Temporary Food Centres

The other day I realised that from the top of the National Library, I could actually see the empty site of the four faced buddha food centre that used to be on Victoria Street. Nick-named because of the large four faced buddha statue that stood in front of it, I thought it was a pity when the parcel on which it was situated on was acquired back by the state, as it had been a very central place for people to congregate and its removal meant that cheap food was going to be further and further from the museum area and The Substation.

Looking deeper into the records, it was apparently always going to be nothing more than a temporary food centre, so its removal was inevitable although we hadn't known it was only there temporarily. At the time, it seemed reasonable to assume it was permanent, because "it had always been there", and why would one question if places should all be temporary? Until one day when it was suddenly not there.

I don't know why one would have a temporary food centre without a plan for a more permanent one. Or where did all the stalls go to? I couldn't seem to find information on whether it had been relocated or simply evaporated one day when the lease was up. But searching for "four faced buddha" on my flickr threw up these old photos that I had taken in the last few years....



Renovations/repainting the four-faced buddha in 2006/2007



September 23, 2010



December 18, 2010

So what happened to the temporary food centre then? Searching for "Temporary Market at Victoria Street" is rather confusing, on google it throws up mentions of other temporary food markets in the area such as the Albert Court Temporary Market that apparently recently moved back to Queen Street. Is that related to the Victoria Street Temporary Food Centre then? Or was there some other temporary market nearby that I forgot about, that also just moved back into Albert Street? SINGAPORE! WHY ARE THERE SO MANY TEMPORARY FOOD CENTRES?

I was also reading up about the fate of the Victoria Street Wholesale Market, which until recently was also along Victoria Street until it was relocated.

On their website, they write the following:

"The history of VSWC dates back to 1891 when vendors of dried seafood products gathered together in a marketplace in Tew Chew Street by the Singapore River (now the site of Merchant Court Swissotel) to do their business. Tew Chew Street then came to be known as a marketplace with the widest variety of reasonably priced dried groceries. However a fire broke out in 1968 and burnt down the market. In 1978, a modern three-storey wholesale centre was built at the same location to house the original tenants. This became the Ellenborough Market. When plans for the construction of the MRT Northeast Line were announced, the wholesale centre was affected and had to relocate to its current premises at Victoria Street on a temporary lease agreement, ending 2003. HDB then agreed to extend the lease of Victoria Street Wholesale Centre for another three years until December 2006. After much campaigning by the members of Victoria Street Wholesale Centre Merchants’ Association, HDB has once again extended our lease till September 2009."

According to a CNA report this year (2012):

"The Victoria Street Wholesale Centre will be relocating to Kallang Road on April 1 this year. The new building, which costs S$30 million to build, was completed in December last year. The eight-storey centre will be able to accommodate 60 shop units, 50 percent more shops than before. However, more than 10 wholesalers have decided not to move to the new building. This is partly because at 600 square feet per unit, the shop space is 30 percent smaller than before. Rent is also three or four times more expensive, at about S$4000 to S$5000 a month.

A shopkeeper said: "The rent is higher and it's less convenient. It's very convenient here. Over there, you'll have to walk quite a bit." Another said: "I'm old, my children don't intend to take over my business, so I'm not moving...."

Interestingly, in another article:

"Despite the move, the association said the wholesale centre will continue to keep its name."

This retention of the original road name is also something that is mirrored in the names of hawker centre food stalls, which are also equally transient in nature yet often oddly retaining some "road name" or geographical reference - like the Johore Road Porridge Stall on Veerasamy Road, or the Katong Laksa in Holland Village. There must be hundreds of other examples of hawker stalls keeping the name of their original location, despite moving over and over again. But if all the things that we remember on Victoria Street are no longer in Victoria Street, then where or what is the meaning of associating oneself with Victoria Street, now that everything that was once there is replaced by something other?

A Meeting with a Land Surveyor

This weekend I was very fortunate to meet Mr KL Loh, a land surveyor who has been working for over 40 years in land surveying (and an avid collector of Killifish and moss expert!). He was very kind to invite me over to his house, and to tell me more about his work as a land surveyor, and we also looked through the symbols I've been collecting for the last few years. (Many thanks to Mr Loh and his family for having me over - and Caleb for introducing us in the first place!)

