M1 - 7 - Catacombs of Domitilla

The Catacombs of Domitilla in Rome is an early Christian burial site in Rome.  The followings images were derived from a 1.2 billion point laser-scan of the interior: 30GB of data.

"The Domitilla Catacomb is the largest of Rome’s over 60 known catacombs, built by the early Christian communities between the late 2nd and the early 5th century. The soil around Rome consists mostly of tuff, which allows easy digging, and therefore catacombs were extended frequently and without plan. The result is a very irregular network of galleries, 15km in the case of the Domitilla Catacomb, which is challenging to document.... The documentation of the geometry of archaeological monuments, buildings, or findings by laser-scanning evolved rapidly over the last years, as scanning devices became more precise and are able to record more points in one

pass. One of the first large scan projects was the Digital Michelangelo Project, where 10 statues created by Michelangelo were digitized. The largest single data

set, the statue of David, consists of 2 Billion triangles... (Scheiblauer, et all. 2009)

These are like burrows, ichnofossils of some cambrian creatures den...

Sources: 

http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/2009/SCHEIBLAUER-2009-IDCE/SCHEIBLAUER-2009-IDCE-Paper.pdf

and google image search.

Human Powered Helicopter

M1 - 6 - Random Walk with Notes

"A man starts from a point O and walks L yards in a straight line; he then turns through any angle whatever and walks another L yards in a second straight line. He repeats this process N times."

- K. Pearson, Nature 1905.

A "random walk" is defined as a mathematical formalisation of a trajectory that consists of taking successive random steps (wiki).  


A similar concept to the "random walk" is a "stochastic process", defined as: a collection of random variables often used to represent the evolution of some random value, or system, over time (wiki).   

Physicist Leonard Mlodinow's book Drunkards Walk is about the role of chance in human endeavours.  It is an interesting and accessible read, though one which is generally resigned about things. The subtitle, "How Randomness Rules Our Lives" is illustrative of this as well as the following larger-bit: 

In the scientific study of random processes the drunkard’s walk is the archetype. In our lives it also provides an apt model, for like the granules of pollen floating in the Brownian fluid, we’re continually nudged in this direction and then that one by random events. As a result, although statistical regularities can be found in social data, the future of particular individuals is impossible to predict, and for our particular achievements, our jobs, our friends, our finances, we all owe more to chance than many people realize. On the following pages, I shall argue, furthermore, that in all except the simplest real-life endeavors unforeseeable or unpredictable forces cannot be avoided, and moreover those random forces and our reactions to them account for much of what constitutes our particular path in life. I will begin my argument by exploring an apparent contradiction to that idea: if the future is really chaotic and unpredictable, why, after events have occurred, does it often seem as if we should have been able to foresee them? (p.63)

To test out the idea I decided to actually go for a Random Walk.  


I download an app for my smartphone which claims to be random and use it to decide which direction to walk every time I come to an intersection.   

Above is the GPS track I had while conducting the random walk in the city of Rome, March 22, 2012 from 2100-2200 hours. 

Some notes taken on the random walk:

A: 

I walk four times by the door of my own house

B: 

I walk 3 times past the entrance to a restaurant in which some VIP is eating, and in front of which sits a half dozen black gleaming Mercedes with security cards milling about in front in preparation for the imminent departure. I am a security threat. 

E: 

I try with all my strength to predict which direction the stochastic process will take me: sometimes I guess right, most often times wrong, and I frustratingly walk back upon the street I have walked on 3 times before.

F: 

I walk up half the Janiculum, then am instructed to turn mid-slope and head back, walking once again on streets I had just walked: the stochastic process almost brought me to the top of a mountain.  

G:

If I wish to walk half-way up a hill and past the door of my own home 3 or 4 times moving only a few hundred meters in an hour of  continuous walking, then I should use a stochastic process to inform my daily decisions.   

The conclusion above, in Excerpt "G" is very similar to that of Karl Pearson, inventor of the "Random Walk" as formulated in a 1905 edition of Nature: "The lesson... is that in open country the most probable place to find a drunken man who is at all capable of keeping on his feet is somewhere near his starting point!" 

