a day you work as a cutter of agate, onyx, chrysoprase, your labor which gives form to desire takes from desire its form, and you believe you are enjoying Anastasia wholly when you are only its slave ”

Calvino, I. (1997). Invisible Cities (New Ed.). Vintage Classics.

Project sponsored by FONCA (National Fund for Culture & Arts)-CONACYT (National Science and Technology Council). Mexico

The map images used for this work are from © OpenStreetMap contributors, CC-BY-SA. http://www.openstreetmap.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/.

Hence the title -Constructing Singapore- for this is an exercise at describing the country and its rites while acknowledging that this will always be done through the eyes of une étrangère. I’m not a citizen of this city and this will lead me to construct a subjective view of it.

In terms of praxis I will realise a certain number of dérives through the city streets in which extensive documentation will take place in the form of notes, photos and field recordings. The dérives will inform the visual material that will be shown here in subsequent posts. This visual material will use the map as its basic starting point in order to re-construct the walked paths, resulting in a set of (imaginary) map pieces for each dérive.

Additionally  the resulting visual material for each dérive will be accompanied by a quote (one that I feel describes best the psycho-geography of the visited zones) from the book Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.

The documentation from each dérive will in turn inform a larger body of work that will not necessarily have the map as its starting point but that will relate more to the content and aesthetic that I’ve been developing for the past year in the -the drawing project-.

On a final note, the dérives, documentation, map pieces and extended visual pieces are all  the result of a subjective and thought-out  construction of Singapore.

Project sponsored by FONCA (National Fund for Culture & Arts)-CONACYT (National Science and Technology Council). Mexico

]]> http://natalialudmila.net/blog/2012/02/06/constructing-singapore-a-brief-introduction/feed/ 0 http://natalialudmila.net/blog/2011/12/05/reflective-entry/ http://natalialudmila.net/blog/2011/12/05/reflective-entry/#comments Mon, 05 Dec 2011 00:44:16 +0000 Ntla http://natalialudmila.net/blog/?p=602 Described in a brief manner the idea driving this project was to tweak and bend the textual data present in the dataset of the NMA’s collection to the point where it becomes something else entirely and that -something else- would be the material from which images will be generated.

 The resulting images in this project can be separated into two groups. Group a contains images in which the text is readable and group b images in which the text is so highly condensed that it is rendered unreadable and in which it is just functioning as form. Even though the two groups emerge from the same premise they each explore different ideas and possibilities about the textual data that they employ.

 In the images that belong to group a what is explored are the intricate relationships that exist within the NMA’s collection. This exploration is not shown in an explicit manner but rather as suggested paths of connectedness open for interpretation on the part of the viewer. I believe that this openness for interpretation also sheds light on the evocative and poetic possibilities of these texts, which have an entirely different function (one that is solely of an informative nature) within the context of the NMA collection. By recontextualising the texts in the setting of the images they became highly expressive while at the same time maintaining their explanatory character. Some of the relationships explored through the images were material type and object type and collection belonging and object type.

 In the images that belong to group b what is explored is free form making through the use of text as material. What was of most concern in these images were compositional elements such as colour, typography type and size. In some images the text was drawn with a pre-established composition in mind, that is to say that it was coded (Pocessing) so the the text would be drawn at certain positions and in others the text was being drawn as the mouse moved on the screen. The latter made for a more fluid and free drawing experience. In this group even though the text is rendered unreadable I did keep a log of what text was being used in each of the compositions, finding this information (content) an important element of the images. **

things learned

 The NMA’s collection is comprised of 49230 items, these items belong to 1003 different collections and within these items there is a diversity of 196 materials.

 The above information might seem as too tip of the iceberg yet I believe it is a perfect exemplar on the accessibility that digital practices have brought about on the keepings of cultural institutions. While it is virtually impossible for  museums to show their collections entirely at once in physical form in a digital form it is thinkable. This project and its brief were informative on the contemporary practice of digital collecting through projects such as Stamen’s Artscope for sfmoma and the library hack project.

 Code wise there was a lot to learn in this project through the introduction of quite a few new concepts and simply by the size of the dataset provided. There were the xml and json formats which enable to break the data into smaller chunks. These formats aided at getting specific information one wanted from the dataset. ArrayLists(), HashMap and sort() were also introduced, these helped at sorting and accessing the data in a direct manner. In the case of my project these concepts were very useful in Processing to access the text that I wanted to work with in the images.

strength

One of the strengths of the project is that from early on in the process both on a conceptual and formal level I knew what I wanted to do. This enabled me to concentrate on the images themselves while also giving me the freedom to explore the dataset at will in the search for what text to use or what relationships to present in order to create meaningful images. At times this exploration gave the must unique results in terms of the items I came upon, either because of their unique objet quality, their detailed description or their unusual material. Finding this objects at random while generating the images at times felt like diving into a treasure trove.

weakness

The weakness of the project is somewhat linked to its strength because the decision was reached on creating images out of the data given at a fairly early stage. I feel that at times there was  greater focus on the resulting images with far less focus on elegant code solutions. This made for made a trial and error sort of process which as a learning experience was great but slow at times. Deciding on images at an early stage I think also hindered the exploration of other possibilities for outcomes.