It was really really amazing to finally speak with a real land surveyor and to hear it directly from someone who makes official, practical marks which are being used in actual architectural and civil engineering projects in Singapore and we had many many urban stories or anecdotes to share and talk about. I will slowly process it all and write more about it in time to come.

It appears that most of what I have been collecting is not always "survey markers" but also a lot of informal civil engineering markers. True survey markers always have a plate and a reference number. The number is stored inside a big database known as the Integrated Land Information Service and anyone can retrieve information from this service (such as property titles, boundary plans, cadastral maps, control points) for a small fee.




This is the cover plate for what would be a real control point made by a land surveyor.

On INLIS, this is a list of information that is provided:

a. Property Title Information comprising title, ownership, encumbrances, last transaction information and Land Encroachment Details
b. Property Ownership Information
c. Property Title Information - Estate and Land Description
d. Property Title Information - Encumbrances Information
e. Property Title Information with Cadastral Map
f. Historical Information which lists instruments and caveats lodged against a title or unregistered land after it has been computerised
g. Caveat Index Information which lists caveats lodged and still affecting an unregistered land
h. Land Information - Lot Particulars
i. Land Information - Lot History
j. Encroachment Boundary Plan
k. Certified Plan
l. Strata Certified Plan
m. Registrar of Title Plan
n. Road Line Plan
o. Horizontal Control Point & Vertical Control Point
p. Image of HDB Leases
q. Image of HDB Instruments
r. Image of Private Property Instruments
s. Image of Index to Land Book
t. Image of Index to Caveat Book
u. Image of Private Property Deeds

Available Graphical Information (as listed on INLIS):

• Cadastral Map
• Property Title Information with Cadastral Map
• Road Line Plan
• Horizontal Control Point & Vertical Control Point

Trimble CU Controller

Some of the interesting things I learnt were that (1) the control points are also sometimes on turf and i have only collected ones on pavements but surveyed points sometimes aren't always on concrete pavements or roads, and (2) the control points have the potential to go missing - KL said that many control points were made much more quickly in modern times, and as a result some of them would disappear after a few years. So when surveyors returned to look for them after many years (or when looking for other control points listed on INLIS) these points might have disappeared (soil movement might also cause their position to shift!). Apparently in the old days some of the control points were marked out with granite blocks and they were laid into the turf/ground with more time and care; a few still exist in older places such as Bukit Timah Nature Reserve and possibly Bukit Brown.

With regards to blocks that stick out on grassy turf... having read a book on LTA Guidelines recently, I have also realized that there is also much more to learn about those boxes and pipes we sometimes see on roads. I have frequently wondered why sometimes pavements have little metal boxes sticking out and it appears they are not all the same! Those little boxes or tubes serve very different purposes in monitoring different things. Here are diagrams of what some things that stick out from roads might be:




Pneumatic Piezometer



Inclinometer



Water Standpipe 

More significantly, for my work, it seems the variance in shapes and drawing depends a lot on the individual surveyor/clerk of works who is drawing it on the ground - whether for his own reference, or for his company to be able to recognise the mark. As many of these marks aren't official survey marks, the person drawing it for their temporary reference while working on a civil engineering or road project could technically take any "artistic" liberties with it and draw almost anything so as to make the marking recognisable to himself during the duration of the project.

Sites of Construction

63 floors up in the sky and on the rooftop of One Raffles Place is 1-Altitude. Naturally, with my love for cities, I am attracted to the view from the top of skyscrapers. Before 1-Altitude existed, the highest urban spot you could plausibly go to in Singapore (with a spectacular view) was New Asia Bar / City Space, at the top of the Swissotel at Raffles City.

It is funny because I just recalled that I first became well-acquainted with the New Asia Bar quite some years ago while, at the time, I had been going out with someone who had been attempting to work as a "Private Investigator" at the time. I say "attempting" because now when I look back on it, his choice of working as a Private Investigator seemed more to fulfill his pipe dream of being a detective rather than a sensible career move. Without any prior police background or surveillance training (he had originally been an English teacher and studied Middle English), he approached his work assignments in a desultory, do-it-yourself fashion with self-invented decoys and covers, with methods found on the internet such as newspapers with slits in them, and holes cut in bags for cameras to peek out of.

I suppose one would say that becoming a Private Investigator was a job that one would have done for passion - but yet for all the ingenuity required, I'm sad to say that it was not an extremely lucrative or financially sustainable profession for the person on the ground who was doing all the tedious legwork. The hours were long and the work was very hard. He eventually quit and went back to teaching English (in any case we are no longer in contact anymore today).

