On the background of a computer screen we can also see 'all of Paris.' ...The pixels are a bit granular and packets of bauds struggle along tortuous modems but, at last, that's it! We clearly recognize the landmarks of Paris in this interactive computer game... When we move on from bureaucratic inscriptions to geographic data, we shift to another medium, institution, graphic representation and scale - not from the inside of the social to its outside... In this web site we simply take advantage of the continuous underscoring through which the most minute connections seem to be marked with a highlighter. Owing to files and print-outs, each relation, even microscope, becomes the drosophila of the social sciences, expressing in enormous dimensions that which has hitherto been to complex... Water, electricity, telephony, traffic, metereology, geography, town planning: all have their oligopticon, a huge control panel in a closed control room. From there very little can be seen at any one time, but everything appears with great precision owing to a dual network of signs, coming and going, rising and descending, watching over Parisian life night and day...

electricity pole, transmission towers, cable - universal icons crossing earth's surface; physical markers helped structure fundamental changes in everyday life - instant comm on global scale; equipment around which cities were built

transportation and telecom infrastructures caused both expansion and contraction

impact of sound transmission of urban theory - telecom engineering absorbed by modernist architects - Lewis Mumford, Frank Lloyd Wright illustrated assimilation of modern tech landscape - management of suburban sprawl

Mumford: transportation (cars), communication (interpersonal comm -> telephone lines; "the telegraph symbolically follows the railroad..."; "radio is a potentially distributive and decentralizing agency...")

Wright: "all pole and wires overhead [will be] a bad memory of ugliness and danger"; "crude, utilitarian scaffolding...does violence to our own character..."

1890 NY: Bell started laying wire underground

Now imagine a central clearinghouse for those records, an online hub researchers could consult to find archival materials.... "So if I'm interested in a particular person," Mr. Pitti says, "I can find where all the records are that would be required to understand them." For instance, a search for Robert Oppenheimer turns up a link to a collection of the physicist's papers housed at the Library of Congress, plus links to other collections in which he is referenced, a biographical timeline, and a list of occupations and subjects related to his life and work.

A researcher can explore a person's social and cultural environment with SNAC's radial-graph feature. It creates a web, which can be manipulated, of a subject's connections as revealed in archival records. The radial graph of Oppenheimer's network, for instance, includes George Kennan, Linus Pauling, Bertrand Russell, and Albert Schweitzer, among many other names represented as nodes on the graph.

The SNAC project is addressing a longstanding research challenge: discovering, locating, and using distributed historical records. Scholars use these records as primary evidence for the lives and work of historical persons and the events in which they participated. These records are held in archives and manuscript libraries, large and small, around the world, and scholars may need to search scores of different archives, following clues, hunches, and leads to find the records relevant to their topic (and it is likely that at least some records will remain undiscovered). SNAC aims to not only make the records more easily discovered and accessed but also, and at the same time, build an unprecedented resource that provides access to the socio-historical contexts (which includes people, families, and corporate bodies) in which the records were created.

The project uses a recently released Society of American Archivists communication standard for encoding information about persons, corporate bodies, and families, Encoded Archival Context-Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF). EAC-CPF standardizes descriptions of people and groups who are documented in archival records.

In digital space, everything we do is networked. Real thinking doesn’t (and can’t) happen in a vacuum. Our teaching practices and scholarship don’t just burst forth miraculously from our skulls. The digital academic community is driven by citation, generosity, connection, and collaboration. The work we do as hybrid and critical pedagogues, digital humanists, and alternative academic publishers depends on our sharing ideas as part of a much larger project or conversation.
1. Attribute: "We attribute not just for rhetorical effect, but for intertextual familiarity. Sources no longer deliver merely arguments or data; they create an interactive critical network."
2. Defer: "In digital discourse, however, an article has less claim to such authority because it is in such immediate contiguity with parallel scholarship -- the Burkian conversation metaphor brought to fruition. Rather than everyone talking over one another, the best digital texts talk in turn, express appreciation and connection, and are honest about their indebtedness to related works."
3. Curate: "...the best curatorial practice is more overtly intertextual, bringing those links and web objects (and the people behind them) into meaningful conversation, making explicit and implicit connections between them."
4. Engage: "The hyperlink (both as a literal device in digital texts and as a metaphor) draws a direct line between things at a conceptual distance, pushing them (no matter how disparate) into direct (metonymic) contact. The hyperlink is a call-to-action in at least two ways. It asks the reader to venture off the page and into a sourced work. It also invites the author of the sourced work into the conversation, through the trackback that tells them when and where they’ve been cited."

