Linked by Air - Home

SO – IL

2008-06-18T20:19:00Z

In our second collaboration with Geoff Han, we designed & launched a new identity and website for Solid Objectives, the architecture partnership of Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu. This website’s goal is an almost physical density or fullness, organized. It is a blog built on WordPress. Each category of post has its own layout, all using the same grid; so that there is a relationship between form and program that evolves as you explore the site.

Talk

2008-06-02T22:02:00Z

Next Wednesday June 11 at the Apple Store in Soho, we’ll give a talk about our practice, what we’re up to and where we want to go next as part of the AIGA’s “Design Remixed” series. Come join us! Challenge: Ask us a good question at the end.

Update: It was fun to talk to you! Thanks to everyone who came. By the way here are the questions you asked, as I recall.

Update: It was fun to talk to you! Thanks to everyone who came. By the way here are the questions you asked, as I recall:

How do we collaborate, with one another, with other designers and programmers, and with clients.
How to learn to program, and what is the importance of technology.
Why does Making Policy Public change color every day, and why eight palettes not seven.
What are some of our influences: people, things, etc.
What is the role of arbitrariness in our work.

Later Tom asked, if design depends on its users or some other external forces for completion, is this a permanent condition or a passing fad? And if such a condition persists, is there any longer a place for a fixed “great work” of design?

Plugin

2008-06-02T22:00:00Z

We finally have a little studio! Right in the thick of things. We’ll be moving in next week.

Update: We are moved in and really enjoy being here. It’s sunny. We had our first meeting in the space the other day, with Rosten and Valeria. Danielle has rented our spare desk for some days this summer. Give us a call and stop by if you’re in Chinatown or the L.E.S.

Making policy public

2008-05-21T00:42:00Z

Making Policy Public is a neat initiative of the Center for Urban Pedagogy. We just designed & launched the new website for it.

If you are a designer, you have from now until June 16 to apply to be paired up with one of four advocacy groups. If you’re selected, you’ll work with that group to design an informational poster about either predatory lending & credit, detention and deportation, street vending, or barriers faced by previously incarcerated job-seekers. There is a $1000 stipend. I hope some of you guys apply!

l8r sk8rs

2008-05-19T21:57:00Z

Dan is going from full-time to part-time at Yale and moving from CT back to New York. With plenty of excitement and of course some sadness. Next year he’ll teach Networks & Transactions 2 in the fall, and Networks & Transactions 1 in the spring. Photo: Mary V?

Elsewhere on the net

2008-05-19T21:13:00Z

Did you know we have a YouTube page? If you want to see more bits of our work in motion. And a Flickr page too, with more images. We try to add videos and photos to those places respectively, and then talk about it here.

Nerd Nite!

2008-04-25T17:09:00Z

Trying to up the nerd ante, Dan will be talking about networks & transactions in the next installment of the Nerd Nite series in Boston. 9pm, Saturday May 3, at the Midway Cafe. The 8pm talk is about Old Testament justice and sounds awesome. More info. (See also: The Secret Life of Machines.)

Update: Tough crowd! There were hecklers!

Dan will be talking about networks & transactions in the next installment of the Nerd Nite series in Boston. 9pm, Saturday May 3, at the Midway Cafe. The 8pm talk is about Old Testament justice and sounds awesome. (With apologies to: The Secret Life of Machines.)

Complete invite:

Hey Nerdnite-ers:

The next Nerdnite will be Saturday May 3 at the Midway.
3496 Washington St. in Jamica Plain, Boston.
Doors open at 7...talks begin at 8. Here's the lineup:

8pm:  Alyson Dame: Payback's a Bitch
Before turn the other cheek, there was eye for an eye.  In the Hebrew
Scriptures (formally and sometimes still known as the Old Testament),
justice churned in your stomach and smarted your loins.  Heads rolled,
bodies burned and foreskins fell. In this talk, Harvard Divinity
School student Alyson Dame recaps the goriest highlights of revenge
from her favorite testament.  Prepare to meet thy God!!

9pm: Dan Michaelson, "A Secret Life of Machines."
Dan is at the forefront of bringing nerdiness to the normally hip
world of art and design.  He teaches the Networks & Transactions
course in the graduate graphic design program at Yale University's
School of Art, where he's been on the faculty the past three years.
He is also a half of the graphic design partnership Linked by Air.
Since Dan comes at the technology stuff from an artistic perspective,
I'm guessing this will be a less-than-completely-literal look at his
topic, which he describes as follows:

"A secret life of machines: What goes on when you request a web page":
When you type an address into your web browser, a series of invisible
requests and responses ping across the internet, so that your page can
be constructed and presented to you. Much of this hidden conversation
between machines takes place in English even though you never see or
hear it. In this talk we'll request a web page and then we'll listen
in to the network as machines build it for us step by step.

10pm: Music!  Featuring the CD release party for Conservative Man.

