Urban Storytelling: Hitotoki

The hidden whimsy of cities, or what Parisian gardens have to do with the Tokyo subway.

We’ve always been fascinated by cities — they are living organisms whose narrative is constantly evolving. Which is why we love Hitotoki — a rather unorthodox exploration of the highly subjective cultural footprints of cities, creating a narrative map of the world.

Hitotoki is an online literary project collecting stories of singular experiences tied to locations in cities worldwide

The Japanese word Hitotoki connotes any brief, singular stretch of time. It’s roughly translated as “moment” and is comprised of two components: hito, “one,” and toki, “time.” Which perfectly captures the project’s ephemeral yet timeless quality as an anthology of vibes.

Started in 2007 as a collaboration between Tokyo design group AQ and Tokyo/Seattle-based indie publisher Chin Music Press, the project embodies that wonderful cross-pollination of ideas and disciplines that we believe is the driving force behind true innovation. Today, Hitotoki spans six cultural epicenters — Tokyo, New York, London, Paris, Shanghai, and our hometown of Sofia. (It’s okay, we’ll save you some Googling — that’s in Bulgaria, which is not to be confused with Bolivia or Botswana or any of the other surprisingly misguided geographic guesses people make, and is actually in Europe.)

Beautifully designed and encrusted with superb typographic art direction, Hitotoki is a conceptual, aesthetic and cultural indulgence like no other. Be a part of this incredible project by submitting your own story about one of the existing cities, or by applying to be an editor for a brand new city.

Meanwhile, explore Hitotoki‘s fascinating literary landscapes — whether or not you’re familiar with the city itself, these rich, vicarious experiences unravel a new whimsical world you never thought existed behind the concrete reality of the big city.

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Google Groupies Galore: Goollery

What album covers have to do with shoe shopping and Renaissance paintings.

The open-source movement is among the great cultural feats of our time. And the move towards open API’s, inviting derivative, often collaborative work, is a major force driving this new paradigm. Google was arguably the pioneer there, releasing the Google Maps API in June 2005, and following up with API’s for many of their other products. More recently, the Android API has generated a number of fascinating independent developments in today’s white-hot area of augmented reality. So: How does one keep up with all the API wonderfulness out there?

Enter Goollery, a comprehensive gallery of Google-related projects from around the world.

Inviting you to browse by Google product or project date, the collection features such gems as a map of where iconic album covers were shot, to an artist who paints scenes and locations he has only experienced via Street View, to Layar, the new critically-acclaimed augmented reality browser for Android.

Among our favorites is the Tate’s mashup, which lets you explore locations depicted in artwork from the National Collection of British Art using Street View. Looking at place from a Renaissance painting and seeing it today somehow captures our cultural evolution on a multitude of levels, from the aesthetic to the social to the environmental.

Explore Goollery for more fascinating celebrations of voyeurism and the freedom to roam around in other people’s data.

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Ordering The Chaos: The Internet Mapping Project

Dissecting the interwebs, or what digital toddlers have to do with infinite loops.

You know we’re in dire straits when Tim Berners-Lee, father of the World Wide Web, says we no longer fully understand the Internet.

But Wired magazine founder and chronic digital culture explorer Kevin Kelly has set out to dissect the fabric of the web. His Internet Mapping Project is an effort to understand how people conceive of the Internet through a series of user-submitted hand-drawn maps.

The internet is intangible, like spirits and angels. The web is an immense ghost land of disembodied places. Who knows if you are even there, there. Yet everyday we navigate through this ethereal realm for hours on end and return alive. We must have some map in our head.

So far, there are close to 80 submissions by people of all ages, nationalities and expertise levels, ranging from the concrete to the conceptual to the comic.

The project has also sprouted further analysis of people’s understanding – Argentinean psychology professor Mara Vanina Oses has distilled a fascinating taxonomy of the maps themselves.

Our favorite submission is a visceral stride-stopper that manages to communicate the nature of the Internet with brilliant simplicity, capturing the sea of interestingness that surrounds our homebase of curiosity.

Each submission asks for the person’s age, occupation and average daily hours on the web. And while the diversity of entries is astounding — from an art student to a jazz musician moonlighting as an IT consultant to the manager of the 10,000 Year Clock project — we did notice some interesting correlations.

Those who spend the most time online, for instance, have the most abstract of drawings — perhaps an indication that a truly rich understanding lives in the realm of the abstract and conceptual, not the concrete, providing a big-picture view not of what the Internet does or offers, but of what it is: An infinite loop of possibility.

At the same time, those who spend the least amount of time tend to put themselves at the center of the Internet — a sign of the “developmental psychology” of the web, wherein “web toddlers,” just like real 1-4-year-olds, adopt an egocentric worldview, while “web adults” are better able to shift perspectives and see the collective context of it all.

Download, sketch, and submit your map today.

HT LoloBloggs

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