You’re on the Internet. What does that mean?

Most likely, it means one of a handful of telecommunications providers is middlemanning your information from Point A to Point B. Fire off an email or a tweet, broadcast a livestream or upload video to YouTube, and you’re relying on vast networks of fiber optic cables deep underground and undersea, working with satellites high above, to move your data around the world, and to bring the world to your fingertips.

It’s an infrastructure largely out of sight and mind. AT&T, Level 3, Hurricane Electric, Tata Indicom – to most these are simply invisible magicians performing the act of getting one online and kicking. To many open-source advocates, however, these are a few of the big, dirty names responsible for what they see as the Web’s rapid consolidation. The prospect of an irreparably centralized Internet, a physical Internet in the hands of a shrinking core of so-called Tier 1 transit networks, keeps Isaac Wilder up at night.

it is my growing suspicion that we hold network visualizations to higher standards than we do to an equally abstract and complex class of knowledge representation: the traditional map. Despite the need for increased spatial literacy, it’s easy to see that there is a basic literacy in geographic visualization of information that should be expected in network visualizations. For instance, there is more information on display in the below than the two images above.

...without my even mentioning what is on display, a typical scholarly or lay observer would already have a grasp of the subject matter. This despite the likelihood that the observer is neither a geographer nor an astronaut, and so has little experience with literally seeing Europe from space or creating and analyzing spatial data. This basic literacy required to understand the representation of knowledge is contrasted with the fluency necessary to create such objects in the hope that we can develop a similar divide in the realm of network representations, which I think will only grow in popularity and ubiquity in the coming years.

Even though these maps are networks (as I’ve so often referred to the Roman transportation network) and most of the maps that people are familiar with actually display network data. But maps have a few basic standards in display of information that network analysis might stand to adopt. Some concept of representation of space (and even, to a degree, projection) as well as very simple standards like displaying water traditionally with one class of colors, and roads with another class, and so on, so that we develop a general sense of standard symbols for standard features....

The point here, though, is not to focus on individual technical solutions but to emphasize the necessity for creators of network visualizations to open a dialogue about standards and practices as well as expectations of visual literacy of their audience. As the tools to represent and manipulate networks become more common, the level of fluency with network representation has begun to highlight the low level of visual literacy among typical observers who try to “read” such representations.

