The Next, Next Street Art

Street With A View is a performance/digital art hybrid (I know! So rad!) coordinated by a small team of artists, residents of Pittsburgh's North Side, and Google. The artists thought up the idea to create vignettes in the city's streets that would be coordinated with when Google's Street View camera car would drive down those same streets. They tapped local residents to act out a series of scenes, coordinated with the Googleheads, and the rest is history.

SWAV's staged "interventions," as the team refers to them, point out an interesting possibility for street art. Referring to an earlier post on the subject, tech like RFID chips and barcodes will make digital graffiti a more ready possibility in the future. SWAV highlights one of the many ways that this type of art could be achieved: take a 360˚ photo (of which there are plenty freely available through Street View for an enterprising hacker), doctor it, and attach it to an RFID chip installed inconspicuously nearby. Set it up with an automatic trigger, and any passersby with an iPhone or a Blackberry will be treated to an alternate reality version of the place that they're walking through.

Aside from the potential for humor, there is political potential here as well. Think of preservationists looking to impress upon people the importance of preventing the destruction of historic structures; take the current, well-publicized battle over St. Vincent's in Manhattan, for example. A skilled digital artist with a penchant for quirky 1960s-vintage low-rises could create a digital, 360˚ recreation of the intersection of 7th Ave and 12th Street in which to-scale renderings of the 300 and 233 foot towers planned by the adjacent hospital replaced the distinctive O’Toole Medical Services Building. Passersby could get a better sense of the scale and blandness of the new development than they ever could from a wallet-sized picture in the Times.

Inverting the perspective, SWAV says some interesting things about Google's Street View feature as well. When examining the interventions on the Google Maps website, try to imagine what a normal user, unaware of the SWAV project, might think when encountering the digital parade. At the same time that it makes Google Street View more fantastical, SWAV also makes it, in a way, seem a bit more real. Certainly moreso in examples like the moving truck or the garage band practice. Add to that the impromptu "meta-interventions" staged by locals unaware of the project until it was happening, and the lines between reality and digital representation get delightfully blurry.

To ponder: If people become more aware of the Google Street View camera car and scenes like those staged by SWAV become more common (which seems very plausible, I think), what role does the Street View feature take on? Its parallel reality becomes heightened; humor and politics are woven into the scenery, and become as valid as the built environment that the feature was intended to represent. In addition, what does a more theatrical representation on the web mean for the real place being represented? If one were to walk down Sampsonia Way in Pittsburgh -- a charmingly "Pittsburgh" kind of street -- would it seem boring? Less authentic or interesting than its Street Views counterpart? Does the digital city draw from the real city, or add to it?


(Photo from Street With a View. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

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Urbanism revelation of the week: cities need more giraffes. And camels.

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Apologies for the tardiness of this week's Urbanffffinds. Unfortunately, this blogger has been busy with the planning and execution of a funeral over the past several days. Regular posting will hopefully resume soon.

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WEEKEND READING: December 21-28, 2007

Check back on Monday for a round-up of the past year's most interesting Weekend Reading Items. But for now, check out the current crop:

ITEM ONE: WorldChanging on the importance of voluntary simplicity. The article is not directly about cities, but the ideas that it presents are certainly integral to the reimagining of cities as sustainable places.

ITEM TWO: AHI's blog examines a decidedly different vision for the city of the future.

ITEM THREE: Jay Walljasper's new blog, The Ecopolitan, kicks off at National Geographic's site.

ITEM FOUR: TNAC on The Independent's recent list that names London as the current World Capital.

ITEM FIVE: GPS message-in-a-bottle locative art. Pretty cool stuff.

ITEM SIX: The City Room on Hollywood's fascination with the destruction of New York, which Ed Koch cheekily refers to as "edifice envy."

ITEM SEVEN: Lots of dreamy, really wonderful images of the UK over at BLDGBLOG - like the one pictured above.

Have a wonderful weekend, everyone!

Airoots Gets Lost in Deep Urbanmess (Guest Post by Matias Sendoa Echanove and Rahul Srivastava)

We arrive at a narrow commercial street lost somewhere between Bombay and Tokyo. It is crowded with pedestrians, bicycles, street vendors, food stalls, and wandering cows and dogs that don’t allow cars to pass through. Most of the buildings lining the street are two to three stories high, covered either with faded, dusty shop-signs painted in art-deco fonts, or snazzy neon lights. Billboards with smiling Manga faces and Bollywood movie stars eye each other warily.

An intricate web of wires, pipes, pathways, and cables connect the buildings, huts, cottages and shop-fronts to each other. They hang overhead or lie snugly underground. They are like masses of snakes intertwined into each other – alive and organic. They buzz with whispering voices, crackle with coded e-mails and crisp exchange of smses, gurgle with water or sewage and are swollen with pornographic images looking for immediate release, along with religious icons that appear on screens of high-tech devotees who bow to them in tiny studios.

The air is abuzz with invisible energy fields. Wireless networks that feed on cables and transmit the cyber-world into this dense neighbourhood. They compete for airspace with the smells of food, fish, gutters, and incense and the crowded sounds of the city.


Walking through the gulleys and streets one sees second-hand electronic shops selling tiny bits of chips and wires. We bump into a bull, resting in front of a poster selling Chinese medicine. Withdrawing, we stumble over a robot-dog who yelps angrily, snapping mechanically and uselessly at our ankles.

Going deeper one sees nimble hands stripping off circuit-board wires. They magically transform the pieces into copper jewelry that is marketed as tribal art. On one side otakus and geeks wait to devour cheap electronic left-overs – on the other, hippies and high-fashion lovers wait to decorate themselves with re-designed electronic waste.

An entrance to one street looks particularly crowded. It is lined with Japanese tea-shops, Iranian Samovar-houses and Chai-stalls served by kids. Old men and women sip tea, keeping an eye on children playing dangerously close to railway tracks. The street shudders as two trains zoom pass each other – one a yellow and brown old-fashioned rusty local train with open doors and another a sleek silver, futuristic machine made of steel, its windows covered with dark tinted glass.


The sound of new stalls being put up and old ones being pulled down rent the air. A bearded man with wild eyes sells mangas in a makeshift stall right next to an old sadhu with dirty, matted hair, who tells your fortune. The mangaman reads out stories to a group of teenaged girls who giggle crazily as he shows them explicit pictures. The palmist-cum-astrologer catches a hapless European tourist and predicts that he will hook up with one of the teenaged girls, who is already smiling at him.

The two connect and vanish around the corner hand in hand. To be continued...


(All of the images above are photoshop collages of Bombay and Tokyo.)

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Big thanks to today's guest bloggers! Matias Sendoa Echanove and Rahul Srivastava are the bloggers behind Airoots/Eirut. Check out their blog for more ruminations on "adventitious roots, urban forests & villages, natural cities, lost tribes, new nomads, and everything in between."