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 .

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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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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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] 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)

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