“The X just means we don’t know what’s going to happen,” he adds. This is the spirit of experimentation behind Studio-X, an ambitious global educational initiative currently underway at GSAPP. Equal parts learning space, public forum, and international think tank, Studio-X “affords an enormous bandwidth for thinking about the future of cities,” Wigley says—a mandate that he cites as the core mission of the program, and the reason he first proposed it four years ago... With sister offices now open in Mumbai, Amman, Beijing, and Rio de Janeiro, and more in the offing in South Africa and Japan, Studio-X New York is one spoke in a wheel of architectural activity that is at once international and intensely localized. The overseas branches aren’t intended to be subordinate to either Columbia or the Manhattan pilot office—“not like Starbucks selling some sort of wisdom from New York,” as Wigley puts it. They’re idea incubators in their own right, feeding new knowledge about how cities live and change into a greater community of thought... “It’s about expanding the notion of the university beyond the institution itself,” explains Jeffrey Johnson, the director of the New York–based China Megacities Lab, who has led groups of students on semiannual visits to Studio-X Beijing since it opened in 2009... Situated, like the New York studio, in the very heart of their respective downtowns, each Studio-X satellite operates as a discrete unit, with local directors setting a specific agenda. Yet all of the outposts, following the program’s mission, look to reinvigorate the urban conversation in their particular cities by engaging not just designers but culturally omnivrous thinkers from diverse backgrounds... Gavin Browning, who preceded Twilley and Manaugh at Studio-X New York, admits that the two halves of the Studio-X population are often “operating in separate spheres.”... The space’s social character is part of its appeal. “The potential for the contact there to be informal allows for discussions to take place that don’t take place in a more official setting,” says Jeffrey Inaba, the head of C-Lab, another fixture of Studio-X New York... And then there is the question of how the overseas locales are meant to work in concert with one another, as well as with the university. When they’re not being visited by one of the American student groups (which is to say, the majority of the year), the far-flung outposts operate entirely independently of Columbia. Although that gives them considerable leeway to chart their own course, it reduces the overall coherence of the program. “We all have access to each others’ planning calendars,” says Twilley, referring to her fellow Studio-X directors, “and I check what they’re up to.
But we haven’t translated that information into a coordinated series.”... Some of Studio-X’s satellites are located in places where certain political issues, the kind of things that might be spoken about freely on the campus of Columbia University, simply cannot be addressed. Wigley, who also sees the program as a vehicle for bringing corporate figures into architectural conversations, believes there’s room for healthy debate, but he tends to downplay the potential for outright conflict.

Cytoscape is a free, open-source platform that allows you to visualize network data... Using Excel (or your favorite spreadsheet application), create one column for “Person,” one column for “Relationship,” and a third column for “Film.” You can choose the language you use to describe relationships, but be consistent... Tell Cytoscape how to interpret your data... Start making sense of your network"

An “internet of things” describes a world embedded with so many digital devices that the space between them consists not of dark circuitry but rather the space of the city itself. The computer has escaped the box, and ordinary objects in space are carriers of digital signals. This capacity seems to finally fulfill the dream of artists and architects of the mid- to late twentieth century, among them Jack Burnham, Cedric Price, Archigram, and Christopher Alexander, who experimented with a cybernetic apparatus for modeling space. It might also be the practical answer to quests by Nicholas Negroponte’s Architecture Machine Group and architects exploring Artificial Intelligence, who rehearse interplay between digital machines and the space of the city and the body—reciprocal modeling that enhances the capacities of each... ascinated by networks, infrastructure, and the movement of populations, Price puzzled over variable cocktails of skeletal authorship and improvisation. He designed spatial repertoires, building details, infrastructural networks, games, and toys. His constructions were essentially choreographies of human and non-human actors unfolding over time. Price steered his work away from objects, signature buildings, and monuments toward encounter and performance... Christopher Alexander’s direct application of set theory and network topology to urban morphology similarly illustrates the perils of codification and predetermination.

How might infrastructure systems be reimagined? How will next-generation infrastructure perform? I would like to propose four principles for a post-industrial, ecologically informed infrastructure. First principle: Systems should be multipurpose, interconnected and synergistic. Co-location can make noxious infrastructures recede, even seem to disappear. Utilities can be conjoined with transportation networks...co-location can support opportunities to use waste from one utility as energy for another. Second principle: Infrastructure should work with natural processes.
Once we recognize that our built infrastructures are in essence man-made extensions of natural flows — of water cycles, of carbon created millennia ago by solar energy, etc. — we might more closely model our own constructed networks on complex organic ecosystems. Third principle: Infrastructure should improve social contexts and serve local constituencies.
Beyond the mitigation or elimination of noxious operations, next-generation infrastructure will increasingly be called upon to deliver obvious programmatic benefits to its community. Fourth principle: Infrastructure should be designed for resilience, to adapt to foreseeable changes brought about by an unstable global climate.
Next-generation infrastructure will need to withstand hazards related to increasing heat, intensifying storms, rising sea levels and other meteorological stressors.

