Due: Thursday, October 24

Choose a single non-human actor (ex. an insect, a weed, a drone, a mapping technology) defined in the context of a contemporary controversy of your choice. You may make use of controversies defined in newspaper articles from previous experiments, but you are not required to.

A couple of things about your actor:

1. Your actor should be either a type of urban wildlife or a feral technology.
2. Your actor should be socially troubled in some way (ex. invisible, in flux, ill-defined, contested, a cyborg, or simply a reified concept).
3. The identity of your actor should be grounded in at least one newspaper source.
4. Your actor should exist in Boston or in some future version of the city.

Then, invent a means of visualizing the presence of your actor in the city of Boston. Make use of data, materials, media and traces of your actor found in secondary sources (i.e. online) or collected first hand. This does not require a complete representation of the city, only a demonstration of limited scope. In other words, choose a section of the city to focus on.

In order to help you develop this visualization, revisit a reading we did earlier in the term: The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch. Lynch created a new mode of representation for the city: a visual language of nodes, paths, edges, districts and landmarks in order to represent the image of the city produced by its inhabitants. In this experiment, you will be gathering information about the image of the city according to non-human actors (urban wildlife or feral technologies) based on how they see, sense, migrate, or navigate. Consider how you might redefine one or more of Lynch’s elements in order to represent a new mixed-reality.

Create a new project on the website to host your visualization and a short description of your process (~300 words). Be prepared to present and discuss your findings on Mezz (come prepared with jpegs).