The paper was published in the Journal of the American Planning Association (JAPA)

The second paper, published in the Leonardo Journal from MIT press, is a social network analysis of the Prix Ars Electronica Jury sessions covering all categories through the years 1987 – 2009. The networks reflect two different views of interdisciplinarity – one from the institutional perspective, expressed in the nominations for prix jurors made by the organizers of the competition (as many judges participate in several different juries throughout the years) and the second one expressed in the award choices of these jurors (awarding artists who themselves have worked in multiple areas and disciplines).

The paper was also chosen as the cover motif for the issue.

Offenhuber, D., Lee, D., Wolf, M. I., Phithakkitnukoon, S., Biderman, A., & Ratti, C. (2012). Putting Matter in Place. Journal of the American Planning Association, 78(2), 173–196. doi:10.1080/01944363.2012.677120

Offenhuber, D. (2012). Patterns of Choice: The Prix Ars Electronica Jury Sessions. Leonardo, 45(3), 226–232. doi:10.1162/LEON_a_00364

We used location-detecting hardware and software to investigate how the Catadores, informal recyclers, find and collect material in the city. We are also developing participatory platforms that will help them to organize their activities and connect the cooperative to the citizens.

In our work with the recycling cooperative COOPAMARE, we try to increase visibility and understanding of the service they provide to the city.

Project homepage

Team

Dietmar Offenhuber, Senseable City Laboratory; David Lee, Senseable City Laboratory; Ciro Iorio, Sloan School of Management; Libby McDonald, Community Innovators Laboratory; Profa. Maria Cecília Loschiavo dos Santos, University of São Paulo; Laura Fostinone, MIT Community Innovators Laboratory; Rafael Galvão, University of São Paulo

Collection activity of the Cooperative, orange: collection with handcart, blue: collection with truck

A new stadtmusik work, tying together a lot of what we were working on in the past couple of years.

The physical configuration of the built environment generates a wide spectrum of acoustic effects. Even while they usually remain unnoticed, these acoustic phenomena actively support our orientation in the city and provide a sense of place.
For the exhibition, we have assembled an inventory of urban auditory situations illustrating some of these effects in the vicinity of the architecture forum. We provide a visitor of these places with instructions that facilitate awareness of these effects and decode the underlying interaction between the physical environment and the soundscape. By contrasting these situations with videos of similar situations in other cities around the world, we show shared principles and seek answers to questions such as: why do some urban spaces seem to attract or repel us? What information is being offered to our senses, what information gets lost?
We want to initiate a conversation about the soundscape as a shared, collectively owned resource, its synesthetic interactions and atmospheric elements. Stadtmusik scrutinizes the role of public space as a space of performance that provides a frame through its structures and inter-dependencies.

Curated by Dietmar Offenhuber and Katja Schechtner
A Cooperation between afo architekturforum oberösterreich, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology and Ars Electronica.

Programm

Sunday, 4. 09. 2011, 10 am–7:30 pm

10:00–12:30 am
Panel 1: Senses – the perception of urban media
Sam Auinger (A/D) + Bruce Odland (US): The Sonic Commons
Malcom McCullough (US): Attention and Ambient Information
Chris Nold (UK): Designing for Responsive Communities
Chair: Dietmar Offenhuber

2:00 pm–4:30 pm
Panel 2: Systems – new infrastructures for public space
Usman Haque (UK): Notes on the Design of Participatory Systems – for the City or for the Planet
Joi Ito (J/USA): Safecast.org
Natalie Jeremijenko (US): What is smarter than a smart city, googlier than a google power meter, whatsier than a Whatzon, greener than a green building, wiser than nuclear monitoring committee and faster than a speeding bullet?
Jose Luis Vicente (ES): Reverse-engineering the #Spanishrevolution: on the Hybrid Infrastructures of 15M
Chair: Katja Schechtner

5:00 pm–7:30 pm
Panel 3: Places – the aesthetics of hyperlocality
Stefan Mittlböck-Jungwirth-Fohringer (A): „Zeitraum“ – a media art project based on the imaginary space bounded by all the world’s airports
Susanne Seitinger (A/USA): Surfacing Opportunities for Engagement through Responsive Lighting Infrastructures
Sandrine von Klot (A): The Significance of Becoming Actors
Juha van ‘t Zelfde (NL): The Medium is the Metropolis
Chair: Oliver Schürer

the symposium program

the exhibition

exhibition photoset

all images (c) senseable city lab 2011

Markus Decker, Dietmar Offenhuber, Orkan Telhan

‘Dust Serenade‘ is a reenactment of an acoustic experiment done by German physicist August Kundt. Inspired by the Chladni’s famous sand figures visualizing sound waves in solid materials, Kundt devised an experiment for visualizing longitudinal sound waves through fine lycopodium dust; a setup that would allow him to measure the speed of sound in different gases.

Kundt was a strong believer in experimental methods over purely theoretical inquiry in a time when the disciplines of theoretical and experimental physics started to diverge.

‘Dust Serenade’ intends to remind us the materiality of sound. Tubes filled with scraps of words and letters–cut-up theory–interact with sound waves and turn into figures of dust. Here, visitors can modulate the frequency of the sound emitted by moving a rod and create different harmonic sound effects. As sound waves figure, refigure, and disfigure the text, we invite visitors to rethink about the tension between their theorical knowlegde and the sensory experience.

Dust Serenade is one of a series of interactive sound projects that enable visitors to experience the physical aspects of sound, presence, and atmosphere. Works in the series have been shown at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Zagreb, Istanbul and São Paulo.

The project was funded by the Council for the Arts at MIT and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture (BMUKK)

In Netzpioniere, an art-historical project contextualizing the practice of early net art, SemaSpace is used for exploring the social structure of the early “Thing” network, a central hub of the early net art scene. In the project, also the synchronoptic timeline conceptualized together with Mar Canet Sola is used.

You can visit the project and the visualizations

The second project, Facing Science conducted at the Humboldt University Berlin, explores the social structure of scientific collaborations across different disciplines and countries, a part of the WeltWissen exhibition at the Martin Gropius Bau Berlin. Tim Otto Roth also made a nice documentation page for the application.

Link to the project

our project page and a related post on WMMNA