cityofsound

Sublime visions

I can't shift these images from my mind. Two particular sets of recently-linked-to photographs which, although very different, seem connected in some way. They are both bystanders to an entwining of natural processes and human engineering. And both sets of images are sublime, but in the original fearful, awe-inspiring sense of the word.

Barcelona & Fotografia exhibition, Barcelona

Possibly the best way to spend €1.50 in Europe at the moment (discuss!) would be to go to the 'Barcelona & Fotografia' exhibition at the Museu D'Historia de la Ciutat in Barcelona.

It's a supreme collection of photography pertaining to Barcelona, and perhaps the best exploration of the relationship between photography and the city I've ever seen.

More photos of Shanghai by Paul Schütze

A few more photos of Shanghai from Paul Schütze [more here]. Click these crops for full image:

Some photos of Shanghai by Paul Schütze

My friend Paul Schütze has just returned from a quick trip to Shanghai and was suitably amazed. He sent me a few photos and I thought I'd share them with you. These will be the tip of the iceberg's-worth of photos Paul no doubt took, but are fairly extraordinary. The email containing the last one had the subject line "Pollution? What pollution?". Click on these hasty crops to get the full images.

Recent art: King, Madonna, Sokoloff

A quick pointer to some illustration and photography I've seen recently. Apologies for the crops...

Andrew King

I delicious-ed the work of Andrew King the other day. He's well worth a look. Annoyingly, in updating his gallery, he seems to delete some older works. Keep 'em there, fella! So these links may break, but current favourites include companion pieces Winston Flies to Tangiers for Martini Olives and 'Teddy Thrills His Dinner Party After Cocktails', as well as 'Ol Ziggy Ruins The Zeppelin Party' and Cuban Missile Crisis' . It's a strange world of 40s airplanes flying over lonesome, windswept plains and further things flying out of windows of modernist buildings. Curiously appealing.

Paul Madonna

Having posted about King, Teddy Jamieson emailed to point me at Paul Madonna's 'All Over Coffee' series, a quietly gorgeous series of cartoons based in San Fransciso and published in the San Francisco Chronicle. Here's a particularly lovely example. There's a rather difficult to navigate archive here, and interview here, in which Madonna suggests that while the human protagonists are never actually seen, the main character is San Francisco itself - and that's all so visible, in beautifully detailed pen-and-ink. Similar feel to the brilliant Ben Katchor, though a little more detailed. (I note Katchor has some newly updated weekly strips.)

Marshall Sokoloff

Leaving illustration aside for the moment, The Morning News carried the photographs of Marshall Sokoloff a while ago, but it's still quite the loveliest thing I've seen since. Jim Coudal, of Coudal fame, introduced the work for TMN:

"It seems fitting somehow that the hulls of ships carrying raw sugar from the tropics, north through the Atlantic to the Jarvis Quay in Toronto, should be bright and cheerful. That, like those products that will be produced from their cargo, they should be the color of jawbreakers and soda cans, candy wrappers, and the sprinkles that dress the top of cupcakes. It’s also appropriate that they show signs of decay."

They're simply stunning, the corrosion and paint producing great fields of curving abstraction that would put Rothko to shame - and where crisply-painted numbers, letters or other symbols appear on the hulls, it's nothing short of thrilling. Sokoloff's website is at blurbism.com, and The Morning News feature index is here.

Shanghai, crayfish, the Chinese media, recent architecture, graphic designers, Chairmen, Emperors, and making minced meat of memory amidst the maelstrom of modernisation

I'm fascinated by China, particularly Shanghai, and have been keeping a running list of links around these subjects for a while. Given some recent activity elsewhere, I thought I'd better just post the lot as is, rather than attempt to make anything particularly coherent. As ever, this is somewhere between a 'note-to-self' and list of links and quotes others may find useful. So here goes ...

Lightening Field on Shanghai
Things reports that David F. Gallagher is currently documenting Shanghai, and other Chinese cities, at the moment - see writhing crayfish, expressways and the symbiotic cycles of demolition and construction.

