urban

Shadow Trees compiles and animates images of urban nature. Focusing on shadows cast by trees onto walls, buildings, pavement, and the trunks of other trees, Jody Zellen is able to investigate places where natural and built environments overlap and touch.

The short video disrupts audience expectations of nature films and photography, which are often framed to limit or erase the presence of humans, so that trees are shown to exist in forests, not in city blocks. In so doing, such photographic conventions comfort us by removing our role in the precariosness of their existence, particularly in large metropolitan places like Los Angeles where carbon emissions choke human and nonhuman life alike.

(Source: http://thenewriver.us/shadow-trees/)

Urbanscrawl is an abstraction of everyday city life. Whilst we may be aware of some conversations that are happening around us, urbanscrawl seeks to trace the residue of digital conversations that pass by undetected.
SMS messaging enables people to participate regardless of location by texting a dedicated number. The visualisation picks these messages from the ether and uses them to construct a navigable 3D space surrounding the voyeur within a context which is simultaneously familiar but also completely alien...

(source: Vimeo)

Written for the opening of the Stavanger Concert hall and its custom built organ, the poetry film The Pipes is an ode to the industrial history and former backbone of the city. Published as part 9 of the electronic poetry film series Gasspedal Animert, intended for electronic distribution through the internet, the film combines text, sound and digital animation. This particular film is a collaboration between the small press Gasspedal and the publishing house Gyldendal. (Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Urban Fragments is an interactive website that functions as a repository for ideas about the city and how the urban experience can be translated into an online experience. From the opening users can peruse numerous avenues each accessible through a different vertical fragment pictured on the home page. Animations, processing sketches and images are gathered together within the site and open in individual pop up windows creating random juxtapositions and eventually chaos on the screen.

Imaginary Year is a serialized work of electronic fiction, updated twice a week. As it grows, it follows the extended interconnected narratives of a group of fictional characters. By documenting their experiences in present-day Chicago, Imaginary Year examines the complex network of relationships between human experience and mediated urban space.

(Source: 2002 ELO State of the Arts gallery)

Note: serialized web fiction that was published from 2000-2005.

The project ‘Folgen’ looks at the publication of personal archives and the tension between the public and private experience. This is explored by the personal experience of what it is like to follow somebody, first by monitoring the videos people put online, then following this information to actual physical addresses within the city where these videos were produced. Staged as a performance and installation, Folgen draws on the existing narratives of amateur video makers found on YouTube to build a multi-layered media landscape of Berlin. A subjective approach combines fragments of images and sound from the videos with the artist’s own narration, using the traces video makers have left in the public sphere of the internet to follow people throughout the city. The videos are self-representative acts, performances and depictions of the everyday, which together form a relation with the city spaces where they transpire. The geographic locations encoded in the videos become waypoints for traversing an unofficial, unintentional map of Berlin. Through this process, the city becomes a place to be inhabited and experienced through an other’s narrative — stepping into somebody else’s shoes.

A later version of The Legible City (1989) encompasses all the experiences offered by the original version, but introduces an important new multi-user functionality that to a large extent becomes its predominant feature. In the Distributed Legible City there are two or more bicyclists at remote locations who are simultaneously present in the virtual environment.They can meet each other (by accident or intentionally), see abstracted avatar representations of each other, and when they come close to each other they can verbally communicate with each other.While the Distributed Legible City shows the same urban textual landscape as the original Legible City, this database now takes on a new meaning. The texts are no longer the sole focus of the user's experience, but instead becomes the con_text (both in terms of scenery and content) for the possible meetings and resulting conversations (meta_texts) between the bicyclists. In this way a rich new space of co-mingled spoken and readable texts is generated. In other words the artwork changes from being merely a visual experience, into becoming a visual ambiance for social exchange between visitors to that artwork.As a result of the increasingly ubiquitous nature of the Internet and the maturing of 3D interaction techniques, there is a growing need to define aesthetic frameworks for the technological development of new social interaction and interface paradigms for content rich, inter-connected, shared virtual environments. The Legible City has been used as a context to explore these issues, adding a space of distributed multi-user social engagement to the space of interactive spectacle. This paradigm is a novel one for art, embedding and transforming its representational practices in the the new and evolving net condition.

(Source: Shaw's description from project page)