Linked by Air: Recent pages

Whitney Org Relaunch

Dan Michaelson — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 11:10:24 -0400

On May 21st, 2013, we launched the new version of the Whitney Museum’s website. The new site highlights the Whitney’s new “responsive W” graphic identity. Our W responds in a funny way to the user’s scroll down the page. The W also changes depending on device used and day of the week. In keeping with the idea of the identity, the website also features a “responsive” design that adapts to many different window sizes, allowing artwork to look its best not only on small phones, but also on the biggest screens. Also featured are user collections, where users are invited to assemble work from the museum into titled groups for future reference and exploration, and to share with others.

Three years of content from the life of the site since our previous redesign gave us a lot to work with and learn from, including (for example) thousands of user collections which are now featured more prominently in the site. The challenge was to synthesize all that diverse content with the requirements of the new identity, within our existing content management system. In this way, the new design is just one more step for a website that was conceived from the start in 2009 as a permanent state of flux beginning with its launch – an idea also supported by the new visual identity with its jittering arrow of a W.

The new website is the first manifestation of the museum’s new graphic identity created by Experimental Jetset. The identity paves the way for the museum’s 2015 move to a new building in the Meatpacking District from its old location in the Upper East Side. For six months before its move-in, the Whitney will have no physical location, making its website the only way to interact with the museum.

Many thanks to the Whitney’s Graphic Design and Digital Media staff, to Experimental Jetset for the new identity, and a special thanks to Linked by Air’s lead designer and programmer for this project, Brian Watterson.

Whitney Org

Laurel Schwulst — Tue, 21 May 2013 16:23:46 -0400

In 2010, we launched the Whitney Museum’s website, following a year of visual design and the development of new technologies and business processes at the Whitney. To communicate the museum’s geography, the website is black at night and white in the day, and it has its own sunrise and sunset on New York time, marked each morning and night by a changing artist intervention. The website’s modular design allows the Whitney’s many different activities to be woven together in many different ways. Art is shown at generous dimensions, and users can make their own collections (which they can share with other people), stream really great video and audio, customize calendars, manage their memberships, and much more. Check out the search results and the “New content” RSS feeds; they’re fun. A recent project allowed artists to create their own pages within the website.

A groundbreaking and inclusive new area for kids allows all kids to do that, too, and to contribute their own art. A popular feature is that kids can make their own background patterns for the website, affecting the site for all other kids. In May 2012, Artinfo.com declared the Whitney.org and the Whitney For Kids site the #2 and #3 Top Museum Websites on the internet, respectively.

Recently, we added an online magazine to the site called Whitney Stories. It’s an interactive magazine designed to provide a space for readers to engage with the multiple histories and narratives that make the Whitney a compelling place to visit—in the galleries or online.

Programming: with GrayBits.

About

Laurel Schwulst — Tue, 21 May 2013 12:12:10 -0400

Linked by Air began as the partnership of Tamara Maletic and Dan Michaelson in 2005. Our studio specializes in the production of public spaces and other networked structures, both online and in the world. Our approach is practical and hands on. Through in-house programming and an emphasis on collaboration and iteration, we are able to approach design and technology as intertwined inventive processes. Our studio is experienced in several media, including print, online, mobile, exhibitions, and installations in the environment. We often undertake complex projects, including leading projects that require the integration of multiple parties, vendors, and technologies. But many of our projects are also simple, including printed matter that reflects our attitudes toward the contemporary world.

Linked by Air is the recipient of the Charles Nypels grant for research on embedded digital sign systems, in residence at the Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht. Some of our projects have been awarded AIGA 365 awards in the United States. And we are the recipient of the Jury Prize at the Brno Graphic Design Biennial 2012.

Our current staff are Tamara, Dan, Laurel Schwulst (designer and programmer), Brian Watterson (designer and programmer), and John Friel (programmer).

Home

Laurel Schwulst — Tue, 21 May 2013 11:36:18 -0400

Street View

Laurel Schwulst — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 04:31:06 -0500

The new Street View feature of Google Maps is a set of photographs that each gather an entire city into a single, rhizomatic image; in New York, it encompasses thousands of Manhattan city blocks in a frozen tableau stretching thirteen miles from Wall Street to the Bronx, from the West Side to the East Side. Despite this scope, the picture is so detailed you can see two men moving hand trucks of bulk-packaged inventory through a sidewalk loading door on Ludlow Street. You see not just that this bit in New York’s economic data stream exists but how it’s happening. One man is leaning casually on his hand truck, shirt untucked, looking toward the camera, while he waits for the other to pass through the open door. Inside is a dark receiving space with boxes stacked. Two young people are conversing as they wander by on the sidewalk.

