"The arrows indicate wind trajectories, while color indicates wind height. The length of a line equates to wind speed (stronger winds get longer lines). Black arrows trace the low-altitude winds that carry moisture, the winds most relevant to the 1988 drought and 1993 floods. These winds are about 1,500 meters (4,900 feet, 850 millibars) above the surface. White arrows are winds at 5,400 meters (18,000 ft, 500 mb), and blue arrows are high-altitude winds at about 9.2 kilometers (30,000 ft, 300 mb)."]

[For comparison, winds from the same period (the beginning of May to the end of July) in 1988, a year of drought that also devastated the Midwest, but in opposite fashion.  Note that in 1993, the high-pressure, low-altitude winds (black arrows) flow freely up from the Gulf of Mexico, bringing moisture-laden air to the Midwest, while in the 1988, a high-pressure system hovered over the Midwest, pushing air south and blocking movement of moist air from the Gulf of Mexico.  To really appreciate the difference, you'll want to watch the animated versions -- 1988 here and 1993 here.  (Note those links are to download sizable video files.)]

A brief interruption to the flood-blogging (which will resume shortly, with more on 1927 and crevasses) to note that I’ll be speaking in Madrid at Visualizar ’11 “Understanding Infrastructures”.  The opening seminar, which runs from June 14-15, promises to be fantastic, featuring talks from Amber Frid-Jimenez, Dietmar Offenhuber, Drew Hemment, Tom Raftery, and Usman Haque on a wide range of topics related to the visualization of infrastructures: the “smart grid”; the politics and crafting of data; innovation in the development and deployment of infrastructures; and “the internet of obsolete objects”, as well as an array of selected papers.  The aim of the gathering as a whole — discussing and prototyping ways to reveal and interpret the operation of infrastructures — is similarly excellent, and if past editions of Visualizar are any guide, the workshop which follows the seminar is sure to produce worthwhile projects.

The program for Visualizar ’11 begins by quoting James Burke from Connections:

“More and more of technology infiltrates every aspect of our lives. It’s become a life support system without which we can’t survive. And yet, how much of it do we understand? Do I bother myself with the reality of what happens when I get into a big steel box, press a button, and rise into the sky?  Of course I don’t. I take going up the world like that for granted, we all do. And as the years of the 20th century have gone by the things we take for granted have multiplied way beyond the ability of any individual to understand in a lifetime.  The things around us, the man-made inventions we’ve provided ourselves with, are like a vast network, each part of which is interdependent with all the others.  (…) All the things in that network has become so specialized that only the people involved in making them understand them.“

It continues with the contemporary example of the smartphone:

Let’s have a look at any object around us. For it to reach our hands, it has been necessary to exploit natural resources, submit it to complex manufacturing processes, distribute it through worldwide supply networks and validate it through international agreements and regulations of all kind. A big amount of our everyday acts -turn on the light, open a tap or take out the garbage- are not isolated events, but form part of a major system, altough we often ignore its scale and rarely have the chance to observe it as a whole. When we use a last generation smartphone in the middle of the street to look for the address of a restaurant, we are not only using the plastic and metal piece that we have in our hands but also activating a vast network that covers thousand of kilometres, formed by satellites in orbit, antennas set up in roofs and data centres that store information in anonymous locations.

Infrastractures are the support system of global society. Physical infrastructures (electric networks, pipelines, reservoirs) but also information (radio broadcasting, underwater cables) transport (sea routes, aerial routes) as well as legal and financial infrastructures that rule international trade and markets, as well as the hidden but active infrastractures that control the networks of drugs distribution or illegal immigration.

If we could contemplate the superposition of all of these infrastructures we could obtain an approximate representation of how a contemporary society works. Nevertheless, as citizens, we are often only conscious of those elements we are related with. Our field of action is determined by the rules that determine how these systems operate, and their functional limits How could we be conscious of them in order to understand them better?

This is a project that mammoth has long been interested in; my talk, “An Atlas of iPhone Landscapes”, begins with the subject matter of a post from last year, “a preliminary atlas of gizmo landscapes”, but will spiral outward from “the spatial trace and organizational logic of patterns of reception, broadcast, transmission, dissemination, production, and extraction” to encompass an array of wider concerns, from the role of the invisibility of infrastructural landscapes in the infrastructural public policy problem to re-industrialization to “the new aesthetic” of “cheap satellite imagery”.

I would, of course, love to meet any mammoth readers who are or will be in Madrid; the seminar is at MediaLab Prado and is, to the best of my knowledge, free and open to the public.

Having (I think, I’m not bothering to track down the location at the moment) before posited that landscape architecture, like architecture, possesses some strong disciplinary aptitude for something(s) like “spatial intelligence” (we landscape architects might call our version “geospatial intelligence”) which make the discipline at least as valuable when it is understood as a way of thinking as when it is understood as a professional body of techniques, and also believing that the capacity to interpret and represent spatial patterns within landscape is a particularly important manifestation of spatial intelligence within the discipline, I find examples like this extremely encouraging, because they indicate that there is some validity to that argument.

[Link via Damian Holmes (@landreader).]

From the description of the above video at PopSci:

Using nearly half a million Flickr photos of Rome, Venice, and the Croatian coastal city of Dubrovnik, a team of computer scientists at the University of Washington’s Graphics and Imaging Laboratory assembled digital models of the three cities in 3-D… Each video includes clusters of small diamond shapes, which represent each photographer and his or her vantage point.  The team built a new algorithm that proceeds in two steps — first, by matching the photos by what they had in common, puzzle-style, and then by determining the scene and each photographer’s pose.

I wonder if Regina Bittner has seen this. It immediately made me think of this article she wrote for Volume Magazine. This isn’t a model of Dubrovnik, it is a model of our collected visual record of that city – which is far more interesting, in my opinion.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if this model was constantly accessible through an iphone app?  And constantly updated?  (Kind of like this). You’re walking around the city, and decide that one of your favorite nooks is lacking in detail, so you snap some extra pictures.  Upload them to flickr and tag them.  A few extra polygons further define the model, the crowd-sourced 3-dimensional map developing in real-time.  How many false images would it take to hack the model?  Citizen activists or a private developer pushing for a future project decide to show their vision to the world, and upload thousands of computer renderings photo-montaged into photographs of the existing site, the new geometry competing with the old, our memories mingling with our aspirations.

[via Gizmodo and Nam]