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Hard Focus (Print Mag)

Digital technology is transforming photojournalism in hot spots around the world. (link) (photo by Riccardo Gangale)

What does conflict look like? Some people are fortunate enough to know only from the photographs they see in newspapers and on the web. But between the moment a picture is taken and its appearance on our computer screen or in our morning paper there exists a technologically remarkable chain of communication. Gone are the days when photojournalists lugged a chunky Rolleiflex TLR into the field and sent film home on planes. Digital technology has streamlined the process—while adding a few of its own complications. To find out more about how technology is changing photojournalism, I tracked down a few of the conflict photographers who travel around the world from hot spot to hot spot, snapping images and sending them back to their editors at home.

Bird Bath (Wired)

Sure, a Jet's Wings Need Scrubbing, But Its Guts Need a Flush, Too (link)

Philip Joshua eases his chrome-rimmed Ford crew cab into mid-morning traffic on the tarmac at John F. Kennedy International Airport, keeping pace with a taxiing passenger jet. It doesn't take much. We're moving 5 miles per hour, if that, slowing even more for bumps on account of the 40 gallons of hot water in the trailer behind us. Also in tow is a 24-kilowatt generator and a mysterious black cart that could pass for a stadium speaker. Evidently, this setup is Pratt & Whitney's EcoPower Engine Wash rig, and we're on our way to bathe the business ends of a 767.

The Ultrabuilder: Bill Baker (Wired)

Seventy feet beneath the Las Vegas strip, in a construction pit that will become the Cosmopolitan Resort and Casino, Bill Baker is looking for local talent. Baker is the head structural engineer at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the famed building design firm responsible for the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Time Warner Center in New York, and scores of other colossal glass boxes across the globe. This morning he's wearing a hard hat and an orange safety vest as he watches a Nevada construction crew at work. He'll likely draft some of them for his next big project, the multibillion-dollar Crown Las Vegas Resort and Casino. At 1,888 (lucky) feet, it will feature what could be the world's highest gaming room, 142 stories above the desert floor. Provided, that is, the Federal Aviation Administration will let it scrape the skies so close to the airport.

Baker inspects welds with his fingertips and, not one to suffer waste (even in Vegas), he looks appraisingly at the oversize columns. Then he rests a dusty dress shoe on a pile of rebar and turns to Brian Calley, an engineer at Schuff Steel, with the question that got him up early this morning, a question that's key to making the steel-framed Crown a reality: "So, what's the biggest thing you're working with?" The Crown will use around 72,000 tons of steel, and Baker needs to know that Schuff can handle that kind of metal. At Calley's answer (16 feet wide by 60 feet long), the bespectacled Baker enthusiastically sticks two thumbs up in the air. The fewer pieces you have to pick up and connect, the faster the building rises. And Baker knows that speed and efficiency will be just as important to getting the Crown off the sketch pad as the schematic itself. "Erection is everything," he explains. The problem with most ambitious architectural endeavors is that "people don't figure out the right way to build them when they design them." (Wired.com link)

Watch This Space (Print Magazine)

Publishers grapple with online video (link)

When President Clinton appeared—in video!—on my laptop screen in the fall of 1998, his index finger jabbing at Kenneth Starr, the future arrived with a shock: The news was no longer something you either watched or read. Somehow, the web was going to make it both, simultaneously.

Nine years later, we’re living in a YouTube world, and video has suddenly become a must-have for print publications—even the ones struggling to have an online presence at all. According to Bart Feder, president and CEO of The FeedRoom, the broadband video company of choice for many magazines and newspapers, “Over the last 18 months, every media company has begun to believe they need to be a digital media company.”

That goal still seems a long way off. Bringing online video up to the quality that most publications are producing in print remains a challenge, even for the best financed. Concierge, Condé Nast Traveler’s online home (and a FeedRoom client), has integrated video across the site, but the footage itself looks like an A/V club spree, a standard that would never fly in the magazine itself. And The New York Times may be adding web-video components to a remarkable number of stories, but much of it still looks like the local news—a substantial notch below the paper’s print reporting and photography.

Local Cities, Global Problems: Jane Jacobs in an Age of Global Change

Originally published in the book "Block by Block: Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York," coinciding with the exhibition "Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York," at the Municipal Art Society, September 25th 2007 - January 5th 2008.

My block in Brooklyn plays a good Hudson Street—at least at first glance. Each morning, the cigar-store owner throws open his gate, the barber puts out his chairs, the baker begins her muffins, and the old man a few doors down takes up his surveillance from the second-floor window. When I make my own first entrance a little after seven, with the dog, the newspaperman calls me “boss.” It may all look like Jane Jacobs’s glorious sidewalk ballet, but this is no longer Jane Jacobs’s city.

When I “look, listen, linger and think” about my corner of the world, I am persistently confronted with the broader world beyond. The barbershop chatter is in Creole, the cigar store might be closed for the end of Ramadan, and the cyclical chanting of capoeira, the Brazilian martial art, echoes from an upstairs dance studio. Planes pass overhead on their way to La Guardia. And at all hours people pause at the top of the subway stairs to finish their cell-phone conversations.

