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 .

When I first get a New Yorker, the first thing I do is look at the Table of Contents. Not only the title of a piece, but the sub-heading which tells you a little more about that story. We’ve been unhappy with the Gothamberg interface only showing stories as animated scrolls for a long time now. We had discussed ‘plumbing’, that is, various ways to connect stories to each other. So our solution was to recess the stories and highlight the ‘plumbing’, so creating a dynamic, interconnected index that links and hints at the stories and their connection to each other.

Interconnections can be:
A common phrase between stories
Author
Character
Uncommon phrases (to show the difference between stories)
Location of story (apartment, lobby, elevator, basement etc)

An image by Chernikov that captures our interests.

A few studies to show the building in 3D, which in the end we decided against.

First screenshot showing building, side of building, plumbiing and basement area. Sky responds to the time of day on host computer.

A brief look at plumbing as a way to connect stories together.

Martin and I got to talk about Cubism, and looked at how the use of gradients created a feeling of depth.

Illustrated manuscripts are an interesting example in which the text is combined with images.

Monday February 20th, 7pm

Take a look through the new interface layout, especially the text used, and be picky about how to change it.

Detailed Notes on Interface 03

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New interface screens, in progress…

Monday 16th January 2006 at 7pm

For the next assignment, take a story you have written or are about to write, and imagine you are inputting your story.

Detailed notes on the interface

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Attached is a first draft of the gothamberg database layout. As the “slides” are updated, so will the database.

The email will likely be the primary key for the user entity. I’ll begin writing relevant queries as things solidify…
Chuck

Some screens showing first layout.

People are asked to link to each other’s stories, so some stories form a narrative ‘web’ and others drift off on their own. The machine aids humans to create relationships.

Simple keywords were questioned, perhaps other forms like word pairings.
The machine creates relationships from the human forms.

Martin has a ‘cliche’ application, which he will present soon, that will parse all the stories looking for groups of similar words.

A scenario:
You enter and you see a ‘building’, an “n” dimensional structure. This can unfold depending on how you mouse/draag over.
Click to choose stories to read. The site unfolds like a pop-up book.

Special indications: Paths well traveled? Webs of stories? Recent stories?

You read a story, you see what other stories are linked to it, you can choose them, you can go to the main building, you can select a ‘pairing’.

At any time you can choose to add your story.
You enter the story title.
You type in your story.
You can link your story to others in the vicinity.

Other:

You can comment on any story.
You register by typing in a story.
Once registered, you can link a story to another.
You can choose characters and ‘flesh’ them out?
Stories that are read a lot get more prominent.
There is a coop board with coop members. When a coop board member leaves, they must nominate another in their place.
Stories with lots of swearing go to the blue area.

Some visual collages of what the building could look like..

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.


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…

Started a page on popups in books, curtesy of Vivian. In talking about creating a multi-dimensional building, it seemed interesting to start an analysis of popups, as they transform 2D to 3D… and they also include time.

Our assignment:
Make a sketch, diagram or other of the building Gothamberg. Include all the current apartments and other building spaces as defined in the texts. Do not add more than what has been described.

Left
Johanna created a series of tableaux that illustrate each story and tried to assemble them into a diagrammatic building.
Left middle
Warren:
This skeletal sketch is based on the idea of the Gothamberg being a vessel for stories, and like an organized painter’s storage space each piece can be stacked and stored (in their respective places) and the longer the painter paints or the older the building gets and more people live there (and the more people visit the Gothamberg on line or on-site) the more each space fills up with stories and if necessary certain areas, rooms, spaces could morph larger (I don’t show this in my diagram) but for some reason if there were a lot of elevator stories the elevator might have to be taller than the building itself or if apartment 11C has a lot more stories than say apt. 10C or 11B it may have to just be bigger because its dimension/scale is determined by the amount of story memory/activity it needs to hold as one accesses each story (which could stack as they were entered chronologically) the story unstuffs itself from it’s angled and skewed orientation and becomes legible in orientation and size (tip of the hat here to David Small but also to others including Marek’s own apartment project and my own 1983 typographical playbook called “I mean you know?” which scores the interior monologues of seven characters who all inhabit the same building) anyway, this here, I submit as a text as image based approach.
Right middle
Christiane assembled the stories into a structure that at first sight looks like a realistic cutaway of an apartment building. However, as you cast your eye around it you realize that the building cannot make sense. As more and more stories are added, the building will make it even harder for a 'real' 3D visualization. Drawing by John Klima.
Right
Vivian used a standard visualization software to place the various stories in relation to each other.

Our assignment:
Using characters already created in any of the existing stories, write a new story that places any of them in a different context in the building.

Notes:
The goal here was to see how the characters would develop if put in a different situation. Christiane placed Johanna's Smelly Man into a doctor's office. This is currently the oldest story in the 'timeline' of the building. We discussed time, both the order in which posts have been made and the timeline of the narratives themselves. It seems like time will simply be another dimension in the building. Already there will be several dimensions, as the building will perhaps not fit into the standard 3. So to look at an apartment is a little like looking at a 'slice', a panning section as used in some films. Warren wove as many characters as possible into an elevator story. Johanna's character had to walk to the courtyard to take a shower. Vivian took the letter form and wrote about olfactory excess - smell and noise seem like a big deal in the building, as they are ways people sense others. Marek tried to write a nasty story, and Chuck took the Sleeping Man to the top of the building. So the elevator appears twice this month. Chuck also had a 'story' which was about the computer's context: word processor/xml/stylesheet and machine code. Finally, he had a soundtrack of lint, another popular character in the building, which had mad static cling.

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.

Our assignment:
1] Connect to any of the existing stories.
2] If you can, connect two stories to each other. (Doesn’t need to be more than an anecdote)

Notes: Many issues:
- We created texts that link to any story, or link two stories. Turned out that this was easy and a lot of fun. Its clear that the building will not work in conventional space, as too many stories butt up against each other. This means that the idea that Martin and I discussed, of a multi-dimensional space, makes perfect sense. The analogy of pop-up books was made, where dimensions 'fold' into each other.
- There are supposed to be multiple ways to link stories to each other. These include, at least, Characters, who may occur in multiple stories, Keywords, which people assign to their stories, and Spaces, so you would go from space to contiguous space. Keywords can be twofold, they can be what people assign to their text, but also we could run a program to search for word usage independent of people's keywords.
- Pranksters were talked about, and assigning identity to building members (anyone who writes a story). By giving people an email alias (eg. marek@gothamberg.com) it means people can be told when someone writes a story near to theirs.. or keyword/character etc. We can set up a filter for swearing, creating a special 'blue' area for those who want to go there.
- Three levels of screening: An elected Coop Board that screens new apartments etc. A Wiki Mechanism (rejected), or a Version History, where people can re-write other's texts as a new version.
- We discussed images and text, and what their relationship could be. This is deeply problematic, as we don't want either to get in the way, or be subordinate. (see Marek's Collage contribution below)

Our assignment:1] Keywords
2] Relationship diagram of keywords
3] What does this make you think of? (optional)

Notes: We talked about 'keywords' and other ways to configure the text. However, we decided that keywords alone are not enough, and that we had to create ways to create relationships between keywords.

Notes: Each member was asked to write a short story or a synopsis. These texts are then used as material to discuss the site: