Everyone who has lived in an apartment has a story to tell. Gothamberg is a place to read, interact and exchange stories of lives in apartment buildings. Together, these tales of unwanted sounds and smells, lobbies and bathrooms, laundry room gossip and unexpected favors form a single collective building, Gothamberg. The stories describe characters immersed in social dilemmas - guilt, responsibility, legalities and banality. Voyeuristic or chance encounters are concocted from the daily habits of the story makers. Their experiences form the elliptical threads of inhabitation, a mnemonic quality expressing something of the shared nature of dwelling.

This blog was set up to document the process by which Gothamberg was derived. These included meetings with a group of people, each meeting they would either write a story about Gothamberg, or analyze the stories and their relationship to eachother. The group also discussed the first interfaces .

Our assignment:
1] Create a meta-relationship diagram (that tries to combine those below)
2] Pass two of the stories through the the meta-relationship diagram.

Notes:
- The assignment was considered really hard, and also the point of it was questioned. The goal is to discover ways to navigate the various stories on the site. Already there are several ways to navigate: by spatial proximity, by character, chronologically (when each story was written), by user-keywords, and by word analysis. However, the idea is create a way to read the texts so that they flow, rather like reading a novel, perhaps like a thematic structure that is uncovered as the novel is read. A suggestion was to have 'cartographers', whose job would be to create paths between stories. Also, it was pointed out that people would add there stories to others deliberately.
- Vivian showed popup books and explained the different way they worked. We are interested in these as a way to explore multi-dimensional spaces. More to follow.
- Warren discussed the idea of a book for Gothamberg. He showed us his latest book, Crossing the BLVD which combines images and texts into a series of individual and group narratives. We began to discuss ideas for such a 'hyperlink' book.
- We were introduced to Chuck Crow, who has a host of talents which include programming, music and writing, we hope he will continue with us.