Kaleidoscopic New York

More fun with the Stereographic Street View hack. As it turns out, you can do a lot more than just make those cute little mini-planets. Long, low buildings, for example, can be fun to play around with. Here we are at Industry City in Sunset Park, Brooklyn:

And, up at Viñoly's razzle-dazzle-y Hall of Justice in the Bronx:

Skyscrapers are fun for the same reason. Here's Manhattan's GM Building (and Apple's famous Cube store):

And Long Island City's Citi Tower, warped into something of a crooked frame:

In fact, with the right site, these stereographic images can start to look like legit abstract art:

And then, of course, there's the straight-up kaleidoscopic stuff. Here's the old American Banknote Building in Hunts Point:

One of the covered sections of the High Line, near 14th Street:

Under the 1 tracks up in Kingsbridge:

Pier Luigi Nervi's magnificently weird bus terminal in Washington Heights:

Inside the Met (three cheers for Street View inside major museums!)

And last, but certainly not least, on the Brooklyn Bridge:

If anybody plays around with this thing and finds some more worth sharing, please do!

Stereographic New York

Thanks to Brainpicker for alerting me to the presence of what may be the best Google Maps hack I've seen yet, Stereographic Street View. Now I know what I'm going to be doing for pretty much the rest of my life. Some early successes:

Under the Queensboro Bridge in LIC:

Then on down to Soho:

And Flatbush. The uniformity of public housing blocks makes for some really great stereographic images:

And speaking of uniform residential architecture, Fort Greene's Portland Avenue lends itself well to this format:

As does the Greystones block of 80th Street in Jackson Heights, Queens:

Then, on to fun with interestingly-shaped landmarks. The Bronx's Kingsbridge Armory:

The Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Greenpoint:

The New Museum:

The Whit:

And the Gugg:

The patchy quality of much of Google's Street View imagery means that a lot of stuff gets a little blurry around the edges, but the site is still terrifyingly addictive. If you enjoyed this post, stop back tomorrow for some more abstract fare...

Mindrelic's Manhattan: The Urban Timelapse Video to End All Urban Timelapse Videos

Mindrelic - Manhattan in motion from Mindrelic on Vimeo.

I've gotten kind of bored with urban timelapse videos since they've become A Thing, but this is head and shoulders above the rest. Really epic stuff. (Thanks Alex!)

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.)

Chicago Prints

Found some spectacular art prints of Chicago landmarks while poking around on Etsy today. If you see one you're interested in purchasing, click on the image and it will take you directly to the seller's page.

A bit of color...

Tonight's storm in Chicago:


And, oh god...Tokyo is on Google Street Views...

Urbanffffinds: The Movie

Well, not really. Actually, not at all. Maybe sort of? Whatever, it's a longer variation on a theme.

Urbanffffinds will not run as a regular feature anymore on Where. But, thanks to Marcus, there will be a constantly-updating feed of architecture and urbanism imagery over at Where's new FFFFOUND! account! Occasionally, there will be Urbanffffinds features to promote the page, which can now be found in the sidebar at left. But I encourage you to add the page to your feed reader for a steady flow of excellent urban imagery.

Enjoy!


UPDATE: the full Urbanffffinds catalog has been added, mostly in order, and with only a few permanent losses (stupid broken links!), to Where's FFFFOUND! page. Peruse away!

Urbanffffinds 030

It's baaaack.