[david rokeby / seen / 2002] I’m excited to announce the launch of TAGallery 21: City of Nodes, a selection of geographic and cartographic work that I’ve curated for the fine folks at Cont3xt.net. City of Nodes is a collection of twelve new media projects from the last decade that reconsider the representation of urban space. Broadly speaking, the work deals with mapping but some projects also address narrative, the simulated city and the process of archiving. An excerpt from my introduction to the work:

City of Nodes is a collection of works from the last decade that explores the everyday domains of street, neighbourhood and the entire city as platforms for mapping, movement and communication. These projects adopt a bird’s-eye view of urban space and storyboard the city towards a number of idiosyncratic ends. In these augmented and annotated cities, space and context are interrogated, surveillance technology exposed, fleeting histories archived and the role of the body reconsidered.

It was quite exciting for me to research this project as it will serve as the foundation for a venture that I’ll be working on later in the year. Beyond my enthusiasm about this body of work, I was an early fan of the use of delicious as a tool for curation (see my post Tagging as Curation from last summer); contributing to TAGallery felt right on point with my research interests. What follows is a brief introduction to a few of the projects included in City of Nodes.

256² from aram bartholl on Vimeo.

Aram Bartholl is German artist whose work explores the intersection of web culture and everyday life. 256² was an exercise in delineating a parcel of land from NewBerlin (a reproduction of Berlin in Second Life) in Berlin proper. For this 2007 project, Bartholl used chalk to trace the bounding box of a 256 square meter area in Alexanderplatz reinforcing the connection between this public space and its virtual counterpoint.

One Block Radius was a 2004 project by Christina Ray and Dave Mandl founded on archiving the ephemera of a Manhattan city block (now the site of the New Museum). The work utilizes a web interface to store a variety of entries which catalog photographs and experience via categories such as rules/regulations, daily life and sounds/noise. I really enjoy the rigor of this project and in many ways it seems prescient of sites like Everyblock, a web service that I’ve written about several times in the past.

City of Nodes was also an opportunity for me to finally pay homage to Amsterdam Realtime, a 2002 project by Esther Polak, Jeroen Kee and The Waag Society. The work equipped volunteers with GPS devices to track their movements over a two month period. The resulting “personal” maps were compared and composited as part of retrospective exploring 100 years of cartography in Amsterdam. Amsterdam Realtime is as a benchmark locative media project and an ancestor to later, influential work including Polak’s MILK project (2005), the MIT SENSEable City Lab’s Real Time Rome (2006) and Stamen Design’s Cabspotting (2006).

TAGallery 021: City of Nodes also contains work by Tuur Van Balen, Gordan Savic, Tom Carden, the Insitute for Applied Autonomy, John Geraci, Mushon Zer-Aviv + Dan Phiffer + Kati London + Laila El-Haddad + Thomas Duc + Ran Tao + Charles Pratt, Shawn Micallef + James Roussel + Gabe Sawhney and David Rokeby.

You can view the full list of projects and annotations via this link. [posted by Greg Smith on Serial Consign]