In his novel L’Innommable Beckett describes a strange world made up from a complex system of repetitive cyclical events. What is described as social architecture – the spatial / temporal organisation of everyday life- is often very similar to this: people do the same things at the same time. They follow the same routes in regular periods. Sometimes when riding the tram, visiting a cafe or going to the supermarket I recognize strangers who seem to live in the same “loops” like I do. The Project is a subjective description of the city as a set of repeating actions and events on different scales. A space composed of closed loops, intersecting each other. each loop is a thematic entity, a story: a stroll through the shelves of a local supermarket. Looking for a free place in a parking lot. A tourists guide round through a district. A hotel maid’s morning round.

link to the project , developed in the course of a Japan Foundation Fellowship

The Language of Networks is a symposium / exhibition I co-curated for Ars Electronica 2004. The lineup was  interdisciplinary, including visualization developers, media artists, mathematicians and social scientists.

The festival website is offline, since ars electronica restructured their archive, but the pdf program can still be downloaded here.

A nice blogpost about the symposium can be found here.

Program

Panel I – Information Visualization

Ulrik Brandes (DE) – Network Visualization and Graph Drawing
Lothar Krempel (DE) – Communicating Empirical Information with Color
Anne Nigten (NL) – Mental Maps
W. Bradford Paley (USA) – Information Visualization: Meaning, Evolution, and
Design; How to Engage Cognition Using Early Vision
René Weiskircher (AT) – Network Visualization and Graph Drawing

Panel II – Mapping Research and Innovation

Jürgen Güdler (DE) – 2003 DFG Funding Ranking: Methods, Findings and
Perspectives
Nikolaos Kastrinos (EL) – Mapping the Social Sciences and Humanities in Europe:
Needs, Challenges and Prospects
Wolfgang Neurath (AT) – Social Network Analysis (SNA): A New Method
for Exploring Patterns of Innovation
Stefan Thurner (AT) – Complex Systems Theory, Evolution and Innovation