The relationships between architecture and conditions that are more, if not vastly more extensive than buildings is consistent with those of infrastructure, which is commonly accepted to operate in relation to large-scale phenomena and to manifest its effects at large scales as well. Initiatives such as the Recovery Act of 2009 speak to the potential of infrastructure to act as an engine for large-scale social and economic change - infrastructure as the intersection of engineering and public policy. These are the soft effects of infrastructure - new social and cultural practices, new modes of leisure, economic stability, green jobs, and information technology proliferation – but while they are central to the political impetus for infrastructure, they are also secondary to technical performance in the design of systems for transportation, energy production and transmission, and the like. This mediation between technical and social agendas is an area where the agency of architecture might be extended to afford engagement with infrastructural scales and practices and where alternative protocols are instrumental.

Network thinking, and the development of new network protocols and logics will be a major component of the studio’s approach. The tendency to regard conventional infrastructures as networks is consistent with the urge to think of networks as static formations rather than dynamic multiplicities. Isolation within a network - a condition that Christopher Alexander famously associated with linear and hierarchical “tree” structures - engenders spatial and network diffusion as well as volatility and potential for decay. For Alexander, overlap within systems of organization is the key to complexity but also to vitality and heterogeneity. The fixity and firmness of most infrastructures stands in contrast to the fact that some of the fastest growing and most volatile regions of the world are also the most distant from centralized administrative control, out of reach of and the least serviced by conventional infrastructures. Absent an explicit or robust infrastructure, many regions are in need of new protocols for the exchange of bodies, energy, materials, and information. New modes of infrastructures might be evaluated on their capacity to enter into network organizations and to promote network exchange and communication.

"Infrastructural zones operate in and across those borders both as real and phantasmal aesthetics that operate as a becoming system of governance and interpretation. They operate as a cross-ecologic, semiological, and pragmatic regime that is established in relation to production of subjectivity in their cultural milieu....It is through our actions and transgressions that we enact and inscribe interzones in our subjective world, but it is through our reactions and transgressions also that they are territorialized and deterritorialized in our social world....People commonly envision infrastructure as a system of substrates—railroad lines, pipes and plumbing, electrical power plants, and wires. It is by definition invisible, part of the background for other kinds of work. It is ready-to-hand. This image holds up well enough for many purposes—turn on the faucet for a drink of water and you use a vast infrastructure of plumbing and water regulation without usually thinking much about it. (Star 380)

"Jpeg and Facebook’s strategy or the wireless memory card are not joined or in some sort of assemblage-relation or ecology at some deeper or more structural level. Global info-cpaitalism is not the backdrop or even the structural space within which these objects connect. To hold to that is to move away from a commitment to actualism, to addressing objects in their actual location--a concept dear to media archaeology... Rather the jpeg and the Facebook object exceed (or withdraw from) their relations...The objects connect in the ‘molten core’ of a new (actual) object, a new player on the scene....If jpeg is more than part of a Photoshop assemblage or an automated database, if it exceeds Google’s search business, then we can approach its connections with the other objects in those spaces in their specificity rather than as in some way structured or determined by jpeg… and vice versa. The connection in the heart of a new object."

"Kittler and others for instance in “German media theory” rarely talk about objects – but of networks, inscription systems, materials of communication – but I can see where some of the arguments might resonate. In terms of links between the various theory scenes, some people such as Paul Caplan at The Internationale are picking up related themes, combining media archaeology with OOP/OOO (never sure which one to call it), and discussing the logic of technical media objects (in this case, the JPEG protocol) through Harman and others.

For me, the so-called material media theory lends itself to “new materialism”, and the material assemblages, networks, dynamic embodiments and intensive becomings investigated there. Whereas the relations between new materialisms and the speculative realism as well as object oriented philosophy are still to be investigated I guess, so are the possibilities that media theory offers too."

