Projects

With James Burns
Spring 2011

The Mixed-Reality emerges from a collaborative studio at the Harvard GSD. In different ways, the work uses mobile media to respond to the provocation that the contemporary city is constituted by multiple overlapping, intermixing realities, articulated between built form and imagined space, individuated experience and collective memory, embodied sensation and digital mediation. Often, these multiple realities are invisible or illegible in physical space, with certain narratives dominating particular environments. However, realities always leave traces, to be excavated or constructed.

Co-Founder
With James Burns, Daniele Ledda, Kara Oehler, Robert Gerard Pietrusko and Jeffrey Schnapp
2010-present

metaLAB (at) Harvard is a research unit dedicated to innovation and experimentation in the arts, media and humanities hosted at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The lab is founded on the belief that some of the key research challenges and opportunities of the new millennium, not to mention fundamental questions about experience in a connected world, about the boundaries between nature and culture, about democracy and social justice, transcend divisions between the arts, humanities and sciences; between the academy, industry, and the public sphere; between theoretical and applied knowledge.

Co-Creator
With Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Ernst Karel and James Burns
Fall 2010

Media Archaeology of Place is a project initiated by a collaborative course at Harvard University, Fall 2010. Combining new media art practice with critical inquiry and ethnographic research, sites across metropolitan Boston serve as laboratories for exploring different modes of representing place. Over 15 weeks, course participants scavenge archives across the region and online, record original audio, video and photography, and use custom API-driven HTML5 software to build a shared multimedia database from which each student authors a nonlinear interactive project about a specific place.

Co-Creator
With Kara Oehler, James Burns and Ann Heppermann
2009-present

When politicians and the media mention Main Street, they evoke one people and one place. But there are over 10,466 streets named Main in the United States. Mapping Main Street is a collaborative documentary media project that creates a new map of the country through stories, photos and videos recorded on actual Main Streets. Produced with NPR, the CPB, AIR and the Berkman Center

President + Director of Product Development
With Kara Oehler + James Burns
2010-present

Media And Place (MAP) Productions is a start-up non-profit at the intersection of journalism, media arts and urbanism. Our first major project is to create Zeega, an open-source toolkit to create API-driven interactive documentaries. Think Processing for cross-platform, translocal storytelling, seamlessly moving through audio, text, video, photography, data visualizations, and maps.

Co-Creator
With Kara Oehler, Christopher Allen and Steve Holmgren
2009-present

The UnionDocs Collaborative is an experimental laboratory for innovation in trasnmedia documentary arts. It is both a rigorous platform for exploring contemporary approaches to the documentary arts and a process for developing a group project. The first year’s project was “Documenting Mythologies,” which used Roland Barthes 1957 Mythologies as a jumping off point to explore myth in contemporary society.

Co-Creator
With Olga Touloumi
2008-present
Additional curators: Ernst Karel, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Julie Mallozzi

A Media Archaeology of Boston is a one-night sound, film, and video exhibition that uses the Boston metropolitan region as a laboratory for exploring different modes of urban representation across history and various media. The program presents an initial excavation of the city’s spaces through a montage of short films, photographs, postcards, and experimental soundscapes recorded on-location in the larger metropolitan area. The objective is to disturb the technical, temporal, and aesthetic assumptions that underlie the narrowness of a medium-specific lens on a city. Far from a comprehensive survey, the presentation aims to provoke new senses of the city and challenge everyday perception. Produced with the Film Study Center, Carpenter Center for Visual Arts and Provostial Funds for Arts and Humanities

Co-Creator
With Brian House
2008-present

Periplurban is a tool for workshops engaging critical discourse about the built environment and media arts that allows students to conduct urban research by defining words in a new experiential dictionary through text, photography, video and maps. This dictionary serves as a source for new modes of site-specific storytelling, read and written with mobile phones and the internet. The platform was initially developed in the context of a Visual Studies workshop sponsored by the Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia University.

Co-Creator
With Christopher Allen + Kara Oehler + Counts Media
2006

Capitol of Punk is an interactive documentary consisting of 10 videos and text message walking tours that explore the spaces of D.C.’s punk rock music history. Online, the videos are experienced through a map-based interface. The project also unfolds in a physical space through a video podcast and text-message walking tour. Interviews with Ian Mackaye, Alex Mackaye, Brendan Canty, Ian Svenonius, Allison Wolfe, Cynthia Connolly, Dante Ferrando, Jeff Nelson, Joe Lally, Leslie Clague, and, of course, Marion Barry. Sites include: Fort Reno, d.c. space, Old 9:30 Club, The Mall, Mount Pleasant, and others.

Co-Creator
With Christopher Allen + Kara Oehler + Counts Media
2005

In all of NYC’s five boroughs, large sculptural Yellow Arrows pointed out the unique characteristics, personal histories, and hidden secrets within our everyday spaces. Each arrow has a unique code and a telephone number. When anyone calls the number and enters the code, they hear short individual audio messages about that specific place.

Co-Creator
With Brian House, Christopher Allen + Counts Media
2004-2006

A harbinger of the geospatial web, Yellow Arrow began in 2004 as a street art project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Since then, Yellow Arrow has grown to over 35 countries and 380 cities globally and become a way to experience and publish ideas and stories via text messaging on your mobile phone and interactive maps online. When the project was first introduced in 2004, Stanford archaeologist and cultural theorist Michael Shanks wrote that Yellow Arrow was an example of “deep mapping cultural experience – a cartography of the intimate, the everyday, the monumental, the ephemeral, the epochal.”

Co-Creator
With Philipp Schwarz + Celia Di Pauli
2002-2005

Operating in the border zones between contemporary art, urban design and ethnographic research, Stadtblind is an independent collective dedicated to the investigation and transformation of urban life. The Colors of Berlin was our first project, an exhibition consisting of over 1,000 photographs and maps, along with an experimental guidebook to be used on the city’s streets. Targeting the lacunae in the representation and perception of the city, we developed the project under the premise: “Too often Berlin is seen blindly.”

Co-Creator
With James Burns
2002

An early experiment that combined a live performance of a story from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities with photographs of overlooked faces in the urban landscape and aerial photographs of their precise locations.