See you May 3,

nerdnite

be there and be square

saturday, May 3
the midway cafe
3496 washington st., jamaica plain, boston
www.midwaycafe.com
www.nerdnite.com

Yale g.d. show

2008-04-25T16:40:00Z

This year’s exhibition of the work of the graduating Yale MFA graphic design students – most of whom have been or are students of Dan’s – will be open from May 10-14 in New Haven. The opening is Saturday May 10 at 7pm, come say hello! Here’s their website for you to bookmark.

Here’s another good bookmark: An archive of the past few years’ GD show websites is now online. The 2007 site remains quite active.

AIGA show

2007-12-20T03:08:00Z

With Lana Cavar, we designed this year’s AIGA “365” show, which displays AIGA’s picks of the best graphic design of the year. We dropped the work off in the middle of the gallery, along with a pinup board, a bookcase, and a couple trolleys, and waited to see what would happen to it… The show is open through February. AIGA has provided comfortable couches and free wifi for the duration, and Mark and Lia the receptionists finally get to play their iPods. So stop by if you want to kill some time. Thanks Lisa, Dariusz, Gabriela, Ric. More pictures.

Still more…

Shenzhen

2007-12-03T22:38:00Z

We’re in a design show in Shenzhen, China (“X Exhibition“). The other American designer featured was Eric Adolfsen. If you want to download some really big files, the reels we showed there are here.

Mary Ping

2007-10-28T17:48:00Z

We launched a website for Mary Ping, the New York-based fashion designer. It starts from the bottom, which is where we put her tag, and you scroll up from there. The whole website is just the one page with all her collections on it, which felt like the dense rack of clothes we found in her studio. In collaboration with Geoff Han.

What we're up to

2007-09-30T16:05:00Z

The Environmental Performance Index is a global measurement of the environmental quality and policies of most of the world’s nations. This year’s index will be released in Davos in January. We’re working with its creators at Yale and Columbia to make a more accessible and public online manifestation of the index and its components. We want to provide access to its subjective, uncertain, and manifold aspects, as well as to the causal relationships that must be understood in order to improve environmental policies. Mike Gallagher is now working with us on this project.

We’re both busily teaching. Tamara is teaching a Typography 1 class at Parsons; pages for Dan’s classes at Yale this semester: Networks & Transactions 2, Advanced Graphic Design, Thesis group, Second-year Core.

Artcity

2007-08-31T22:57:00Z

We just launched a new website for Artcity a festival of contemporary art in Calgary. Our design is a hack on top of Google Maps. It was easy to make because it uses Google’s code for all aspects of the interface. With Adam and Prem at Project Projects.

(Update: Since the festival’s over now, the organization has put a more generic website at their main URL, with a link to the one we designed.)

Urban game

2007-08-23T13:17:00Z

If you notice anything strange in the city this Saturday night, the tenth and last edition of Midnight Madness, the all-night, urban puzzle-solving test of endurance is afoot! (“Midnight Madness X: Backed Into a Corner”.)

Street View

2007-08-23T11:39:00Z

Dan is in the September issue of Modern Painters magazine with a review of the new Street View feature of Google Maps. The article (full text) is about Street View’s qualities as an image. The same issue also has text by Claire Bishop and others about ad hoc art schools, so it’s worth checking out & not too hard to find.

The new Street View feature of Google Maps is a set of photographs that each gather an entire city into a single, rhizomatic image; in New York, it encompasses thousands of Manhattan city blocks in a frozen tableau stretching thirteen miles from Wall Street to the Bronx, from the West Side to the East Side. Despite this scope, the picture is so detailed you can see two men moving hand trucks of bulk-packaged inventory through a sidewalk loading door on Ludlow Street. You see not just that this bit in New York’s economic data stream exists but how it’s happening. One man is leaning casually on his hand truck, shirt untucked, looking toward the camera, while he waits for the other to pass through the open door. Inside is a dark receiving space with boxes stacked. Two young people are conversing as they wander by on the sidewalk.

Is Street View’s image of New York the most ambitious documentary photograph ever made, a whole city’s routine captured in a single picture? It’s the kind of image Brueghel might have dreamed about, a vernacular comedy of infinite perception. And it’s the kind of map that, as in various Borges stories, makes the viewer begin to imagine a technological singularity in which the drawing’s resolution would eventually equal that of its own subject; or the simulation trope of contemporary sci fi, in which a data set is rich enough to realize an autonomous copy of a person or place. Google, Inc.’s great social contribution may turn out to be imaginative rather than utilitarian, and it’s the same project that pop culture has always pursued: to help us grasp the syntax and grammar made possible by our own technological and political present.

In a strict sense, Street View is a cartographic photograph. A history of that genre’s more heroic moments begins with the first picture of Paris from a balloon, made in 1858 by the Belgian photographer Nadar, also a friend and muse of Jules Verne. It continues with the late-century kite photographs of Arthur Batut, on through the off-kilter 1929 photo of Auburn, Massachusetts, from one of Robert H. Goddard’s first liquid-fuel rockets. Street View’s grainy, glitchy rhetorics have more in common with the look of those early images than with the claims to scientific, military, and aesthetic precision made by contemporary aerial photography and satellite remote-sensing imagery.