Back then, for some reason, one of his assignments at that time also necessitated him periodically taking aerial shots of a certain construction site that could be observed from New Asia's expansive aerial view. I'd tag along in the mid-afternoon and we'd go to New Asia, have a lemonade or fruit schnapp, and look out at the open patches of construction and deep excavation sites close to the foot of the building.

While honestly I don't feel as if this directly influenced me or my current work in any way, I do find it to be a pretty uncanny coincidence, considering that I somehow ended up developing my personal work and writings along the lines of cities being repositories of clues - of a bigger mystery to be solved. Like the "ruins in reverse" as described by Robert Smithson, I find that I look to construction sites for ghosts and phantoms of the future, of the realities not yet realised.

To extend the thought a bit more, what this means is that through my work I would rather like to create "semiotic ghosts" (William Gibson). "Semiotic ghosts" refer to things which exist in people's minds as actual OBJECTS and THINGS that could exist and might be built one day, but at the present moment have not actually been built. In having given it a name and imagined its possible existence in the world, they exist because we can talk about it like it really exists, and we can also write about it in essays and in fiction as if it really does exist. Sometimes that is all you need in order for the thing to exist.

So it exists conceptually and on that count one cannot deny that it "exists". Yet at the same time it also does not really exist...

Or on the flipside, maybe one would say I'm just simply trying to make the best of this modern, boring, generic construction site that is Singapore; just trying to find me some metaphorical fossils while I'm here, since I've got no real rocks or fossils to dig up...

A Brief Account of Recent things: Sub-Mullae 2012, The Patriotic Cabby, and the Geology of Singapore

From left to right: Khai, Heewoo, Annabelle, and Mulim

This week is the start of the first phase of a collaboration between me and Korean artist Jeong Heewoo. Heewoo is a meticulous artist who also works with mapping and I'm excited to be showing her around and working with her! We are working from the The Substation Random Room where we have a kind of open studio from around 11 to 6pm each day (when we are in, if we are not in, then it means we are outside seeing things).

The only problem is that my schedule has also suddenly exploded! It has become ridiculously hectic this week, along with my usual overwhelming commercial design work, preparation for talks and abstracts and journals, and on top of that: my Postcode Postcard receiving a lot of good but unexpected attention, including being mentioned in a presentation at the World Cities Summit Expo Forum 2012, and fielding some interviews. Despite the superbusyness, I find that it has been very fruitful to have worked on that project as I have met many amazing people working in data visualisation / data mining / programming as a result of participating in that data hackathon... and I am always keen to meet more people who are interested in this area or actually work in this area.

I have posted some things about the last few days: our trip to the WCS Summit, going to the Marina Bay City Gallery, and going to the URA Resource Centre & City Gallery.

Here are links to our new blog and wiki for the Sub-mullae project:

Blog: http://sub-mullae-2012.blogspot.sg/
Wiki: http://map.wwgou.org

A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF OTHER RECENT THINGS

Patriotic Cabby

THE PATRIOTIC CABBIE

I was taking a Taxi back home one day when I met a cab driver who was fiercely patriotic and he told me of his secret plan to buy 10000 singapore flags and to festoon his entire HDB block with them, overnight, in order to remind Singaporeans that they should love Singapore and not behave ungraciously. "I will hang a Singapore flag from every single ledge! i will plant one flag in their pots of plants! I will put one flag in every single pot of plant that I have! I will also get some bunting and go around the estate with the Singapore flag! When everyone wakes up they will be shocked! But then, I will be quiet and not let anyone know it was me." I hope he gets to do it! He even had a design that he had made by himself - he let me take a picture of this design that he had also pasted on his own taxi. I love the idea and I hope he manages to accomplish it, whereever he might be right now...

THE GEOLOGY OF SINGAPORE

I was reading a book by the Public Works Department about the geology of Singapore and it tabulates all the geological faults in Singapore (no matter how tiny and almost non-existent).

