This arrived in the mail over a week ago and I just now managed to actually watch the thing, mostly because access to a VHS deck is not super easy. There are a few around the studio. Irony Number One: The first one I tried — which I tried because it appears to be connected via some piping of cables into a wall, prob…

The apparatus consists of a very tall pole which is used to gain a unique, portable vantage point to see the world. Two wide field of view cameras are used to capture video from the full height. The video is then processed to highlight specific features of the world below, mostly such things as the movement of people and the movement strategies. Individuals are highlighted using video processing algorithms to accentuate the flow of urban life. The motivation for this project is the noted urbanist, William H. Whyte, who wrote an important, short monograph that went along with a film, both called The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.
The post processed videos

Times Square Urban Living Room from Julian Bleecker. More Apparatus Videos.

Design Fiction Chronicles: The Final Cut from Julian Bleecker on Vimeo.

First off, I’m being tongue-in-cheek with the blog post title, so lower your weapons. And I’ll be brief. There are two things going on here.

A short mention of this wonderful film “Moon”, which is presently in the theaters here and there. I quite enjoyed the production design — Tom Carden pointed me to the site of the designer who created the fictional environment, giving the film a particularly lonely and somewhat constrained feeling to it, a fellow cal…

Cribbed from John Marshall’s Designed Objects blog, he and I contributed a short, analytic essay on inter/trans/undisciplinarity as it pertains to design practices for this book — Digital Blur: Stories from the Edge of Creative Design Practice. The book is forthcoming in September-ish I am told and contains a collec…

Via Nicolas — Upcoming piece about the asynchronous city:

This weekend, I was at this un-conference, event, workshop called The Overlap in the misty Pacific Grove along the coast of California near Monterey. It’s a mix of designers and self-described business types and some who were both, mixing it up with a variety of loosely structured “technologies” to explore, test, pr…