This last activity is remarkably dominant and has come to define the character of the place. They lean against the station railing three or four at a time, talking with one hand to an ear and their heads cocked high. Like a lot of things here, they are deeply connected to other places. Their attention is divided. And, by extension, so is ours. While this feeling is common to all cities over time, cell phones bring the tangible immediacy of the faraway to the street. Helped along by media and the global logistics networks that define our material lives, our moment-to-moment experience of the local has become increasingly global. And so have our problems.

Jacobs fought modernist urban planning’s “dishonest mask of pretended order,” and what concerns me today about cities is a corollary: Call it the dishonest mask of pretended localism. Thanks in great part to Jacobs, we talk a lot about preserving neighborhoods, which most often means keeping them the way they are. But for me, preserving an urban community—not merely its architecture, its open space, or its independently owned stores—now means recognizing what the local is made of, the warp and weft of all its pieces, wherever they come from, near or far. And that requires recognizing the global community behind it—for better or worse, in the face of both nostalgia and change.

New York Hotel Bar Uncorks an Interactive Wine List (Wired)

People who are about to drop $300 on a bottle of Chateau Margeaux want the experience to be awesome — bouquet, color, mouthfeel, yada yada. But what about the ordering? Avid wine snobs might think about a trip to Adour, the restaurant opening at New York's St. Regis Hotel in November. Pull up a stool at the goatskin-upholstered wine bote, tap the glowing word wines projected in front of you, and the list scrolls into view. Choose a type and a bottle — hand and finger movements reveal its details (grape, origin, tasting notes, cost). The info unfolds with an animated flourish out of a flower icon; think Minority Report meets Sideways. Behind the alcohol-enabling magic is a lot of technology: Cameras and object-recognition software track your hand gestures — and ignore stuff like glassware — following the motion with a trail of projected white pixel dust. And all that vino data stays safe on a dedicated Web server. Need help? Luckily, there's a sommelier on duty, so don't worry about getting transferred to a call center in Bangalore. (link) (Rockwell) (Potion)

Olafur Eliasson is Playing With Your Mind (Wired News)

Weather Project Artist Eliasson Brings Techie Installations to U.S. (link)

For Take Your Time, a major new exhibition that opened September 8 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the internationally-celebrated artist Olafur Eliasson changed out the gallery lights, put mirrors on the ceilings, created a small fog bank, filled a room with a pool of water, and turned a skywalk into a trippy disco kaleidoscope, all in an effort to tinker with the way we experience space and light, and how we navigate the world. Open through February, the exhibition travels to New York's Museum of Modern Art and P.S. 1 in April, then to the Dallas Museum of Art in November 2008.

Eliason became famous as an artist in 2003, when 2 million people visited The Weather Project, a giant installation at London's Tate Modern that created an artificial sun from 200 yellow sodium lamps.

But, explains SFMOMA curator Madeleine Grynsztejn, Eliasson's work is never mere special effects. Like a DIY guru morphed into an international art star, Eliasson likes to show the mechanisms behind his artwork. "The revelation of his process is part and parcel of the work," says Grynsztejn. "It's equal parts 'wow' and 'a-ha.'"

The Big Pixel (Print Magazine)

The future of "mediatecture" (link)

In his 2001 book, Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies, architect James Sanders describes the relationship between the city and iconic films like Annie Hall and Miracle on 34th Street. Recently, though, as he discussed at a recent event in New York, Sanders has been thinking a lot about Shark Tale. True, it’s a movie about talking fish, but Sanders sees in it a compelling vision of a city of the future, in which the lines between real events and their video representation become blurred. In one scene, TV newscaster “Katie Current” reports live on a battle against a villainous shark. At the climactic moment, the shark smashes into an outdoor video screen—which turns out to be the very screen we’ve been watching Katie on, in the center of Times Square. In an explosion of flashbulbs and falling fish, we are confronted with what Sanders sees as the coming urban reality: a city that is simultaneously itself and its media representation.

Illuminated signs in public spaces have been around for a century, but recent advances in LED and projection technology are bringing us closer to truly transforming buildings into video screens. Boosters of this phenomenon call it “mediatecture.” For advertisers, it’s obviously irresistible; for the rest of us walking around the city, it could be either terrifying or thrilling. What’s clear is that the final effect depends enormously on designers and their ability to wrangle a larger canvas than ever before. We’ve arrived at a strange time when many designers must scramble to create good solutions for tiny cell-phone screens and, at the same time, devise the best approach for a quarter-acre of pixels.

