Gothamberg
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.

When you first enter you see the entire building, it exists in a multi-dimensional space where all the accumulated stories can co-exist, as if they were placed in a cubist painting. Gothamberg is a collective apartment building. You can travel using various strategies to different parts of the structure, the stories unfolding between public, private and personal spaces. You can journey through the narratives floor by floor, person by person or theme by theme.

The structure of Gothamberg follows certain rules, however the building is mutable and can grow larger as more stories are added to it. You can insert your own story at any time as you wander through the building and, if you are reading a narrative that brings something to mind, you can add your own story right there.

There are several ways to bridge between stories. As you type and mention a name that is known to the building, that name highlights and provides a shared context for that character. Also, we ask people o add keywords that describe their narrative. These two collective responsibilities, descriptors of characters and stories, provide for diverse journeys between the various places in the building.

Gothamberg has a Coop Board. The board is made up of members who live in the building and make all necessary decisions pertinent to it. Once the site has become fully inhabited, the Coop Board will be elected from its occupants and will be responsible for non-technical site maintenance.

The website is the first part of the story of Gothamberg. We are also planning an installation that will take advantage of the Dialogtable see below), a social interface where several people can experience and add to the various stories of the building.

In contemporary society, shared living space establishes physical proximity between people but does not necessarily support exchange. Gothamberg enables these exchanges through stories that reflect on the social fabric of inhabitation.

Details
The site will be written in Processing, we have yet to determine which is the best to create a multi-dimensional apartment building. Parts of the backend will be written in Php. We will make use of the mySQL database for the records. We will also provide the ability for people to add pictures, sound or even movies, but will try to use an external feed like Flikr.com to do this.

Martin and his wife have a database of people’s names. We will use this nameset to enable the shared interface for characters in the building.
We have a domain name, gothamberg.com, which we will use to develop and conceptualize the project. Currently it is parked at Gertrude Stein Repertory Theater for free. We have no preference to the site being either at Turbulence’s server or at its current location, whatever is best.

The bandwidth usage will not be high, as most of the input is text based. We will assume that everything high bandwidth will be elsewhere and maintained by others.

The current history of the project is being kept in a log here, it includes sample texts by the current coop board.

Coop Board
Johanna Kindvall : architect
Warren Lehrer : writer
Christiane Paul : curator
Vivian Selbo : new media
Marek Walczak : chairman, artist
Martin Wattenberg : artist of multi-dimensional spaces
Chuck Crow : programmer

Marek Walczak is an artist and architect who is interested in how people participate in physical and virtual spaces. This has led to digital tools and interactive projects such as Apartment which was shown at the Whitney Museum and many venues worldwide. Dialog Table has recently been completed for the Walker Art Center, it is a shared interface that replaces a keyboard and mouse with gesture recognition technology. Current projects bridge physical installations with user interaction, including a one block long facade at 7 World Trade Center that reacts to pedestrians walking beneath it (for James Carpenter Design) and video installations that activate physical space based on user engagement such as Third Person, recently shown at the ICA, London. mw2mw.com

Martin Wattenberg’s work centers on the theme of making the invisible visible. Past projects include The Thinking Machine, The Shape of Song, Third Person, the Whitney Artport’s Idea Line, and Apartment. Wattenberg is a researcher at IBM, where he creates new forms of data visualization. He is also known for the SmartMoney.com Map of the Market. He holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from U.C. Berkeley. bewitched.com

Johanna Kindvall is an architect with a background in social work. She grew up in South Sweden and is now living in New York. After her degree in social studies she worked for seven years mostly with drug addicts and the mentally ill. At the same time she also worked with sculpture and art installations. For her architecture is a way to combine art with social issues. Johanna’s work is often about the relationship between spaces and people, movement and behavior. In May 2003 Johanna got a grant from the Arts Grants Committee in Sweden to work with Marek Walczak in New York City on spaces and digital interaction. Currently Johanna is working for James Carpenter Design in New York. In her spare time she is also working on the Hudson Park Project.

Warren Lehrer is a multi-disciplinary artist, writer, designer, performer, and educator. Over the past 25 years, he has been writing and designing books and theatrical works that explore the music of thought and speech, the complexity of character, the pathos and absurdity of life, and the relationship between social structures and the individual. The form and structure of his books attempt to capture the shape of thought and reunite the oral and pictorial traditions of storytelling with the printed page. Warren has published ten books including Crossing the BLVD: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new America (written with Judith Sloan). With Dennis Bernstein, he wrote the play Social Security: the basic training of Eugene Solomon, and with Harvey Goldman, he co-wrote and co-composed a contemporary opera, The Search for It and Other Pronouns. He has also produced two audio CDs, and six radio documentaries for Public Radio. His plays and performance pieces have been performed at La MaMa Experimental Theatre, the Public Theatre, the Theatre Workshop (Scotland), the Knitting Factory, the Jewish Museum, Independent Art at Here, the Painted Bride, etc..

Christiane Paul is the Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the director of Intelligent Agent, a service organization dedicated to digital art. She has written extensively on new media arts and her book “Digital Art (part of the World of Art Series by Thames & Hudson, UK) was published in July 2003. She teaches in the MFA computer arts department at the School of Visual Arts in New York and has lectured internationally on art and technology. At the Whitney Museum, she curated the show “Data Dynamics” (2001), the net art selection for the 2002 Whitney Biennial, as well as the online exhibition “CODeDOC” (2002) for artport, the Whitney Museum’s online portal to Internet art for which she is responsible. Other curatorial work includes “The Passam3eege of Mirage” (Chelsea Art Museum, New York, 2004); “Evident Traces” (Ciberarts Festival Bilbao, 2004); and “eVolution — the art of living systems” (Art Interactive, Boston, 2004).

Vivian Selbo has conceptualized and designed web projects for PBS/P.O.V., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the Museum of Modern Art, NY, among others. From 1995 to 1998, Selbo was the interface director of adaweb.com, now part of the Walker Art Center’s Digital Arts Study Collection. Selbo is also an adjunct professor at the School of the Visual Arts, and New York University.

Chuck Crow is a financial engineer who specializes in the theory and implementation of autonomous trading systems. He obtained a B.S. in Computer Science with minors in Mathematics and Business Management from Johns Hopkins University and an M.S. in Operations Research from Columbia University. Chuck uses digitally rendered sound and raw field recordings to create engaging soundscapes intended for controlled listening environments. From lush layering to stark microsound, his compositional techniques include the use of static noise, stochastic processes, and real-time web data. He acquired a private pilot’s license during the summer of 2000.

Examples of previous work
Apartment
Wonderwalker
Dialogtable
General presentation of previous work