Return of the Shanghai Diary?
And news from Manchester is that Justin O'Connor is going back to Shanghai shortly and may be able to continue the Shanghai diary that I posting on his behalf last year. I really hope so, as I still think it's some of the best writing about cities around right now - have a browse through the previous entries while we're waiting to see if we can continue ...

Bad Beijing Architecture?
CrazyJianZhu, with the somewhat perjorative URL - badarchitecture.org - covers architecture emerging in Beijing, including these amazing photos of the brave new city being promised.

The Economist on China
As I write, I feel that The Economist has about the best weekly coverage of China around - it's clearly a real focal point for the magazine (registration required for all the following Economist links I'm afraid).

For instance, here's a good densely-linked backgrounder on China's economy, and their regularly updated country briefing on China. Includes stuff like this:

"China and Japan are increasingly inter-linked commercially. But their age-old political animus is reviving too ... (But) only a fifth of China's exports are in categories that compete with Japanese ones. That could change in coming years, as Chinese manufacturers gain in sophistication. But China's ultra-cheap labour is likely for some time to tilt those firms towards labour-intensive processes and away from the more capital- and research-intensive ones favoured in higher-cost Japan. Meanwhile, rising demand in China, both from industry and consumers, is bringing huge benefits to Japanese firms, both in lower, metal-bashing trades and in higher-value businesses."

The Economist: So hard to be friends

... as well as this recent in-depth survey on China and India compared. This piece - Sweatshops and technocoolies - compares the different approaches to industry in the two emerging superpowers. Fascinating stuff.

Rick Poyner Gets Chinese Design Louder
Get It Louder is "the first art/design exhibition and event of its kind held in mainland China" featuring the work of designers and artists "80% of (whom) are of Chinese background, and half are among the new generation of artists and designers in mainland China. The average age of all the artists are 25." according to the Get It Louder website.

Rick Poyner covered it for Design Observer, noting:

"If not for the sticky heat, requiring steady use of the mouth-shaped “Get it Louder” fans supplied by the organisers, we could have been anywhere. The audience had the usual haircuts, shaven or spiky, and the same tastes in branded designer gear ... Again, it was striking how many of these pieces spoke in the lingua franca of young international design ... They showed the same concern with graffiti, T-shirt designs, doe-eyed cartoon figures, cute toys, robots and illustrations based on whimsical doodles."

"More interesting was the work that seemed to have something to say about China today and where it stands in relation to its past. A set of skateboards was decorated with images of smiling workers and the slogan “The People’s Republic of Skateboarding”. A T-shirt by a designer based in Shanghai bore the legend “Worker, Peasant and Soldier” (in English) next to a drawing of the trio. The worker and the peasant appeared to be kissing, which would never have happened under Chairman Mao, while the soldier looked the other way."

"(Organiser) Ou Ning argues that since China’s social and political reforms began in 1979, there have been three generations in Chinese design. Until the early 1990s, the first generation still created mainly handmade work as there were few computers in the country. The second embraced the Macintosh and began to absorb international design influences. The third, represented in 'Get it Louder', grew up in the age of the Internet with access to information not available to earlier Chinese designers. They have an international outlook, often completing their education abroad, and they share the 'independent DIY spirit' found in young designers the world over."

"Photographs by Sze Tsung Leong, a New York artist and one of the editors of Great Leap Forward by Rem Koolhaas and his Harvard students, document the 'maelstrom of modernization' - as the book terms it - with a meticulously objective eye. Leong contrasts the few surviving older buildings with the new and shows the ravages of demolition alongside sleek emerging structures thrown up by the Chinese economic miracle. Shenzhen itself has grown from little more than a village to a wealthy modern city in 20 years."

Poyner ends reporting Ou Ning's hope that the internet, and other informational patterns like DVD piracy, will enable a more democratic order in China. The comments are interesting too, with Momus and others pitching in on how graphic design history, from Rodchenko to Tokion has been filtered through Chinese history.

