Seeing the Corner

another person...just seeing the city

Cornerville .... exerpt from Joseph O'Neil

"...I see twin phone booths; a pole with those multiple parking signs that demand the application of advanced logic to figure out what the devil the parking situation actually is; and a pole with a yellow crosswalk sign showing a faintly Hitchcockian man and woman on foot (Why does each carry a kind of briefcase? Why do the figures look so weirdly lethargic? Most mysterious of all, which person looking at this sign has not already realized that there is a crosswalk here?). There are also a very cluttered pole on which are mounted two pedestrian lights and a vehicular traffic light; a one-way sign; a sign alerting us to the possible presence of blind persons; a no-left-turn sign; a chirping yellow gadget (presumably for the blind); and, at the pole’s overhanging extremity, a streetlight..."

A City Drip System

urban sewer grates along the streets of San Francisco color coded with drops of altering primary colored paints.

Graffiti artists or City employee? Physical demarcations noting status of rainwater catchment system?

What are the physical or virtual notifications of the efficiencies of a network?

Street Signs

Pedestrian street signs...
know where you are - without needing to be in a car.

Street corners have the street names stamped into the concrete, allowing for the pedestrian (already simi-conscious of what is before them) to be a little bit more aware of their location
San Francisco, California

Tracing our Clicks

By monitoring what we google online, can we actually get a better sense of the what the general public are thinking, experiencing and doing?

Leave it to Google itself to find that out. Google Flu Trends for example, within this report taking data from the past four years to show that by identifying key search terms, Google Flu Trends can call a flu outbreak up to 10 days before the CDC an identify it.

From their site:

"Each week, millions of users around the world search for online health information. As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer. You can explore all of these phenomena using Google Trends. But can search query trends provide an accurate, reliable model of real-world phenomena?"

..."real-world phenomena"...

How are our individual actions both virtually and physically understood within a collective?
What kind of "thinking" are we entering into a www database?
What kind of "thinking" could we begin entering into a www database to improve other social, cultural, economic functions?
What is a truly transparent city that can quantify satisfactions? dissatisfactions? qualifications?

image credit: google.org
additional article: new york times

Seed Project

David Cohen's The Seed Project

This "art" project asks people to plant organic basil seeds anywhere and everywhere. Its invites one to take the element of nature and imposes it upon the more "unnatural" environments within our everyday lives.

In regards to our urban environment, existing visual cues of "natural" have become so urbane that many fail to even recognize it as plant life. This project shakes up your daily commutes, questioning place, location and purpose of plant life in our built environments.










In a time of extreme greenwashing, what are the new visual cues of true environmental action?
What locations, programs, buildings, forms of employment within a concrete jungle of a city can programmed for understanding basic living processes?
What new forms of urban gardening can harvest not only moments of contemplation, but todays lunch?

Similar movements:
Guerrilla Gardners