urban rhythms

Using the New York City's actual subway system schedule, routes, and expected travel times, recordings of cello pizzicato and a wee bit of artistic licence, Alexander Chen has created Conductor.

Conductor: www.mta.me from Alexander Chen on Vimeo.

He chose certain parameters for aesthetic reasons (colours, fading lines, number of allowed simultaneous trains, and how to relate length to pitch). I love how both visually and audibly the lines appear to be plucked. "When a string is in the middle of being drawn by a subway car, its pitch is continually shifting." The pitch of the sound is determined by length of the straight-line segments but rather to avoid dissonance he stuck with, a "simple major C scale but with the lowest note as a raised third E, which keeps it from ever feeling fully resolved."

{via bioephemera}

Meanwhile, French artist Armelle Caron in her Anagrammes graphiques de plans de villes - 2005 / 2008 series takes cities and deconstructs them into their constituent blocks, arranges these by size and shape and reveals the inner rhythms experienced by the pedestrian - like an anagram of a sentence.*


Berlin


Paris


New York


Istanbul

{via Planetary Folklore}

Urban Animal About Town

The raccoon is the ultimate urban animal, who thrives in cities. Here, my former neighbour, the raccoon and the text "HIGH FIVE" are block printed on striped silk - cause he's an urban sophisticate. This is in a patchwork with wool herringbone and fuchsia fabric. The reverse is a cotton print with an urban scene, with a strip of pin-striped burgundy wool and green block printed minouette tentacles and flowers label. Urban animals dig typography.