Related possibly, visiting the US last year, there was much discussion amongst the various American companies we visited which can only be described as fear of outsourcing of design work to China and India in particular.

Sze Tsung Leong
Those astonishing aforementioned Sze Tsung Leong photos in full, both the History Images series and accompanying text and the Cities series. And here a text on the traditions of Chinese cities:

"One of the most important historical characteristics of cities in China is continuity with the past—an aspect reflected in the urban patterns and layouts that have remained, in their many incarnations over the centuries, relatively unchanging. Despite the common view that present-day Chinese cities constitute a break with the past, they are still consistent with three historical patterns that have defined urban change in China: large-scale destruction and replacement of urban fabrics to inaugurate changes of emperors or dynasties; massive relocations of populations; and highly planned urban configurations enabled by centralized and unchallenged forms of authority. These traditions underly the shape and nature of the contemporary Chinese city."

"The persistence of these traditions is possible only in a nation and society that has historically been steered by absolute forms of power. Only by acting as vehicles of these forms of power can urban and architectural development undergo processes that are by now commonplace - demolishing, relocating, wiping clean, and starting anew - all on a magnitude that affects not just individuals, but populations. Concentrated authority gave shape to cities such as traditional Beijing. It also wiped them clean, accommodating a new society in the form of luxury apartment complexes, office towers, and shopping centers. Power today may not exist in the singular form of an Emperor or a Chairman, but it is managed and exercised with enough strength to channel the possibilities for urban experience, and to choose which urban traditions to preserve."

Koolhaas on the Chinese city
See more Rem Koolhaas later, but intrigued by Abe's recent link to the awesome-looking Hans Ulrich Obrist interviews book, I've dug out a section of the Koolhaas interview from that, which was helpfully posted here. Includes this excellent quote (in the context of a discussion on Berlin):

"The Chinese city is for me a city that has built up a lot of volume in a very short time, which therefore doesn't have the slowness that is a condition for a traditional sedimentation of a city, which for us is still the model for authenticity. Beyond a certain speed of construction that kind of authenticity is inevitably sacrificed, even if you build everything out of stone and authentic materials, and that's a kind of irony. For instance, if you look at the color of the stone of the new Berlin, it's the color of all the worst plastics that were produced in East Germany in the 1960s. It's kind of a weird color of pink, a weird color of light yellow ..., they're artificial. There is no escaping the artificial in the new architecture, and certainly not in large amounts of architecture being generated at the same time."

There's more in the full interview on South Korea, possibly to follow later (I've just stood in Foyle's for 20 minutes reading it - the Hans Ulrich Obrist book is a pricey though weighty tome.)

Shanghai South Station
The Shanghai South Station project, by the (confusingly named for a construction engineering firm) French architect/engineers AREP, looks fascinating.

"The design of Shanghaï South station was the object of an international competition won by AREP and ECADI in three stages from May to September 2001. The new Shanghai-South intermodal terminal has been designed to symbolize the city's dynamism, and its economic, financial and cultural leadership together with its creativity and avant-garde vision"

On the AREP site, they've posted a panorama of the actual building emerging and there's a brief bit of content at Wallpaper on same. Also on the AREP site, there's news of an exhibition about architecture in China by French companies - Visions françaises, just finished in China but on in France in the autumn.

China and WIPO
John Naughton on China and WIPO, who links to J. Bradford DeLong's Outline notes for his talk 'Peering into the Future of China' (interesting comments, tho they get a bit bonkers).

Beijing Biennale
Some interesting perspectives on the collision between Chinese and 'Western' architecture emerge in a Domus sketch from the Beijing Biennale [reg. reqd. - free]

"The A2 section (which is where we are, called Architecture / Non Architecture) is housed in a giant building site. An area on the outskirts of the city, supermodern, attractive, marvellous. But not quite finished. Hundreds of builders work like ants to construct walls, foundations, stairs, lift wells. An impressive sight. With buildings that literally grow before your very eyes. You go and get something to eat and when you come back that building on the left has grown a floor and in the meantime a lorry has arrived with an acre of real lawn rolled up in strips."

