Apartment, Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg
Apartment is a program designed by Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg that constructs spaces based on the text input from viewers. Visitors are confronted with a blinking cursor and as they begin to type rooms take shape in the form of a two-dimensional plan, similar to a blueprint. The program is able to recognize semantic connections in the visitor's type and then connects them based on theme. Buildings and cities are clustered according to their linguistic relationships.
Apartment seems to be based on a tenant of phenomenological philosophy - that spaces are definied by memory and language and we construct them in our minds not based on dimensions or physical properties but on the memories and ideas that we associate with them. The project almost seems to be an attempt to essential map our minds - to discerne how our different patterns of thought can be translated into a visual component.
The project envisioned by Walczak and Wattenberg can be concieved of in a similar vien to the type of alternative mapping we are exploring in class, but structured in an opposite formation. Rather than going out into an actual environment and distinguishing between different elements that physically define the space, Apartment instead takes our own mental patterns, a purely intellectual pursuit that have no concrete manifestation, and constructs an environment that is definied by their relationships. The element being mapped is then our own trains of thought and their intersticies, and the environment in which these elements are located is a visual representation of our own conciousness.
The ideology behind the project is imaginative and enaging, although its practical implimentation through the programming designed by its creators seems to be limited in constructing a project of the scope imagined. Computers, fortunately, are not yet people, capable of the intricate process of connotation and autonomous linguistic patterns. While Walczak and Wattenberg may have created a comprehensive database of the english language based on definition, it seems impossible to fully express the enormous amount of associations contained in each individual word or to take into account the matter of individual interpretation. The program is tremendous for its potential to create a primitive landscape of the mental realm, but at this current stage I do not think there is the technology available to fully map the mind. I truely hope that day never is realized either, because I dread the thought that all the enormous power of the human imagination can be reduced down to a code that can be read through a computer.
Apartment seems to be based on a tenant of phenomenological philosophy - that spaces are definied by memory and language and we construct them in our minds not based on dimensions or physical properties but on the memories and ideas that we associate with them. The project almost seems to be an attempt to essential map our minds - to discerne how our different patterns of thought can be translated into a visual component.
The project envisioned by Walczak and Wattenberg can be concieved of in a similar vien to the type of alternative mapping we are exploring in class, but structured in an opposite formation. Rather than going out into an actual environment and distinguishing between different elements that physically define the space, Apartment instead takes our own mental patterns, a purely intellectual pursuit that have no concrete manifestation, and constructs an environment that is definied by their relationships. The element being mapped is then our own trains of thought and their intersticies, and the environment in which these elements are located is a visual representation of our own conciousness.
The ideology behind the project is imaginative and enaging, although its practical implimentation through the programming designed by its creators seems to be limited in constructing a project of the scope imagined. Computers, fortunately, are not yet people, capable of the intricate process of connotation and autonomous linguistic patterns. While Walczak and Wattenberg may have created a comprehensive database of the english language based on definition, it seems impossible to fully express the enormous amount of associations contained in each individual word or to take into account the matter of individual interpretation. The program is tremendous for its potential to create a primitive landscape of the mental realm, but at this current stage I do not think there is the technology available to fully map the mind. I truely hope that day never is realized either, because I dread the thought that all the enormous power of the human imagination can be reduced down to a code that can be read through a computer.
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