Object Oriented Investigations

These investigations take an inventory of park related ‘objects,’ describe their behaviors, relations, and changes of state.

Annotated Topography

“Following a rambling conversation with his dear friend Robert Filliou, Daniel Spoerri one day mapped the objects lying at random on the table of his room, adding a rigorously scientific decription of each. These objects subsequently evoked associations, memories, anecdotes; not only from the original author, but from his friends as well: a beguiling creation was born. Many of the principal participants of FLUXUS make an appearance. It is a novel of digressions in the manner of Tristram Shandy or Robbe-Grillet; it’s a game, a poem, an encyclopaedia, a cabinet of wonders: a celebration of friendship and creativity. The Topography personifies (and pre-dates) the whole FLUXUS spirit and constitutes one of the strangest and most compelling insights into the artist’s life. From out of the banal detritus of the everyday a virtual autobiography emerges.”

Instructions

Most maps refer to a field of objects.  All of these objects and spaces are triggers for other associations, They trigger memories of other objects, remind one of other landscapes, or scenes from literature, television cinema, politics, or advertising.  Some help us understand cultural or social contexts.  Some relate to the law or literature.  Some relate to scientific knowledge.  Some relate to non-human occupants of the site, and so on..

1. Referencing drawings or aerials of a Chicago park, trace the perimeter boundaries of all objects, territories, spaces, landmarks, and other measurable features.
   
2. Number every object.
   
3. Annotate, associatiating each number to a complementary encyclopedia.  Each entry of the encyclopedia can include instructions on use, historic information, an analysis of related socio-cultural practices, general associations, personal memories, daydreams and other relations.
   

Possible Tools:

Drawing on Paper
Adobe Illustrator

Relevant Texts:

Spoerri, Daniel. Anecdoted Topography of Chance.
George Perec, Think Classify.

Other Inspiration:

Michael Landy, “Breakdown” (link)

ChicagoParks to Reference:

Use any park in the (list) as a constraint or reference, exhausting the landscape, space by space, object by object,  Try not to ‘overmine’, or ‘undermine’ the survey,  Objects contain objects.  Objects are contained by other objects.  Spaces contain spaces.  Spaces may be contained by spaces.

Class Diagram

In computer science, class structure diagrams show the static structure of a system being modeled.  These focus on the relevant elements of a system, disregarding time.  The class diagram shows how different entities (people, things, information, phenomena, etc.) relate to each other. 

Different objects often have attributes in common.  For example, tigers, zebras, and skunks all have ‘stripes.’  Each of these creatures also has attributes that make them different.  As an analytic tool, the goal of the class diagram is to make an exhaustive inventory of relevant objects, classifying each  according to families, behaviors and attributes, to identify dependencies and relations within the system.  This drawing will expose relations, and expose possible opportunities for reorganizing a system, its hierarchies, or its expression.

How it could be useful.

Sports fields, parking lots, bicycle and running paths, street intersections - all inherit systems of graphic  markings on surfaces to inform use.  If these marks are an active ingredient that informs the way we interpet these spaces, then one can speculate about the power of graphic markings as a potential medium of design.

Similarly — toilet rooms, water fountains, bird baths, swimming pools, hockey rinks, irrigation systems, and fountains all depend on (inherit) water, and plumbing systems as an attribute.   If plumbing is an active ingredient contributing to the use or interpretation of these spaces, one could manipulate plumbing as medium of design.

Possible Tools

Hand Drawing, Adobe Illustrator
Astah free UML software (link)

References

IBM Class Diagram (link)

ChicagoParks to Reference:

Use any park in the list as a constraint or reference, exhausting the landscape, space by space, object by object,  

Try not to ‘overmine’, or ‘undermine’ the survey,  Objects contain objects.  Objects are contained by other objects.  Spaces contain spaces.  Spaces may be contained by spaces.

Sequence Diagram

Sequence diagrams are used primarily to understand the time-elapsed interactions between objects (things, actors, phenomae, etc.) in the sequence that those interactions occur.   

In computer science, these diagrams establish a dashed vertical lifeline for every object in the system.  There can be as many as needed to describe all the objects participating in the system.  When an object is active, a narrow rectangle shows the duration that it is “on.”   Perpendicular to the lifelines are arrows denoting some kind of message (a call, a transaction, or other interaction between objects).  Sometimes there are conditions that must be met before an action can continue (e.g. you must show an id, or pay a fee, before acess is granted or an item is received.)

Instructions

Identify all participants: humans, objects, atmospheres, non-human actors, environmental changes - everything that plays a role in shaping interactions on site.  Construct a notation on a roll of paper, in Astah, or Adobe Illustrator.  