"These Chinese are very good and very quick. We are witnessing epochal transformations and there are many moments when we remain open mouthed."

"It’s a bit like when the European immigrants described New York as a city where the streets were paved with gold. That (obviously) wasn’t true at all, just a linguistic metaphor (apart from anything else, very poetic) to attempt to explain phenomena that were conceptually thousands of years away from the world they had left behind."

"Trying to describe the construction sites of the UHN village is just the same. All the international architects (at least most of them) in the end complained about the problems, the fact that nothing was finished or ready, the pavilion where you couldn’t go in because the entrance stairway wasn’t finished and the places where you could get in but there was no electric light. Which is a sad, miserly, small minded way to think."

"We are before a nation that is entering high-handedly into modernity, no, that is leaping over modernity in one bound to land on the most extreme fringes of post-modernity, a billion superhuman efforts that will probably reduce the whole world to bended knee… and the fine European intellect can’t get beyond the fact that the third projector for their installation has arrived yet. Oh come on..."

Koolhaas and CCTV HQ
Fnally, last year Wired published Rem Koolhaas's/OMA's 'Beijing Manifesto', perhaps in some way seeing in China a warped version of the market-driven techno-boosterism they so covet, and ignoring the very different non-market-driven reality which Koolhaas actually describes. This is based around OMA's/Arup's work on the new CCTV headquarters in Beijing, and though the frustratingly gnomic OMA site has a bit more on the CCTV building, the Wired piece is a decent intro to the project. There's also a glitzy bit of cgi visulisation by Crystal CG available as a Windows Media file - well worth watching for the full on sell. But here's the text:

"In early 2002, my office received two invitations: one to propose a design for Ground Zero, the other to propose a design for the headquarters of China Central Television in Beijing. We discussed the choice over Chinese food. The life of the architect is so fraught with uncertainty and dilemmas that any clarification of the future, including astrology, is disproportionately welcome. My fortune cookie that night read: STUNNINGLY OMNIPRESENT MASTERS MAKE MINCED MEAT OF MEMORY.

"We chose China."

The rest of the article was tucked away in PDF format, which I've extracted for you below. It's an edit of a piece available in Koolhaas's book Content:

"The Chinese love the monumental ambition. They hate the monumental price tag – and the 'foreign' design. A portfolio of the grand ideas and grim realities behind the contentious new vision for China Central Television. For more than a decade, the number of high-rise buildings in Asia has surpassed that in North America. On October 17, 2003, the final spireon the Taipei 101 building was raised into place, making it the world's tallest building by more than 50 meters over the former number one, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. In the West, pundits continue to debate the viability of the skyscraper post-9/11, apparently unaware that in most of the world the high-rise has become a prerequisite. The China Central Television headquarters will be located in the northern part of Beijing's new Central Business District, near the intersection of Chang'an Avenue and the Third Ring Road. We aim to break ground later this year and to complete the project in time for the 2008 Olympics. The site covers about four blocks, with a total area of 180,000 square meters. There are two major buildings – CCTV, which hosts TV-production facilities, and TVCC, a hospitality center with a hotel. On the southeast block, the Media Park will be open to the public for events and entertainment, as well as available for outdoor filming. In the free market, architecture = real estate. Any complex corporation is dismantled, each unit sequestered in place. All media companies suffer a subsequent paranoia: Each department – the creative department, the finance department, administration, et cetera – talks about the others as 'them'; distrust is rife, motives are questioned. But in China, money does not yet have the last word.