Is Street View’s image of New York the most ambitious documentary photograph ever made, a whole city’s routine captured in a single picture? It’s the kind of image Brueghel might have dreamed about, a vernacular comedy of infinite perception. And it’s the kind of map that, as in various Borges stories, makes the viewer begin to imagine a technological singularity in which the drawing’s resolution would eventually equal that of its own subject; or the simulation trope of contemporary sci fi, in which a data set is rich enough to realize an autonomous copy of a person or place. Google, Inc.’s great social contribution may turn out to be imaginative rather than utilitarian, and it’s the same project that pop culture has always pursued: to help us grasp the syntax and grammar made possible by our own technological and political present.

In a strict sense, Street View is a cartographic photograph. A history of that genre’s more heroic moments begins with the first picture of Paris from a balloon, made in 1858 by the Belgian photographer Nadar, also a friend and muse of Jules Verne. It continues with the late-century kite photographs of Arthur Batut, on through the off-kilter 1929 photo of Auburn, Massachusetts, from one of Robert H. Goddard’s first liquid-fuel rockets. Street View’s grainy, glitchy rhetorics have more in common with the look of those early images than with the claims to scientific, military, and aesthetic precision made by contemporary aerial photography and satellite remote-sensing imagery.

But in an obvious way, Street View (unlike an earlier Google product, Google Earth) has no precedent in any aerial photography. Its ground-level, ad hoc, cellular structure owes more to the aggregating, expedient logic of network traversal. Street View’s perspective is esentially a standing person’s horizontal gaze, or many of them joined, rather than the plan view of a downward-pointing airborne instrument. Like other network infrastructure, its imagery becomes more valuable the more it extends and interconnects, and its greatest meaning derives from movement along its filaments rather than from scrutiny of any one site. One of Google’s declared reasons for creating this perspective, at great cost, is that with it you see actual signs on buildings and subway stations. That information can be useful for planning, and the same is true of the more qualitative information in the imagery of each neighborhood. But Street View’s value is not only a use value. Its lowered, manifold perspective lets you see patterns of people coursing to work not as a diagram, but subjectively as the aggregate of the directions and qualities of many individual gaits. There may be little utility in this aspect of Street View since its data is anonymous, ephemeral, and unscientific. Instead there is complexity, subtle honesty, and beauty.

At this point, it’s useful to consider this image’s process of manufacture. A 360-degree panoramic video camera was fixed to the roof of a van, which then drove the length of nearly every street in Manhattan, a looping, chaotic tracking shot that took days to complete. Each frame of the resulting video was then extracted as a panoramic still image, correlated with the camera’s geographic location at that moment, and stitched together into a single complex image. Consequently, the view at 50th Street and 8th Avenue may have been captured either a moment earlier or a moment later than the view at 51st and 8th, depending on which direction the camera was traveling in (on 8th Avenue it happens that traffic, including the camera’s transport, flows northbound only); or significantly earlier or later if the camera was traveling crosstown or if the driver took a break. Despite the linear (if strange), block-by-block scanning movement of this complex exposure, the end result is non-linear. A Street View user can look at any intersection in any order, can smoothly pan from one intersection to the next in any direction, and can look around in 360 degrees at any point. Because no matter where you look you see a frozen frame, and because the viewing interface allows fluid panning both in 360 degrees and across the length of the city, the experience is more like a kind of extended gaze than it is like traveling, and more like photography than video games or film.

The best, most surreal parts of Street View are its inaccuracies and the visible artifacts of its manufacture. Curbs and buildings warble like the visual equivalent of an audiotape played too much, the blended spherical distortions at the periphery of each source frame rendered unpredictable by the camera’s jolts, accelerations, and decelerations. Some trees are crisp collections of leaves, while elsewhere similar-size trees blur into the grain of the image. Strange temporal effects occur, like surprising implications of an advanced physics. A car reappears Cheshire cat-like at multiple intersections because it happened to drive behind the camera for a while. Other disruptions, like a change in the weather, occur when you move your gaze against the flow of the camera-for example, uptown when the camera was moving crosstown. The New York depicted in Street View is an even contest between signal and noise. It is contingent, error-ridden, malleable, membrane-thin, and dreamlike. As a photograph Street View is more Atget than Walker Evans: loose, open to random encounters, relating sympathetically with the city at least as much as with the people in it.