When a participant (environment, human, non-human, object) acts, a slender rectangle indicates the start and end of that action. Interactions are drawn with various kinds of arrows to indicate that one object/participant has sent a request, object etc. to another.  Sometimes a request is literally verbal - “please pass the salt”, but it can take different forms - like a gesture,  a non-verbal trigger, a reaction, or an environmental change - “the lights dim”.  Sometimes the recipient of a message reacts (passes the salt).  Sometimes the recipient replies with a message -“I don’t have the salt.”  Sometimes there is no response.  And sometimes there are conditions that must be met before a response is generated to a request.

Questions

What kinds of durations are useful for you to observe?  Seasons, months, weeks, days, hours? Do events repeat, do they remain, do they differ in time?  Do some short-term sequences fit within longer term sequences ?

References

IBM Sequence Diagrams, also here.
Stan Allen, Notations + Diagrams: Mapping the Unmappable.
Lyster, Clare, Landscapes of Exchange.

Possible Tools

Hand Drawing, Adobe Illustrator
Astah free UML software.

Relational Diagram

Many spaces and systems within a park can be associated with a collection of people who participate or activate them.   Playgrounds tend to draw a range of constituencies.  Basketball courts a different range.  Dog parks and trees are sites that engage non-human beings.  And so on.

Similarly, there are often direct and indirect partipicipants.  A guardian may accompany and supervise a child as they play.  A human may accompany a dog.  Each of these indirect participants may discover and particpate in secondary, unanticipated or unscripted activities.   For example, they may socialize, fall in love, or assist each other.

Instructions

1. Evaluate an existing park to establish an exhaustive inventory of its spaces and systems.
   
2. Add a second layer, to make an exhaustive inventory of who or what might directly engage those spaces.
   
3. Continue... building successive layers to identify secondary companions or caretakers.
   
4. Are there derivative or unintended activities that result from companions interacting?

How it might be useful

These diagrams can help expose latent patterns of use and relation as a basis for speculation.  Once exposed, one can develop an agenda about what activies shoudl be intended or sanctioned, adjusting or eliminating the hierarchies of activity, and consequently the range of constituencies, spaces and infrastructures that might serve them.

References

Stan Allen, Notations + Diagrams: Mapping the Unmappable.
Lyster, Clare, Landscapes of Exchange.
IBM Sequence Diagrams, also here. 

Possible Tools

Hand Drawing, Adobe Illustrator.

ChicagoParks to Reference:

Use any park in the (list) as a constraint or reference, exhausting the landscape, space by space, object by object. Try not to ‘overmine’, or ‘undermine’ the survey,  Objects contain objects.  Objects are contained by other objects.  Spaces contain spaces.  Spaces may be contained by spaces.

Critical Investigations

These investigations examine the structures of social, historical, ideological, or other cultural forces.

Human / Non-Human Subjects

We normally receive the city and the parks within it as constructed for human activity.  While we may be pre-occupied with our selves, there are an abundance of non-human beings superimposed and adjacent.  These non-human subjects interpret the same spaces differently.   This drawing process explores the superimposition of significance, effect space, perception and activity in the parks.

Instructions
Tracing over an aerial or plan of en existing park, imagine all the spaces and modes of inhabitation for a specific being.

It might be helpful to start with a non-human being for which you have some familiarity - for example, a dog.    Trace areas on the map that would support this creature’s activity.  Replace the presupposed activities or names for spaces on the plan, with a list of th eactual activities that a creature would perform there.

Once you’ve exhausted every possible space for that particular creature, save this drawing as a layer, and move to another.

Complete as many layers as you can,  You might collaborate with a colleague to exhaust every possibility you can imagine: toddler, child, teenager, adult, senior, dog, bird, fish, racoon, turtle, fox, beaver, etc.

Possible Tools:

Black technical pens on paper.
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Photoshop
Nodebox

Relevant Texts:

Donna Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Sigificant Otherness.

Jacob Von Uexkell, A Foray through the World of Humans and Animals.

Other Inspiration:

Quentin Deluermoz, Writing history with Animals  (link)

ChicagoParks to Reference:

Use any park as a constraint or reference, exhausting each environment.  (link)

Spatial Boundaries / Thresholds / Gradients

In North by Northwest, Cary Grant is attacked by a crop dusting airplane in an open field.  He manages to escape by stepping in front of a speeding truck, causing the plane to crash.   Considering the dramatic tension that emerges from machines and humans in proximity, we are inured to the bus passing us on the sidewalk, to the trucks passing the bicycle lane, to the cars adjacent to playgrounds.  Perhaps that’s because the landscape of the city is encoded with a social contract in the form of painted lines, material changes, curbs, fences, walls, buildings, and other regulating boundaries.   This materialization of bondaries allows us to cohabitate in a landscape with amazing density.