"CCTV is envisioned as shared conceptual space in which all parts are housed permanently, aware of one another's presence – a collective. Communication increases; paranoia decreases [I must dig out my notes from a talk Richard Maccormac gave on the new BBC Broadcasting House project to compare and contrast approaches to building for large media organisations - DH]. After our design was accepted, it created two kinds of apprehension, if not disappointment. First, was it merely a landmark, one more alien proposal of meaningless boldness? Was its structural complexity simply irresponsible? On August 5, 2003, an afternoon event at Tsinghua University allowed all parties to vent criticism. It was not easy, I realized, for the assembled intelligentsia to see the difference between CCTV and any of the other foreign extravaganzas still in the pipeline. There was surprise at my description of the building as a collective, a word with complex associations. There was relief when the building, which had been considered in isolation, was presented in conjunction with our larger proposals for historical preservation in Beijing and a low-rise business district, revealing an interlocking hypothesis for Beijing's future land use … the beginnings of a Beijing Manifesto. Still, the younger audience members questioned allocating resources to "prestige," even while western China is ravaged by poverty; and the older generation of engineers was shocked to see the objective purity of their profession at the service of the unusual. A pact between the two sides – a coalition of the unwilling – could easily close a possibility that had just been opened. A refusal of the Promethean in the name of correctness and good sense could foreclose China's architectural potential. CCTV headquarters is an ambitious building. It was conceived at the same time that the design competition for Ground Zero took place – not in the backward-looking US, but in the parallel universe of China.In communism, engineering has a high status, its laws resonating with Marxian wheels of history. To prove the stability of a structure that violates some of the most sincerely held convictions about logic and beauty, the engineering firm Arup had to dissect every detail of our design. The effort to reassure only reveals the scary aliveness of every structure – elasticity, creep, shrinkage, sagging, bending, buckling. Serving as a hypnotic window, the computer analyzes and exposes the shocking vividness of the mineral world with the tenacity of a pervert. I heard one of Cecil Balmond's engineers at Arup describe, without irony or noticeable wavering, how two sloping steel structures in our design could be connected only at dawn. They would be exposed to different solar heat gain due to the irrelative positions on the ground and would be most likely to share the same temperature after cooling off overnight. I was elated and horrified by the sheer outrageousness of the problem we had set before them. Why do they never say no?"

That last image is quite, quite beautiful ...

Finally, to experience an aspect of contemporary China first hand (if you're an English-speaker) watch streaming video of CCTV's English-speaking offering, Channel 9 - it's in Windows Media format and blessed with an implausible interface, but at this distance, offers a compelling view of modern Chinese media at work.

Stephen Gill and photographing the everyday invisible

Stephen Gill is changing the way I take photos, the way I see photos. The echoes of the exhibition I visited recently continue to resonate through me. Everything I see now is part of a potential series. The idea of placing parameters as a compositional device is hardly new - see much modern music composition for instance - but the grace and lack of pretension with which Gill executes his ideas is quietly inspirational.

Regarding the (now-finished) exhibition at the Architectural Association, Design Week (28.04.05) carried a small piece on Gill. Vanessa Norwood, the AA's exhibition organiser, suggests that:

"Stephen's photographs are so human, so chaotic and ordinary that they are the perfect antidote to pristine architectural photography. Rather than focusing on the glossy facades of completed projects, Gill revels in the chaos of roadworks, the clutter of abandoned lots and the forgotten spaces between buildings. I really admire the way Stephen observes parts of the city that are so familiar we take them for granted: the back of billboards, omnipresent roadworks and so on. He's there, at ground level, quietly people-watching as we move through space."

Quite so. Gill suggests he's doing no more than "looking at things that we know very well, but rarely have the chance to stop and stare at." But that's it, exactly, and it takes a peculiar kind of brilliance - for instance, to realise that there are few more invisible in the city than those who keep it ticking - the army of workmen and women undertaking maintenance work - street-cleaning, traffic-directing, phone line-repairing etc - every day, everywhere, all over the city. In his series 'Invisible', the subjects are united only by their fluorescent orange workwear; the irony being that jackets specifically designed to be highly visible seem to only underline the invisibility of those who wear them. It's interesting that Gill often wears such a jacket to take his pictures - it apparently guarantees him the anonymity that street photographers need. It's a gentle but rich irony that seems to infuse much of Gill's work. Jon Ronson, who often writes about Gill, notes that his photos are "mercifully lacking in malevolence, ... wise and modern and beautifully laden with tiny, understated details about the way we live today. There is a wonderful, often inadvertent, eccentricity to them."