Because of the citywide (if momentary) presence of its camera, Street View’s point of view approaches the omniscient. But it also embraces chance and it doesn’t generalize. These three aspects happen to be crucial to all of Google’s successful endeavors. The company’s approach has always been characterized by a kind of benevolent and active neutrality, by a celebration of the heterogeneous, and by apparent respect for users’ abilities to find their own meanings within data if given a means to engage it. Of course, such instruments are necessarily political, and Google has made significant, occasionally appalling compromises, like its agreement with the Chinese government to censor search results there. Street View has been criticized as invasive, and for publicizing otherwise innocuous moments in a way that renders them notorious. This “magnifying effect of technology” is an argument that’s important to make, but it ought to register more strongly with other technologies (BitTorrent trackers, the NSA’s telcom pattern-recognition algorithms), or with future versions of this one. For now caution should focus not on any particular content but mainly on Street View’s visual language and provenance. Regardless of the lowered, human-scale perspective Street View accomplishes through a manic series of technical convolutions, it is still a surveying if not a surveillance system. It isn’t the disciplinary apparatus of a state, but it is the totalizing product of a massively capitalized corporation, which, with other corporations, is vying for the power to singularly reshape our conceptions and use of public space. In other words Street View is a great hack but it isn’t owned by hackers.

In both its successes and its failures, Street View provides a useful model for design that wants to be both modern and honest. Start by identifying possibilities of current technology and the values to which those possibilities are beholden. If you decide to go ahead because those values are good ones on balance, then don’t try to hide the technical structure of your work, even if that structure is strange, complicated, un-geometric, or surprising. Instead seek beneficial secondary and tertiary effects of your approach, like the pleasing rhythm of a reappearing car, the flattening of a city into a surreal fabric, or unlimited chance encounters.

Google has undertaken the Street View project in several other cities. San Francisco’s imagery, for example, is more crisply detailed than New York’s; it is a much different kind of image. But somehow, despite and exactly because of its many technical failures and compromised postures, this gritty, ghostlike, many-tentacled image is the right one to describe New York.

Published in Modern Painters, September 2007

Change

Laurel Schwulst — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 18:15:45 -0500

Probably the essential thesis of our firm is that things evolve over time. There is the process of developing a design, but also the life of a design after the project “launches.” When we design a website or an exhibition, we want it to go places we didn’t imagine after we “release” it, and this, more than the supposed wisdom of crowds, is the reason for our interest in distributed authorship. Even though change is the most natural and ubiquitous condition in the universe, we’re fascinated by it, and we try to embed an acknowledgement of this condition into our working process, and into the software and designs we develop.

Furthermore, the presentation of changing content is the single salient feature of graphic design for technological platforms. Books change – they deteriorate and are understood in different ways over the years, and they might even be revised, reprinted or translated, annotated or re-used. A book may also be understood as having various timelines or sequences, including the duration of reading and writing, and the durations of its internal narratives. But screens are the medium that is truly meant to show changing content. Therefore that’s the feature we often seek to exploit and explore when we have the opportunity to design for screens. This interest also takes us to public spaces and cities, where changing patterns of use, shifting architectural configurations and the motion of users may create environments as dynamic as any screen, especially when approached with a contemporary feeling for the significance of flux. In turn, our approaches to all these areas tend to inform our designs for printed matter as well.

Christopher Doyle

Dan Michaelson — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 17:10:54 -0500

This project seeks to expose relationships between image, language, and site in Chris Doyle’s street photographs – and to make those relationships engaging and even participatory. Users should see “in Chris Doyle’s way,” and should also be inspired to see in their own ways.

The project will function as a sort of codex: a glossary and a photo album. Users will be able to explore by title or by image. Users can also propose alternate titles and meanings for Chris’s photographs, and they can add their own photographs in response to his. The project’s emphasis is on engagement and situational awareness.

(project in process)

Midnight Madness Returns

Dan Michaelson — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 12:29:43 -0400

Midnight Madness Returns was an urban game in Manhattan on the night of October 6-7, 2012. From 7:45pm until 10:30am, two hundred players on 20 teams raced to solve puzzles they found around the city. The project raised $1.4 million for the children’s charity Good Shepherd Services.