But in an obvious way, Street View (unlike an earlier Google product, Google Earth) has no precedent in any aerial photography. Its ground-level, ad hoc, cellular structure owes more to the aggregating, expedient logic of network traversal. Street View’s perspective is esentially a standing person’s horizontal gaze, or many of them joined, rather than the plan view of a downward-pointing airborne instrument. Like other network infrastructure, its imagery becomes more valuable the more it extends and interconnects, and its greatest meaning derives from movement along its filaments rather than from scrutiny of any one site. One of Google’s declared reasons for creating this perspective, at great cost, is that with it you see actual signs on buildings and subway stations. That information can be useful for planning, and the same is true of the more qualitative information in the imagery of each neighborhood. But Street View’s value is not only a use value. Its lowered, manifold perspective lets you see patterns of people coursing to work not as a diagram, but subjectively as the aggregate of the directions and qualities of many individual gaits. There may be little utility in this aspect of Street View since its data is anonymous, ephemeral, and unscientific. Instead there is complexity, subtle honesty, and beauty.

At this point, it’s useful to consider this image’s process of manufacture. A 360-degree panoramic video camera was fixed to the roof of a van, which then drove the length of nearly every street in Manhattan, a looping, chaotic tracking shot that took days to complete. Each frame of the resulting video was then extracted as a panoramic still image, correlated with the camera’s geographic location at that moment, and stitched together into a single complex image. Consequently, the view at 50th Street and 8th Avenue may have been captured either a moment earlier or a moment later than the view at 51st and 8th, depending on which direction the camera was traveling in (on 8th Avenue it happens that traffic, including the camera’s transport, flows northbound only); or significantly earlier or later if the camera was traveling crosstown or if the driver took a break. Despite the linear (if strange), block-by-block scanning movement of this complex exposure, the end result is non-linear. A Street View user can look at any intersection in any order, can smoothly pan from one intersection to the next in any direction, and can look around in 360 degrees at any point. Because no matter where you look you see a frozen frame, and because the viewing interface allows fluid panning both in 360 degrees and across the length of the city, the experience is more like a kind of extended gaze than it is like traveling, and more like photography than video games or film.

The best, most surreal parts of Street View are its inaccuracies and the visible artifacts of its manufacture. Curbs and buildings warble like the visual equivalent of an audiotape played too much, the blended spherical distortions at the periphery of each source frame rendered unpredictable by the camera’s jolts, accelerations, and decelerations. Some trees are crisp collections of leaves, while elsewhere similar-size trees blur into the grain of the image. Strange temporal effects occur, like surprising implications of an advanced physics. A car reappears Cheshire cat-like at multiple intersections because it happened to drive behind the camera for a while. Other disruptions, like a change in the weather, occur when you move your gaze against the flow of the camera-for example, uptown when the camera was moving crosstown. The New York depicted in Street View is an even contest between signal and noise. It is contingent, error-ridden, malleable, membrane-thin, and dreamlike. As a photograph Street View is more Atget than Walker Evans: loose, open to random encounters, relating sympathetically with the city at least as much as with the people in it.

Because of the citywide (if momentary) presence of its camera, Street View’s point of view approaches the omniscient. But it also embraces chance and it doesn’t generalize. These three aspects happen to be crucial to all of Google’s successful endeavors. The company’s approach has always been characterized by a kind of benevolent and active neutrality, by a celebration of the heterogeneous, and by apparent respect for users’ abilities to find their own meanings within data if given a means to engage it. Of course, such instruments are necessarily political, and Google has made significant, occasionally appalling compromises, like its agreement with the Chinese government to censor search results there. Street View has been criticized as invasive, and for publicizing otherwise innocuous moments in a way that renders them notorious. This “magnifying effect of technology” is an argument that’s important to make, but it ought to register more strongly with other technologies (BitTorrent trackers, the NSA’s telcom pattern-recognition algorithms), or with future versions of this one. For now caution should focus not on any particular content but mainly on Street View’s visual language and provenance. Regardless of the lowered, human-scale perspective Street View accomplishes through a manic series of technical convolutions, it is still a surveying if not a surveillance system. It isn’t the disciplinary apparatus of a state, but it is the totalizing product of a massively capitalized corporation, which, with other corporations, is vying for the power to singularly reshape our conceptions and use of public space. In other words Street View is a great hack but it isn’t owned by hackers.

In both its successes and its failures, Street View provides a useful model for design that wants to be both modern and honest. Start by identifying possibilities of current technology and the values to which those possibilities are beholden. If you decide to go ahead because those values are good ones on balance, then don’t try to hide the technical structure of your work, even if that structure is strange, complicated, un-geometric, or surprising. Instead seek beneficial secondary and tertiary effects of your approach, like the pleasing rhythm of a reappearing car, the flattening of a city into a surreal fabric, or unlimited chance encounters.

Google has undertaken the Street View project in several other cities. San Francisco’s imagery, for example, is more crisply detailed than New York’s; it is a much different kind of image. But somehow, despite and exactly because of its many technical failures and compromised postures, this gritty, ghostlike, many-tentacled image is the right one to describe New York.

-published in Modern Painters, September 2007