**Through my investigation of the precedents about the practice of using text for its formality rather than for its information carrying properties I came upon a movement and a project which informed this project quite substantially during its process. One being the French movement Letrisme which explored the the possibilities of image creation with letters, by concentrating on their formal character rather than words. And in a more contemporary project is Leonel Moura’s ISU in which there is a robot that randomly writes letters on a given surface. In ISU Genomics the robot is even programmed to draw a body in its entirety by letters.

My writing of blog entries has been on the slow side of things for this project yet the process has been thick with questions and ideas. These questions have been more on a conceptual level rather than a technical (Processing) one. In my last entry I wrote about how the project was breaking away from the original idea of using the collection’s images as the raw material. This breakage has refocused the project on the textual data present in the NMA’s dataset, by focusing on text as the material to work with the conceptual framework of the project has also shifted. The project’s fundamentals are still based on the practice of remix as a creative tool yet its raw material is now solely derived from text.

Focusing on the textual data as a raw material has led me to think about the nature of text and what role it will play within this project, that is how will the text function within the whole of the composition. My main concern being whether or not the text should be readable or would it be present solely as a form. I decided a combination of the two was the best option, in that there would be parts of the composition where the text could be discerned and read but there would also be parts where it would gather as form making blobs. In other words, the text on the screen would be used as the paint to make new images.

I also had to think about what text I would be using within the compositions, would I be drawing with all the text from the dataset at once (could that even be possible considering the size of the dataset )or break it down into groups of some type and what would be the guidance for this grouping. Breaking the text down into groups was the logical step, on the one hand the dataset is already arranged in that manner and by using HashMap in the Processing code one can virtually make any type of grouping. On the other hand there would be a certain relevance within the resulting images, the resulting images could be of all the titles from a given collection or all the collection names from within the whole of the NMA’s collection.

The following images are a few of the experiments I’ve done so far with the ideas explored above. The first three drawings were done with the titles from all the photographic postcards within the collection and the fourth is of the titles from one specific collection (Superannuation Fund Investment Trust collection ), the collection was generated at random from a list of all the collections that makeup the NMA’s collection.

The drawings directly respond (on screen) to the movements of the wiimote and the nunchuck. Additionally the drawing properties for each button work well in an overall composition. The drawings created by the pressing of each button are geometrical and 3D in form.  Different figures are preset to each button , which then are translated and moved according to the movements of the wiimote.

The next logical step is to set the wiimote in a pointer mode. That is to say that the drawing will not be preset figures and the interaction with the wiimote would be in a more traditional pencil-hand manner.

At this stage and due in part to the fact that the interaction with the wiimote is quite dynamic and the translated geometry on screen responds well. A possibility of having the final piece be a video rather than printed media as proposed earlier is unveiling itself as a feasible alternative. The video would fully illustrate the richness in movement that the wiimote allows. A fact that is not lost in its entirety in a printed image yet moving images do display this better. Furthermore, after a while of experimenting with the wiimote I’ve discovered that there needs to be  some sensibility developed in order to grasp how it functions within the Processing sketches.  In other words the user need to “mock around” with the wiimote for a while in order to get a sense on how to drive it within Processing.

Partly due to the above mentioned and partly because of a brainstorming chat with Mitchell Whitelaw, this project is now more at a contemplative stage than a dynamic one. That is to say that at this point there is a wider need to establish the project’s conceptual backdrop rather than further developing its technical elements. At times this the hardest part because one can get lost in a sea of endless possibilities and never truly land a project down.

This part of the creative process is one that is filled with questions. My view is that in answering these questions the profile of this project will become more evident. Here I will outline a few that popped-up during the chat with Mitchell:

-There can be two types of drawings explored within the wiimote/Processing framework. The preset button geometry and the wiimote as a pointer. Or a combination of the two.

-The preset button mode could be extended to include not only geometry but also pngs of other hand drawn figures/characters.

-Could other tools be introduced in the process? Such as rhonda the 3d drawing software.

-What are the options in the final outcomes? Prints, video or even an interactive installation.

-If the final outcome is printed images, would I interact with them in an analogical way?

-Would the images be printed with the studio’s plotter which can be customised to use a variety of marking pens and different qualities of paper.

-What is the project the drawings or the making of a tool that I will continue to use within my practice.