Nada

Brian Watterson — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 14:06:18 -0400

Our website for New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) places special emphasis on the wide range of activities organized by the New York-based, not-for-profit collective—including its annual art fairs in April, May, and December. We see the site as an extension of NADA’s aim to share information and resources both within the contemporary art world and beyond.

The NADA website is currently in beta.

Statuesque

Brian Watterson — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 18:55:02 -0400

We designed the identity, printed matter, signage, and website for Public Art Fund’s outdoor exhibition, Statuesque. The exhibit focuses on contemporary figurative sculpture by Huma Bhabha, Thomas Houseago, and others. Our identity stacks all the content on top of a base made of Albertus, a typeface from the 1930s inspired by raised bronze lettering in public inscriptions. We made it even more 3D. The exhibition was installed in City Hall Park, right around the corner from our old office.

People

Brian Watterson — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 18:31:50 -0400

We designed the identity, invitation, and signage for Public Art Fund’s outdoor exhibition, People, at Brooklyn Bridge Park which features three new sculptures by Oscar Tuazon. The sculptures are composed of both natural (trees and water) and industrial materials (concrete and metals) that are joined together in a DIY/playful fashion.

We took a similar DIY approach by using industrial materials for signage and printed matter. For the identity and accompanying texts we took cues from psychedelia and Drop City (references for Tuazon) by exaggerating the length of the letterforms so that they appear taller and more figural. The invitation for the opening features the identity printed in a red wash on claycoat paper, which we liked for its unique combination of kraft paper and a white coated sheet.

The signage is printed directly on marine-grade plywood, and includes a map of the park to help visitors find their way to each sculpture. The show will be up from July 19, 2012 to April 26, 2013.

The Happy Prince

Brian Watterson — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 18:31:30 -0400

The Happy Prince, a public sculpture by Ryan Gander, was our second project with Public Art Fund, and included a website (with lots of great material), invitation, sign, street banners, and magazine advertising. The identity and website work as a kind of disjointed fairy tale.

Dan

Dan Michaelson — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 01:08:24 -0400

Sandbox/Dan

Zagrebacki Plesni Centar

Tamara Maletic — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 17:56:19 -0400

With designer Lana Cavar, we created the interior and exterior signage system for the Zagrebački Plesni Centar (ZPC), a dance theater in Zagreb built by 3LHD Architects. The tail of a huge Z painted on the street helps to lead visitors into an inner courtyard, where the theater is located. The Z then joins with a P in the courtyard, followed by a C that winds its way into the building. Once inside, underlines on informational signs create a giant rhythm through the building in the form of an irregularly dashed line. We thought dance is about discontinuity as much as continuity.

Our work on this project was featured in Graphic #13: Visual Identity Issue.

Roosevelt Island Explorers

Julia Novitch — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 17:18:03 -0400

Hiring

Dan Michaelson — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 17:34:53 -0400

We are seeking a Rails programmer who, if possible, will additionally contribute to a wide range of other fun programming and technical projects. The position is available immediately and can be arranged as full time, part time, or contract-based.

Us:

We are a small design studio known as one of the most innovative technology-based design firms of our size. Most of our clients are in the cultural and arts sectors. We work on a very diverse range of projects, many of which belie our small size, such as:

Visualizing millions of data points of ocean current movement for a well-known artist
The website for a major museum
A giant New York City scavenger hunt
An iPad application for an artist
Our own iPhone game
An innovative and fun Rails-based CMS

Our work is sometimes political, often generous in spirit, and it takes risks. Our design almost always takes deep inspiration from technical possibilities and structures, and we believe passionately in designing ecosystems that develop over time, that work for users, and that make the qualities of people’s lives better. All of our partners and designers are also teachers at the undergraduate and graduate level.

You:

Integrating very tightly with our existing team, you will be our first on-staff dedicated programmer. Up to now our two designers and two partners have been doing all programming, together with contract-based programmers. If you prefer, part-time or contract-based engagement is also possible.

You must have a great spirit, be passionate about what we make together, be organized, responsible, and self-initiated, collaborate well in a team, like music, be curious and fun, embrace challenges, and love learning new things and keeping up with the latest stuff.