Instructions

Visit an existing park, or trace over an aerial or plan, exhuasting every boundary or threshold - whether expressed as a physical assembly, or implied - whether constructed by human beings, naturally formed, or accidental.

Develop a rigorous system of notation (e.g. linetype and lineweight) to visually classify different qualities of boundary: graphical systems (cross walk, parking lots), changes in material (blacktop to grass to wood) , shifts in surface elevation (height change, curbs), vertical surfaces (fences, storefront windows, walls), overhead (roof edges, tree canopies, or transition to different environments (the edge of pond, or a beach, etc.) 

Possible Tools:

Black technical pens on paper, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Nodebox

Relevant Texts:

Catalin Avramescu, A Country in Lines.
Allen Stan, From Object to Field. 
Allen Stan, Mapping the Unmappable: On Notation (link)

Other Inspiration:

SURFACE, a film from underneath (video)
Albert Pope, Ladders.

ChicagoParks to Reference:

Use any park as a constraint or reference, exhausting each environment.  (link)

Model X as if Y

This is an investigation in translation.  The goal is to use representational techniques typically associated with one point of view and apply them to another.  The investigation may help you expose common denominators for linking systems that may - at first - seem unrelated or distinct.

Examples

Draw or model landscapes as a series of spatial volumes using the standard materials and techniques for modeling architecture.

Draw or model landscapes as if they are a wunderkammer (cabinet of curiousities).

Draw or model architecture as if a three-dimensional folded surface that supports activity, using materials and techniques that one would use for modeling landscape.

Draw or model spatial volumes the way you would model time, model time the way you would model spatial volumes.

Draw a sequece of spaces as if its a template for a complex cardboard box, with folds and tabs.

Draw the city and its regions as sprawling park. Draw the park as a tiny city.  Expose the continuities and entanglements with the adjacent metropolitan infrastructure; model the metropolis to expose its structures as an expansive field of inhabitable landscape.

Draw or model  the city as if a field of climatically controlled environments, model the park as if a small city within that field.

Draw or model animal space the way you would human spaces and then find relationships between them.

Possible Tools:

Drawing on paper.
Drawing on paper, cut and folded.
Adobe Illustrator
Nodebox

Other Inspiration:

Vogt, Gunther, Landscape as a Cabinet of Curiosities.
Girot, Christophe, Vision in Motion, Representing Landscape in Time.

Chicago Parks to Reference:

Use any park as a constraint or reference, exhausting each environment.  (link)

A transect (transverse section) is a mapping technique.  It requires an observer to move along a path to document a sequence of occurrences.  Rather than begin with the map of a real place, this investigation asks you to work in reverse: starting by composing a few sequences and then projecting what space or system would generate  ambient evironments.

Instructions:

Construct five long color sequences.  These can be long rectangles subdivided into bands of color. Imagine they tell the story of a moving body experiencing the light and color of a still unknown environment.  The length of each subdivision could be calibrated to time.

Think about the quality of changes in intensity and character (hue, shade, tint).  Are they suddent or gradient; smooth or striated?  Solid colors might signify a constant encounter, gradients might signifying a time-elapsed change, overlapping colors might signify simultaneous experience.

Now establish a simple geometric boundary that represents the limits of park.  Imagine each of the five linear sequences start somewhere beyond the boundary, pass through it, and then leave.  Copy and re-arrange these lines so they cross through the boundary, meet inside it, and then diverge.  If you imagine these lines are transects through a range of environments, they can represent the experience of different bodies meeting and divering in a color field. 

Now extrapolate/interpolate from these transects to imagine the field between these zones.  Now redraw, identifying the materials, objects, activites, or phenomenae that generates these colors.

Possible Tools:

Drawing on paper.
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Photoshop
Nodebox

Relevant Texts:

Albers, Josef, The Interaction of Color.
Allen Stan, From Object to Field.

Other Inspiration:

Marcel Duchamp, Three Standard Stoppages (link)
Olafur Eliason, Color Experiment #78 (link)
Olafur Eliason, Feelings are Facts (link)
Albers, Josef, Interaction.of.Color, Ch4.Ch7 (link)

ChicagoParks to Reference:

This investigation can begin in the imagination. 

It can also begin by observing an existing park.

A transect (transverse section) is a mapping technique.  It requires an observer to move along a path to document a sequence of occurrences.  Rather than begin with the map of a real place, this investigation asks you to work in reveree: to project what its like to walk through your imagination of tbe sound(s) of a place.

Instructions:

Construct five long sound sequences.  Imagine they tell the story of a moving body encountering sounds while passing through an unseen environment.