Sources:

K. Pearson. Nature 72, 294; 318; 342 (1905) link

Mlodinow, Leonard. The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. New York: Pantheon, 2008. Print.

x

M1 - 5 - Jeremy Woods

Jeremy Wood is a British artist who uses his path as as pencil.  He records his route with GPS to draw massive paintings across cities and landscapes.  He has worked at many different scales, exploring the possibility that are inherent in walking and paths, in a pursuit variously called “human geography”.

vegas dollar. Las Vegas.

Tic-tac-toe. Hollywood.

Water on Water

Star Flights.  Made by carrying GPS and strategically flying across Europe.

Jeremy Woods' bag was stolen:

My bag got stolen in a pub.  Inside the bag was a GPS receiver that I’d left switched on. 
The bag was handed in at a local police station in the early hours of the following morning. 
It was mostly emptied of valuables except for the GPS that was still recording.

From the GPS data he was able reconstruct what the bag was doing while it was stolen, with entries such as: "[21:21:09] Bag stops in Golden Square where it remains for two hours and forty minutes".  He then overlayed the GPS track onto John Snow's "Cholera Map" (the bag was apparently stolen from the John Snow pub). 

Image excerpt from "Meridians" a walk through London along the quote:

“It is not down in any map; true places never are.”

(Herman Melville, Moby Dick)

Check out his site http://www.gpsdrawing.com/index.html

x

  

M1 - 4 - planb

planb (A collaboration between artists, Sophia New and Daniel Belasco Rogers) is engaged in performance work, durational work, participatory projects, locative media and audio projects and have exhibited  pieces in galleries across Europe. 

GPS track through Berlin and countryside. (source: planb)

Zoomed in on GPS track through Berlin. (source: planb)

GPS track through Berlin. (source: planb)

“Our work is site-specific and relationship-specific. Two faces of the same coin. We either explore the nuances of our own relationship or our relationship to a location or both - a kind of looking inward and outward at the same time.” -planb

I took their work as my case study and will present one of their projects here, as well as images from another. 

The project Monday Walks, took place from June 24th to the 27th, 2010 in Leipzig and was "inspired by the demonstrations that took place in Leipzig leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and beyond, the so-called Montagsdemonstrationen (Monday Demonstrations).” -planb 

The Monday Walks consisted of two parts:

1.) “a GPS animation of recreations of the journeys people took to the demonstrations in 1989. Students from the University of Leipzig interviewed people from Leipzig who had taken part in the demonstrations, and then the students reconstructed their journeys, following the specific path taken by the demonstrators. These reconstructions were recorded on GPS’s, and the journeys were then visualized”

2.) “a walk re-tracing part of the Monday Demonstrations, finishing where many of the demonstrations ended, at the Stasi headquarters, the Runde Ecke. The walk was developed in collaboration with the students and it featured original sound material from the actual time, interviews with Leipzigers who took part in the demonstrations, and some live interventions into the space and social fabric of the city”

Students were asked to interview a Leipziger who had taken part in the Monday Demonstrations in 1989, in order to reconstruct the route they took to the protest.  Their responses are documented were document a blog for any interested persons to reference:

I have taken the route of Niels Adam. Now 39, lives in Jena and operates a cinema...Many things he remembered no more, and only came with telling details, such as how he has mastered the way home without a tram. 

-Posted by tim at 02/06/2010 11:29:00 PM and translated from German.

The combination of collecting anecdotal qualitative evidence, a physical re-walking of a historical reconstructed route, and the recording of these re-walkings with GPS provides a very compelling method for documenting the path which historical events took through space, “uncovering  realities  previously unseen or unimagined, even across seemingly exhausted grounds” (James Corner. Agency of Mapping)  

x

M1 - 3 - Fischer Maps

Eric Fischer is mapping language communities on Twitter. He describes himself on twitter as a "Geek of maps, failed transportation plans of the past, history of technology, computers, pedestrianism, and misspelled street signs."  

Below are snapshots of map Twitter Language Communities.  Data is from the Twitter streaming API, May 14-October 20, 2011.

French, German, Dutch, Italian, English

French, German, Italian

Turkish

Norweigan, Danish, Swedish.

Spanish, Portugese, Catalan, French

English, French, Spanish

English, French

Check out more of Eric Fischers maps at  his flickr page. 

Via: http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/6276642489/