Your skills:

You must possess the following minimum technical skills, which mix front-end and back-end development and strategy across a range of platforms:

Rails 2.1 and Rails 3 (we may ask you to help develop our CMS into a salable product)
JavaScript, jQuery, and Prototype (other libraries a plus), including Ajax techniques and best practices
HTML and CSS best practices, including CSS 3, best practices for accessibility and browser compatibility, and browser testing
Git
MySQL and database design
Linux, including website deployment onto VPS servers
Rails production deployment including Phusion Passenger and Apache configuration

The following skills are a plus and many will help with some projects already underway:

Involvement in one or more open-source projects
Experience developing ecommerce websites
Experience with HTML5 video
Experience with in-store point-of-sale systems
Experience developing accessible websites
Experience developing social sharing tools
Experience with test-driven development
Experience with typography and with coding refined graphic design
Experience with user testing and quality assurance processes
Experience with wireframing, planning user flows through a complex system, and testing your work against those use cases
Experience with NoSQL databases
Experience with scalable, load-balanced or cloud-based website deployments
iOS development experience
Android development experience
Game development or game design experience, or you play a lot of games
Facebook app development experience
Experience in at least one desktop programming language (Java, C, etc.)
Experience with Processing, OpenFrameworks, Cinder, or similar graphics frameworks
Hardware development experience (including Arduino etc.)
Comfortable on Macintosh
Experience with Adobe InDesign and Illustrator
Project management experience or other experience managing a large project

Of course, as a member of a highly integrated team, you’ll contribute your input and expertise to all aspects of our work, not just code.

You will work four or five days a week in our Lower East Side loft space (with the possibility to keep one day for your own projects). A smaller commitment can also be arranged, including part-time or project-based engagement.

We are located very close to the D and F trains among others, near many great places to eat and hang out, and in a unique building with many other interesting firms and artists. Our work environment is relaxed and human, even though we all work hard. Working from home is an alternative possibility. We are open to discussing all aspects of schedule, based on our mutual needs.

This is a unique chance to do something fun, work with great people on a wide range of interesting stuff, and learn new things. Send us a note and let us know if it seems like it could be a good fit!

Send resume and note to dan@linkedbyair.net

Fish Screensaver

Julia Novitch — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 14:14:36 -0400

When the curators of Parallelograms asked us to contribute a piece of work, we thought about something that could symbolize our interest in change. We resurrected the fish screensaver, but with a twist. The fish get bigger each day (they have a growth spurt each night at midnight, to be precise). Every seven days they get small again. The bigger fish overlap each other, creating interesting patterns. They swim back and forth in the aquarium of your browser window (a smaller aquarium if you make your browser window smaller). Finally, if you get lucky you’ll see a rare special fish.

Environmental Performance Index

Julia Novitch — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 14:08:30 -0400

The Environmental Performance Index is a global measurement and ranking of the environmental quality and policies of most of the world’s nations. The 2010 index was released in Davos in January. We were working with its creators—the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy (YCELP) and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University—to make a more accessible and public online manifestation of the index and its components.

One of the goals is to provide access to the index’s subjective, uncertain, and manifold aspects—as well as to the causal and correlative relationships that must be understood in order to improve environmental policies and stir change.

Environmental Performance Index2008

Julia Novitch — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 14:05:57 -0400

The Environmental Performance Index (see also our 2010 design and data) is a global measurement and ranking of the environmental quality and policies of most of the world’s nations. The 2008 index was released in Davos in January. We worked with its creators—the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy (YCELP) and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University (CIESIN)—to make a more accessible and public online manifestation of the index and its components.

The design emphasizes hyperlinking to allow users to discover the relationships between many aspects of the world’s environment, as well as between countries. It features resizable “wiki charts,” in which every marker on the chart may be a hyperlink to a different page.

Pickup Performance

Julia Novitch — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 12:50:26 -0400

Pickup Performance Co. is the production company of David Gordon, the seminal postmodern theater director, choreographer, and playwright, and his son Ain Gordon.

Palm Tree

Laurel Schwulst — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 17:42:12 -0400

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Laurel Schwulst — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 14:01:33 -0400

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Laurel Schwulst — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 12:17:18 -0400

Greengrassi

Laurel Schwulst — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 21:38:33 -0400

Our website for the London art gallery Greengrassi highlights current and upcoming
exhibitions in their space. The site emphasizes images, acting as a visual archive that encourages in-depth exploration while documenting past shows and events.

So Il

Dan Michaelson — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 19:24:39 -0400

We designed and launched a new identity and website for Solid Objectives, the architecture partnership of Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu. This website’s goal is an almost physical density or fullness, organized. It’s a blog built on WordPress. Each category of post has its own layout, all using the same grid; so that there is a relationship between form and program that evolves as you explore the site.