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 .

I live in a small apartment. Actually it’s only one room with a tiny kitchen. At the moment we are three people living here. People in my staircase don’t like that I always keep my front door open. But it is a way for me to get air. The apartment feels bigger that way. I like cooking and I guess people don’t like the smell of food in the staircase. I have another problem; my roommates don’t eat meat because of their religion. As I don’t want to step on any toes I am barbequing in the garden. Everyone else does that during the summer so there’s nothing strange about it. But yesterday the super stopped me and made a big deal out of it. He said that I was setting up fire too close to the house. Neighbors where afraid. It’s silly to be afraid of me, I am more afraid of them.

Christiane created a hypertext version of Gothamberg using the 3D drawing by Johanna as an image map of the building. You click on each tableau and up pops the story associated with it. Hyperlinked into each story is another story that relates to it, so you can create a narrative that flows from one story to the next. At the bottom are the keywords from the original posting. However, these do not really help the narrative flow, they may just provide 'context' to the current story.As creating this 'narrative thread' between stories may prove impossible by computer intelligence alone, this lead to the idea that perhaps we can create a way for people to themselves link their stories to others. A little like Max Msp, which uses boxes and threads that you connect yourself.

People may want to choose a particular point in the building to add their story because their stories relate to those around them. By allowing them to physically do this with a threading system hardcodes their relationship to others. Those stories not linked may then 'float' separately as the building expands... so threading becomes a useful strategy to have a story read.

Perhaps as you read one story, you see the thread made up of the various spaces beaded together. Perhaps also, independently, stories that are read more often get darker, so perhaps 'trails' are visible, or destinations.

Finally, we thought about the way in which each story is represented. Maybe we have:

- a context glyph
- a ‘thread’ of associated spaces,
- the story
- the ‘thesaurus keywords’ or ‘associated texts’ (see below).
- Other? Time seemed irrelevant, as it seemed that jumping in hypertext creates its own time in the viewer

These may all be floating elements a little like Marc Napiers “Feed”, where each object can be sized and scaled by the reader, creating their own canvas.

Chuck picked out ideas, concepts or just categories of things that he found interesting. The stories then cluster around those ideas. It's interesting how these clusters throw your perception of each story, shifting them from their normalcy.We discussed the issue with keywords and their banality. They don't really let you in. However these 'ideas' are interesting, perhaps because they are more than one word. Compare also to textarc and the ‘association list’. Here the program does not search for individual words, but rather what words are grouped next to each other “mock-turtle” “king-queen” etc. This seemed a very promising way to understand what keywords might be.

An alternative approach would be to place keywords according to a 'thesaurus', so that at the bottom of each story you would have a semantic relationship of the keywords used.


Vivian collaged the various 3D representations on top of each other. Whereas the individual representations worked, something about these layerings, where the building is not totally exposed, proved more intriguing than the sum of the parts. Perhaps this is because the perception of an apartment building is often itself fluid. The map we have is neither totally spatial, or social, but an amalgamation of our knowledge of it.

Monday 22nd August at 7pm.

Our next assignment: “Free for all - Connect”
That is, look thru the blog and find a connection between any two different themes/stories/diagrams. This may be in any form, a diagram, a story, an image, a piece of programming…