Urban Engine – live demo of 3D real-time in action from Urban Circus on Vimeo.

Because its visual models are accompanied by great techno soundtracks. Let that be a lesson for unhip political scientists everywhere.

Open query: what soundtrack would you use for a visual of Sageman’s social network analysis of the global salafi jihadist movement?

H/T Digital Urban

Ines and Eyal Weizman have a fascinating new web installation entitled “CELLTEXTS“:

The installation is dedicated to prisoners engaged in writing. The work is organized around a collection of hundreds of books and other texts from across the world written under conditions of enforced incarceration. The collection includes the work of writers who have been sent to prison for the contents of their writing, for their political involvement, as well as of prisoners convicted of other crimes who have used the time and seclusion of their incarceration to become writers. Through the collection of texts an archipelago of prison cells emerges. The cells are thus revealed as sites of intellectual production, marking the limit condition of writing. The collection is assembled in recognition that spatial confinement and isolation may induce a process of creative, imaginative, sometimes spiritual, cultural production.

The website is elegant in its austerity and beautifully spare, which is, of course, appropriate to its subject. The index of authors, is impressive; each is represented by an interactive bar in the graphic. Interesting how we forget some of these facts of books we take for granted in our reading of them.

While we’re entertaining city tropes, this recent interview at Seed Magazine, between Steve Strogatz and Carlo Ratti of MIT’s SENSEable City Lab, is worth reading and watching. Urban feedback loops. Feedback city. Negentropolis. Chaoplexic space.

Ghost In The Shell

And another: who could forget Ghost in the Shell

Another classic.