Again, that touch of the haphazard everyday was evident in the way Gill, or someone, had scrawled the titles underneath the photos, in pencil direct on to the gallery wall. See here, the title to his "Welcome to Marlboro Country. Smoking When Pregnant Harms Your Baby" - part of the brilliant 'Billboards' series, in which the back side of billboards are photographs, surreally juxtaposing the unreality of the advertising message - only by hinting at the advert, as the billboard has its back to us, with the copy only present in the title of the work - with the reality of the locale the billboard actually resides in.

Again, check out his site for many more examples of his work, divided up into these compelling series. For example, his 'Day Return' series is quietly lovely - photos taken on the same train between London and Southend, the countryside blurring past the windows lending them a dreamlike quality, everyone's eyes drawn outside the window almost longingly. And I love Audio Portraits for obvious reasons.

If Gill continues to trace these hidden routes through the city so well, I really think we might be looking back on some of his work and placing it up there with the likes of William Klein, Garry Winogrand, Robert Frank et al. Whilst Gill's work is rather more genteel, reserved, apolitical - more English - than these dazzling, fiercely-charged innovators, it may come to represent a particular time in a particular set of cities just as effectively.

Stephen Gill

Addendum, perhaps related: In The Economist this week, an article on Ed Ruscha, whose work will be shown in the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy, London, from June 7th-August 15th and Venice Biennale from June 12th-November 6th.

"California's biggest urban sprawl is often described as a city of movement rather than monuments, one defined by car culture rather than great architecture or beauty, but Edward Ruscha has found it a source of inspiration for more than 40 years. "Monet had the Seine, I had Route 66," he says of the interstate highway that led him west from an Oklahoma boyhood to art school in Los Angeles in the late 1950s and whose roadside imagery appears in much of his work ... He photographed 26 petrol stations he passed along Route 66 on his way to LA, every building on the Sunset Strip, and many swimming pools, palm trees and car parks. In these books of photographs and other work, he catalogues an American material culture that is so pervasive as to be almost invisible ... Mr Ruscha is not reacting to anything tangible, rather he is is picking up fragments of meaning from the ether, treating words like a jazz player riffing on a common melody, revealing the rich tonality of something we thought we knew."

The Economist: Write-on man [subs reqd]

MS City 1.0

Andrew Otwell points us to an interesting half-hour video on Microsoft's Channel9 site, which showcases their forthcoming mapping/geolocation product, Virtual Earth. As Andrew suggests, it looks to be way more advanced than Google Maps in several ways, perhaps not surprisingly given Microsoft's (relatively) long history as the daddies of the digital mapping business. If you can bear the awkwardly non-staged, perhaps Dogme-influenced presentation - "Hey shove the 'tech guys' in front of the camera!", including the presenter's authentically childish "Take that, guys down at Mountain View!" and "Can you see sunbathing in the backyard? Hur hur" etc. - it's a pretty fascinating tour through the product, including some juicy facts along the lines that MS have had a SOAP API out for their mapping products for around 3 years now, doing 20 millions transactions a day ...

But more on Virtual Earth. A single killer feature is the hybrid view, which superimposes graphical map information on top of the photographic satellite imagery. Whilst I'm not 100% convinced of the efficacy of being able to zoom in to direct-overhead satellite photos, the beauty of this particular city view is utterly compelling.

In terms of the user experience, it's the already-ubiquitous AJAX-based approach (nice quote from one of the developers here: "The best way to share an application is over the web"), apparently cross-browser (which to MS means Firefox and Explorer). This means dragging maps around in the Google Maps style, but with additional keyboard control (arrows keys; + and - for zoom), as well as double-clicking to zoom in. This latter is interesting, as at some point, the double-clicking could stop zooming into the map and instead 'zoom into' (i.e. open up in the same window?) the website of the organisation concerned. This would be an extension of the Eamesian tunneling zoom, but instead opening up/continuing the zoom into the virtual representational space, rather than virtually rendered physical space. Interaction design problems abound - talk about a 'threshold' point - but possibilities perhaps.