Since the Sony JumboTron debuted at the 1985 world’s fair in Japan, enormous public video screens have become a familiar sight. But LED technology, with its lower operating temperatures, eliminates the need for big cooling mechanisms to be built behind the screen. The tipping-point products in this more streamlined genre have been developed by ag4, a German architecture and media design company, in partnership with GKD Metal Fabrics (which produces woven metal fabrics for interiors and exteriors). Mediamesh and Illumesh embed LEDs, along with all power and control cabling, into a structural metal mesh resembling an elegant security grate. The electronics are sleek enough to be transparent, so the screen can be used on a full facade without blocking daylight in or views out. For the same reason, it doesn’t look like a blank black wall when turned off. This doesn’t come cheap—prices hover around $200 per square foot—but that hasn’t prevented installation on a handful of buildings in Europe (including projects for Adidas and the 2006 Cannes Film Festival) and, soon, outside shopping malls in California.

The Times goes digital (again) - (Print Magazine)

[link] Among the legends of computer typography, two stand out. There’s an 18-year-old Steve Jobs stumbling into a calligraphy class at Reed College and learning about serifs and spacing—useless stuff, he thought, until it came time to design the first Mac. Then there’s Bill Hill and the coyote. An eccentric Glaswegian who sometimes still wears a kilt to his job as director of advanced reading technologies at Microsoft, Hill was tracking animals near his home when he had an epiphany: He was reading the tracks as if they were letters. Based on that notion, he wrote a treatise on pattern recognition, typography, and electronic reading. From the moment Bill Gates saw it, Microsoft got serious about e-reading.

Nick Bilton thinks about this often, sitting in the offices of The New York Times’ digital research and development lab. Bilton, who holds the dual title of art director and user-interface specialist, is the point person for Times Reader, one of the first of a new genre of Microsoft-developed digital publications that combine polished typography, tighter page design, and improved interfaces to take online reading beyond the browser.

Dreaming In Code (Metropolis)

Jonathan Harris distills the Web’s infinite avalanche of thoughts, facts, and feelings into exquisitely framed portraits of humanity. (link)

One late-winter morning Jonathan Harris sat in front of a MacBook in his Brooklyn apartment and opened the Web site We Feel Fine. Candy-colored digital balls and dots bounced around a black background. He clicked on one, and it shattered into a spinning sentence of text that flew to the top of the screen: “I feel for you.” Then he clicked on another, and another—all statements beginning with “I feel,” harvested live from the Web’s millions of blogs by this artwork he cocreated:

I feel so lonely today.

I feel he is there watching over me and even more so when I am in the garden.

I feel like I’m in tenth grade all over again.

I feel your might; I only have relinquish’d one delight to live beneath your more habitual sway.

That last one is from William Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality.” Janiele, a 23-year-old in Radford, Virginia, posted it on her MySpace blog “twenty-one minutes ago.” Unsurprised by the serendipitous beauty his Web site creates, Harris then clicked on “Montage,” and a grid of colored squares dissolved one by one into thumbnail images, the visual confetti of the blogosphere: American Idol contestants, the Eiffel Tower, prom pictures, a puppy. Clicking on one created an elegant little explosion of more candy-colored dots, as the image—a corgi frolicking in the grass, suddenly worthy of Tibor Kalman—expanded to fill the whole window. Clicking again launched the page the dog came from, with an intimacy so sudden it felt like magic: “Bron’s Blog: Knitting Without a Net.”

Then the wizard pulled back the curtain. “We realized there was all this amazing humanity hiding on the Web, but most people considered it to be a cold, inhuman space,” Harris explains, speaking for himself and his frequent collaborator, Sepandar Kamvar, whose day job is technical lead of personalization at Google. “So we asked, ‘How can we systematically quantify feelings using the Web?’” In a process Kamvar describes as “not quite rocket science,” they wrote a program that scrapes new blog posts, looking for the statement “I feel.” With the duplicates thrown out, it yielded 20,000 “feelings” a day. Harris punched up the raw feed of XML code in a source file—in other words, plain text. “Just in this form we could tell it was amazing material,” he says. “Which is when the next big layer comes in: how to visualize all this information.”

We Feel Fine—together with the handful of Harris’s other works—defines a profound new kind of information design: it whittles down the world’s 70 million Web sites and blogs into a framed image of humanity. And it does it live, continuously, and autonomously. Architects and designers have experimented with computational design, letting a computer run through a spectrum of possibilities within a given set of parameters. But Harris’s creations are different: rather than static buildings, magazine covers, or shopping bags, they are constantly changing artistic responses to a constantly changing world. By using the Web as both site and material, they offer a way of seeing rather than merely being a sight.

If you believe that the Internet is a cultural revolution on the level of modern capitalism, the nuclear age, or even the age of reason, then think of Harris as struggling to create its Impressionism, its Abstract Expressionism, or its neoclassicism—struggling, in other words, to develop a new artistic language for a new human condition. And undoubtedly for a new generation. At 27 Harris is different from those of us even just a few years older who made it through high school without e-mail, college without IMs, and at least a few years of our twenties without blogs. The material of experience has changed. The old rituals of memory—photographs, scrapbooks, diaries, letters—have moved onto the Web, opening them up for a new kind of analysis. “The goal for me is really to hold up a mirror to the world, and then open that mirror up to the largest number of people possible,” he says.