"technology is not all there is...network culture has deeper underlying conditions, the most intense of which is the networking of capital... A Jeffersonian democracy is, on paper, made possible by the net. And yet, we are more polarized than ever...utter lack of temporal grounding. We have not only no concept of, or interest in, our own position in history...Critical thinking is replaced by the coolhunt, by ideological smoothness, or rather slickness....become cognizant of the network as an ideological apparatus...“emergence of crowd-sourced collective intelligence, global swarm urbanisms, new disruptive economics": it’s precisely here that we need to exercise caution. What could be a better ruse for global capital in its quest to align the world with its most recent financial order?...A state to which, under network culture, we have willingly given more information about than George Orwell could have imagined? "

"Network City explores how urban areas have developed as ecosystems of competing networks since the late nineteenth century. Networks of capital, transportation infrastructures, and telecommunications systems centralize cities while dispersing them into larger posturban fields such as the Northeastern seaboard or Southern California... A fundamental thesis of the course is that buildings too, function as networks." -- First Network Cities (Ronald F. Abler “What Makes Cities Important"), Metropolitan Subject (Simmel, Burgess, Wirth), Office Bldgs as Corporate Machine (Whyte, Wiener, R. Martin, Return of the Center (Jacobs, Koolhaas, Zukin, Florida), Global City & New Centrality (Sassen, Castells), Postsuburbia & Edgeless City, Tourist City

"We will explore how the network is not merely a technology with social ramifications but rather serves as a cultural dominant connecting changes in society, economy, aesthetics, urbanism, and ideology. As a history of the contemporary, the seminar is organized around a series of topics tracing a genealogy of present-day culture.

Topics to be addressed include network theory, changing concepts of time and space, the rise of networked publics, contemporary poetics, new forms of subjectivity, and methods of control. Throughout, we will make connections between architecture and this insurgent condition." -- Castells, Deleuze, "Postmodernism and Periodization" (Harvey, Jameson), Network Theory, Time (Baudrillard, Lyotard), Space (Foucault, Simmel, Hardt & Negri, Auge), Publics (Benkler, Anderson, Shirky), Poetics (Lovink, Liu, Bourriaud), Subjectivity, Control

"The purpose of this seminar is to come to an advanced historical understanding of our networked age. We will explore how the network is not merely a technology with social ramifications but rather serves as a cultural dominant connecting changes in society, economy, aesthetics, urbanism, and ideology." -- Network Theory, Freedom & Control, Pomo & History After the End of History, Postfordism & Pomo, Non-Place to Networked Place, Maps, Networked Publics and Cultural Work, Power Laws & Influence, Infrastructure, Subjectivity; Politics, Urbanism, and Globalization

"The Connected States of America illustrates the emerging communities based on the social interactions through the use of anonymized mobile phone data. Investigating the interaction network of people reveals interesting facets on how people utilize space. Cities attract their citizens from all walks of life, from nearby and from distant areas across the country. This constant flux of people commuting, migrating, and travelling across the country establishes connections which are dominated by large cities. The social connections woven across the United States can be used to define communities, where the glue that holds a community together is a stronger relationship with other members of the same community compared to members of other communities."

"With the vast majority of Facebook users caught in a frenzy of friending’, ‘liking’ and ‘commenting’, at what point do we pause to grasp the consequences of our info-saturated lives? What compels us to engage so diligently with social networking systems? Networks Without a Cause examines our collective obsession with identity and self-management coupled with the fragmentation and information overload endemic to contemporary online culture.

With a dearth of theory on the social and cultural ramifications of hugely popular online services, Lovink provides a path- breaking critical analysis of our over-hyped, networked world with case studies on search engines, online video, blogging, digital radio, media activism and the WikiLeaks saga.... let us collectively unleash our critical capacities to influence technology design and workspaces, otherwise we will disappear into the cloud."

"an exhibition about the global exchange of information in real time by visualizing volumes of long distance telephone & IP (Internet Protocol) data flowing between New York & cities around the world. NYTE, short for New York Talk Exchange, reveals the relationships that New Yorkers have with the rest of the world, by asking: How does the city of New York connect to other cities? With which cities does New York have the strongest ties and how do these relationships shift with time?

globe encounters visualizes in real time the volumes of Internet data flowing between New York & other cities around the world. the size of the glow on a particular city location corresponds to the relative amount of IP traffic.

pulse of the planet illustrates the volume of international calls between New York City & 255 countries over the 24 hours in a day. areas of the world receiving & making fewer phone calls shrink while areas experiencing a greater amount of voice call activity expand."

