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.

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

New interface screens, in progress…

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

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.

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