The 'game panning' of the compass tool looks very smart i.e. replicating different pan speeds depending on your handling of the compass icon. Search is built in very cleverly, with queries remaining live and contextual i.e. it updates the query results as you drag the map around ... So searching for "public libraries" will keep a continually updating list going in a pane on the left, as you pan the map around. A scratchpad to the right contains those particular results you want to check out - or indeed one-click-blog to MSN Spaces (with deep links, jolly good). You can layer these searches i.e. perform multiple queries, marked with different coloured and numbered icons on to the map.

The user experience seems fairly smooth, and making the map itself the interface has a pleasingly recursive edge. One aspect of the experience is fairly fatally flawed though: the erroneously-named 'Virtual Earth' looks set to start with only one nation. Can you guess which it is? (Clue: It's not Wales). Again, geopolitical patterns of power implicitly replicated in code. A less hubristic name may be more appropriate while the Earth is in beta. But you have to start somewhere, and we can see why they have started there. And yet, from visiting Microsoft researchers and designers last October, I know that approx. 46% of Microsoft revenue comes from the USA, so the 146 countries they're also based in would already seem contribute a greater proportion.

The real killer feature, to follow apparently, is the "eagle-eye view" which gives a more comprehensible view of the city, drawn from a plane's low elevation flyover at 45 degrees. This begins to create a usefully recognisable city representation. This still isn't how the average punter sees the city though (exception for those in high-rises), and I'd like to hear Microsoft's thoughts as to something on the scale of Amazon's 'block-view' drive-by photos at eye-level. Zooming down to that level gets useful, over and above the gorgeous wow factor of the SimCity elevation. To zoom and rotate from overhead projection to isometric view to the view from the street level - in both graphical map and photographic form - is surely the long game here.

Right now, however, the zoom from these 'eagle-eye' photos goes potentially a lot deeper but the developers seem aware of the latent privacy issues involved. So these are not real-time images, and they don't zoom down to show license plate data or people's face, for instance. Although tantalisingly, they could. The images are actually "cleansed" (their word, and how Orwellian?!), which means that the images of the people are removed. Bizarrely - and inadvertently, wonderfully poetically - they leave the shadows that the people had cast in. So no people are present in Microsoft's cities, but their shadows are! This immediately conjures thoughts of other "cleansed" imagined cities, but is also reminiscent of Antonioni's Blow Up. Will people attempt to reconstruct the events from their photographic remnants? From the shadows that Microsoft are mysteriously offering us? The lipstick traces of human endeavour scored throughout their imaginary versions of Detroit and Duluth?

Andrew Otwell:MSFT's Virtual Earth movie
Virtual Earth: MSN's answer to Google Maps

Ghostly rollercoaster

As part of Colin Buttimer's detailed comment yesterday on an old post of mine on images of deserted cities, there's a link to an astonishing series of photographs of a deserted funfair and rollercoaster, slowly being engulfed by foliage and rust.

It appears to be part of a wider series of equally beautiful photographs of forgotten and neglecting buildings and sites. Here's the full index. I can't give further details as it's in Japanese (I think) - any basic translations would be most welcome, I imagine. ("Paging Mr. Gyford!")

Deserted funfair

Stephen Gill exhibition, AA, London

My current favourite photographer - Stephen Gill - has an exhibition at the Architectural Association in London until May 27 2005.

I've posted about Gill before and have been enjoyably leafing through his superb monograph, Field Studies, for the last year, but it's great to see a decent selection of the photos up close. There's also a couple of new series, including a hilarious and poetic series of bird photographs. His website has plenty examples more of his quietly brilliant work - I really think he'll be seen in a few years as one of the great city photographers, certainly of London.

The Architectural Association gallery is on Bedford Square - you may have to ring the doorbell at weekends.

Architectural Association: Stephen Gill exhibition