postarchitectural

things i have worked on that i haven’t talked about

sha — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 08:35:25 +0000

i really want to write more about these projects at some point but for now, links to remind myself:

Flickr Clock
LogMeIn Live Connections
LogMeIn Connection Endpoints
California Stimulus Map
MTV VMA Twitter Tracker

Sometimes all you need is data.

sha — Mon, 18 May 2009 10:45:15 +0000

I went back to New York a couple weeks ago, and staying in DUMBO while trying to pretend I lived in Williamsburg again put the subway back on my mind [and brought back memories of my commute to DUMBO, taking the J in to Essex then the F back out to York].

Then a couple days after I got back, I saw Mike Frumin’s post Spark It Up. It’s pretty gorgeous, and tells a lot of little fascinating stories, but what really tickled me was the fat spreadsheet of MTA ridership data Frumin used to create the map.

My first thought was to do something like my mapping of spending in the city — that sea of sparklines just demanded a z-axis. But I wanted to be able to scrub back and forth in time, so I started working on a ModestMaps-powered map with a time slider. After getting the data into the right shape, it was pretty quick to get something simple but interactive and visual up.

Some of the immediate things I realized, scrubbing back and forth in time, was just how high ridership used to be in the 1940s and 1950s, though significant changes like the token to Metrocard / Unlimited Metrocard seem to be affecting ridership. Here’s an atrophied 1977 vs 2006:

I can’t say much more about the data than Frumin’s original post, but it is pretty great to watch Midtown act as the throbbing heart of Manhattan, and the various lines spidering out into the Bronx.

After getting great feedback from my awesome coworkers at Stamen, I added some context to the time slider and some tooltips that feel about right to my eyes [writing the MTABadge class was especially fun]. Also, I set up a relative scaling mode, where all stations are scaled relative to their respective maximums. This gives you the Williamsburg boom that’s otherwise dwarfed by the volume of Midtown traffic.

The current piece is up now, here.

I’m Following Nolan.

sha — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 07:45:45 +0000

I watched Following by Christopher Nolan last week — I’ve always been meaning to watch it, and Le Dernier’s debut black and white awesomeness pushed me to try Nolan’s neonoir debut. Some of the shots, like this first one, could come out of any old noir, albeit with less shadows and more foreground. Other nice moments happen when the two main male characters are tangling and overlapping trying to break into an apartment. One of the longest shots happens when the main protagonist leans, dazed, on a rooftop, and it’s a nice break from the otherwise claustrophobic heaviness of the movie, especially the final shot..

Visiting subway stops in New York.

sha — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 05:51:42 +0000

I started a map of subway stops I’d been to in New York a while ago, but never really finished it. I was scrubbing away the names of the stops but preserving the lines, so there’s sort of this preserved mess of text in Lower Manhattan and Williamsbug. I’ve always thought of the subway map as a great piece of architecture — that is, it takes site and context into account, vs the Vignelli version — but this sort of made me amazed at the density of the text.

What’s also nice is this sort of fog of war that happens when I make all of my masks black:

And especially cool will be when Alicia will be able to generate ‘fog of war’ maps like these to chart unexplored waters..

I watched Gomorra last night.

sha — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 07:32:50 +0000

I didn’t end up watching Time of the Wolf, but I did get to see Gomorra last night. After the trailer and the poster I was already pretty much sold, but I wasn’t expecting this surreal opening shot:

There are quite a few of these wildly colored shots — the fabric in the workshop, the hazard suits, and this. It gives the whole movie an uncomfortable feel, and doesn’t let you box it away in some warm toned aesthetic. This shot could be something out of Blade Runner:

I’m sort of a sucker for movies like this — raw and rough movies that fight with masculinity, but there’s something cruel about seeing this happen to kids.

There are all sorts of amazing things that happen without much dialogue. It was actually kind of weird, it’s all Italian and subtitled, but the only parts I could understand were the Mandarin parts, which didn’t have subtitles.

For the rest, body language lets you project so much of the narrative onto the characters. When one of the boys sits on the motorcycle for a little longer, or when another walks by a cop car, there’s a whole unspoken voiceover that’s happening. That’s what makes it so heartbreaking, I guess. So much of the narrative is your own construction, so much of the dialogue is imagined, that the movie becomes like prose, where you own your depiction of the characters.