"Sustainable cities are dense, diverse and attract newcomers. They are the ones where people want to walk because they know they will encounter the unexpected. Lanier made a claim for visceral interpersonal experience in his keynote address: “in New York you walk down the sidewalk, lock eyes with someone and your life changes.” The energy of these interactions, of these organic synapses dispersed in the urban fabric, has the potential to make cities that do more than merely sustain themselves — cities that generate ideas, choice and productivity. To realize this potential, however, demands attention at all scales: reconfiguring spaces that don’t work into spaces that do, bringing awareness to the power of individual behavior, harnessing digital technology to expand possibility while countering observation and control, and constantly questioning the status quo. The new city should be a city that always evaluates itself, and the Festival of Ideas seized an opportunity to do just that."

"to inform and challenge people on the ways in which a network could be perceived and utilized. Whether that is in a work, home, or public environment, there are many possibilities for further engaging people with networks by bringing realtime information into these spaces and visualizing them in ways that bring about new connections to the data and its physical embodiment. These forms of network integration allow people to experience the Internet in different ways and also allow for artists to provide challenges to the status quo of how these systems should and are used and visualized."

"2600 printed its first payphone photo in the Autumn 1988 issue. We received so many more contributions that printing pictures of foreign payphones became a regular feature a year later. The pictures appeared on page 2, which was limited to black and white. In the Autumn 1994 issue, we moved the payphones to the back page and put the table of contents on page 3. This enabled the payphone photos to be printed in their original color form. Now, by putting the pictures up on the web, we have created a growing library of foreign payphones."

"Cedric Price (1934-2003) was one of the most challenging figures in the field of architecture in Britain during the second half of the 20th century. Throughout his career, Price stressed the need for flexibility in architectural design in view of the unpredictability of possible future uses. He was committed to “beneficial change” and “anticipatory architecture.” Form was of little consequence to him and even building was suspect and might prove unnecessary. In addition to his social, political, and architectural agendas, Price persistently argued for and produced novel, client-less designs intended to evoke delight and pleasure in users and to empower them as co-designers."

Network Management - Network Switching - Network Transmission - "The American Telephone and Telegraph Company was incorporated in New York in 1885 as a subsidiary of the American Bell Telephone Company. AT&T’s corporate charter laid out the firm’s mission: “Connect one or more points in each and every city, town or place in the State of New York with one or more points in every other city, town or place in said State and in each and every other of the United States, Canada and Mexico; and each and every of said cities, towns and places is to be connected with each and every other city, town or place in said states and countries, and also by cable and other appropriate means with the rest of the known world.”

"...it is easy to think of the internet as a free-flowing cloud of information accessible by all. However, our connection to the internet is not mediated by an uber high-tech network of satellites...Thought of as a complex metaphysical network of information, the Internet consists of a highly physical network of lines and nodes...Simply put, it is a network of submarine communication cables laid across water bodies that connect us to information databases in other continents. Although the technology has changed significantly, the network itself does not differ greatly from the network of submarine telegraph lines which existed as early as 1901. Much like long umbilical cords, these cables are the not-so-visible proof of our dependence on concentrated sources of information. These very real and physical “communication highways” establish links between information super hubs, while controlling internet’s dissemination of information."

The building is designed to be a communications hub and meeting point for businesses and institutions in the world of information and communication technologies (ICTs), as well as for the media and audio-visual sectors.

One Wilshire Exhibit

As the urban grid of modernity gives way to the web, and architecture cedes to the virtual dynamics of tethered electronics, Daniel Miller cracks open the password protected ‘post-city'

archigram, techno-utopianism, and critique

"galaxies forming along filaments, like droplets along the strands of a spider's web"

global internet map, submarine telegraph cable map, etc.