These sequence may be literal sound compositions produced by collaging sounds together in software.  They could be recordings made by moving through the city or another space.  They could also be a graphical score, like Cornelius Cardew’s  notational techniques of sound annotated with descriptive text.

Think about the qualities and changes in intensity.  Are they abrubt, gradients; smooth or striated?  Is there reverb, echo, interferene, or doppler effects?

Establish a simple geometric boundary that represents the limits of park.  Imagine that the five sonic sequences start somewhere beyond the boundary, pass through it, and then leave.  Create a notation for sequences so each cross or meet another  somewhere inside the boundary and then diverge.  If you imagine these lines are transects through a range of environments, they can represent the encounters of different bodies meeting and then diverging in a continuous sonic field.  Try to extrapolate/interpolate from these transects to imagine the entire field within the boundary.

Possible Tools:

Drawing on paper,
Painting on paper
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe, Photoshop
Audacity (link)
Apple Garage Band
Nodebox

Relevant Texts:

John Cage, Composition as Process in Silence, pp.76-83. (link)
John Cage, Eric Satie in Silence, pp.76-83. (link)
Cornelius Cardew, Treatise (link)
Eno, Brian, Systems: Generating and Organizing Variet in the Arts. (link)

Other Inspiration:

Janet Cardiff, “Sound Walks” (link)

ChicagoParks to Reference:

This investigation can begin in the imagination. 

It can also begin by observing an existing park.

A transect (transverse section) is a mapping technique.  It requires an observer to move along a path to document a sequence of occurrences.  Rather than begin with the map of a real place, this investigation asks you to work in reverse: to project what its like to walk through your imagination of different climatic conditions.

Instructions:

Construct five long climatic sequences.  Imagine they tell the story of a moving body encountering a sequence of climatic conditions within an environment.

These sequence may be  graphical compositions produced by hand, or via software, and annotated with descriptive text.

Think about the qualities and changes in temperature, humidity, pressure, light level.  Think about climate across seasons and in changing weather conditions.  Do these sequenes pass through both exterior and interior environments?  Are the changes in the sequence abrubt, a gradient; smooth or striated?

Establish a simple geometric boundary to represent the limits of a park.  Imagine that the five climatic sequences start somewhere beyond this  boundary, pass through it, and then depart.  Fold the  sequences through the boundary so they enter, meet somewhere inside, and then diverge.  Now imagine these lines are transects through a space.  They can represent several bodies encountering the space, meeting then diverging. Using the transects as a starting point, extrapolate/interpolate the features of the entire boundary.

What happens if you render both landscape and architecture as architecture, rendering every climatic zone to produce a field of containers?

Possible Tools:

Drawing on paper.
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Photoshop
Nodebox

Relevant Texts:

Heschong, Lisa, Delight, Thermal Delight in Architecture, Massachussetts Institute of Technology, 1979. (link)
Allen Stan, From Object to Field. (link)
Allen Stan, Mapping the Unmappable: On Notation (link)
Other Inspiration:
Philipe Rahm (link)

ChicagoParks to Reference:

This investigation begins in the imagination.

It can also begin as a map of an existing space.

Rudolf Laban was a Hungarian dance theorist who was interested in the spatial structure of movement.  Acting on this interest he published Schrifttanz (Written Dance) in 1928, which contained a precise system of notation to describe the elements of movements and patterns.   Like writing, there are lines representing the performer’s point of view, with distinct symbols that work like an alphabet - each representing different movement forms.  These symbols are drawn with secondary qualities, where its shape represents direction, length - duration, shade - intensity, placement on the line refers to the part of the anatomy that’s in action.

Instructions:

Select a park to investigate from the list provided.  Plans and other data are available on Canvas.

Apply an existing notation, or invent your own, to examine the flows, rests, and qualities of movement in the existing environment of a park and its immediate surroundings.

Think about  various modes of movement: trains, busses, cars, bicycles, strollers, skateboards, scooters, runners, pedestrians, swimmers, etc.

Think about the structures of movement and choreographies suggested by different regions:  paths dedicated for movement, paths not dedicated, fields of play, fields of rest, empty fields, rooms, benches, blankets. Think about who or what is moving: adults, children, dogs, birds, clouds, wind, sun,  Think about the quality of their movement: smooth, frenetic, rhytmic, slow, fast.

Possible Tools:

Drawing on paper
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Photoshop
Nodebox

Relevant Texts:

Allen Stan, From Object to Field. (link)
Allen Stan, Mapping the Unmappable: On Notation (link)

Other Inspiration:

Louis Kahn’s Traffic Study project, Philadelphia, PA. (link)
Marey’s Chronophotography (link)

Suggested Parks:

Humboldt Park
Garfield Park
Calumet Park
Pulaski Park
Warren Park