Few faults are actually exposed in Singapore, and the only ones that can be dated are the Murai Fault, Nanyang Fault, and Pasir Laba Faults which are thrust faults with other associated tear faults around them. Basically if Singapore was a big slab of rock, what happened was that there was probably some horizontal stress from the south-west and this mass of material kinda over-rode on top of the usually north-west trending sediments that were from the older Triassic period. A fault means there was either a thrust fault or tear fault where the rock was compressed/pushed together or pulled apart by the plate tectonics. I find this mindboggling since we aren't used to thinking of the very creation of the land of Singapore, tracing it all the way back to a period where dinosaurs might have even existed. To think that Singapore was here all along, this silly little spot of an island in the world!

So basically if we had to make a list of geological faults in singapore, they would be: Murai Fault, Pasir Laba Fault, Nanyang Fault, Henderson Road Fault, Tanjong Lokos Fault, Pepys Road Fault, Nee Soon Fault, Seletar Fault. Did i miss out anything?

LTA ROAD DETAIL GUIDE

I recently found a road detail guide released by the LTA which is like a detailed design guide to everything to do with road construction and road signage. Yes, they have a detailed guide for that.

ESRI and GIS

I read a ESRI magazine which publishes a selection of outstanding GIS projects each month, from . I have been trying to teach myself about GIS and bought a number of books to learn more about how to get started with ArcGIS (in some brief flashes of madness i even think that I might do a surveyor course here, because I enjoy the idea of doing meaningful urban spatial analysis so much. (I often think I am slowly shifting towards wanting to do my Masters in something like Advanced Spatial Analysis as a starting point to a further PhD in this area, so that I can combine my love for data visualization with my interest in urban built environments, architecture, and geography...)

UP Singapore Urban Prototyping Weekend - Postcode Postcard

Over the weekend I was at UP Singapore where there was a great big data hackathon with interesting datasets from places such as Singtel, Taxi, LTA, etc. We met loads of interesting people, learnt lots, had fun experimenting with the data, and at the end of the weekend, Me and Yuta ("Team Jalan Besar") built this:



The idea I had for the Postcode Postcard was to build a simple web app that aims to visualize the local mobile network data and other datasets in Singapore, and to render this into a physical postcard that can be printed on the spot and distributed as a real postcard that can be mailed to a friend who might not have an internet connection.



Many asked me why not just make it a visual on the iphone, but I feel the point of the physical postcard is because the people who need to see "big data" in this format are the ones who won't be online with their smartphones to see it. How can a smart city be smart if not everyone can understand it?





(Our entry won 3rd prize and we got a Playbook!)

Yangtze Scribbler - Spotted on Queen Street

Yangtze Scribbler - SPOTTED AGAIN (June 2012)! Thanks to a tipoff by my friend Yuta (who also lives along Jalan Besar), I had a little walk around Queen Street, around the Bus Terminal and the Indian Church - and I found this on the side wall of the slightly run-down "Cambridge Institute". I can't believe I missed it before as I have many shots of the old market that is now being disassembled across the road from it, and I must have been standing right in front of this spot before but I just hadn't noticed it before! At night, the path along this wall is not very well lighted.

Its proximity to the station suggests a possible connection to.... Malaysia. Either the person commutes to Malaysia via the bus and thus walks past this path frequently - or the person lives in my area (Near Little India/Jalan Besar) and is also walking around like me. What are the chances that I would have ended up moving to the exact area as the mystery writer whose scrawlings I first discovered on a wall in Chinatown some years ago?

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See Also:
Open Urbanism: Looking for the Yangtze Scribbler
Open Urbanism: Yangtze Scribbler on Victoria Lane
Singapore Memory Project Showcase - Tan Pin Pin's short on the Yangtze Scribbler

Retroalimentacion (Facultad del Artes Gallery, UAEM)

Here are some images from our show "Retroalimentacion" at the Facultad del Artes Gallery, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México.



From the Wall Text: "Retroalimentacion is a series of workshops and a sampling of digital art works by artists located in S.E. Asia sponsored by the Facultad de Artes de la Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, in Mexico. It is hoped that these events, including workshops conducted in Mexico by four artists/designers located in Southeast Asia, will be the beginning of a cross-cultural dialogue about approaches to the digital medium between Latin America and Southeast Asia. The retro in the title recalls a return to a focus on digital art, a medium of expression that first bloomed at the dawn of the Information Age in the late 1990's. Although not as novel as when wide-spread computer and the Internet usage first sprung up in many parts of the world, the digital medium is being energetically explored by a newer generation of artists geographically located in regions of Southeast Asia such as Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines who approach the medium with fresh insights, as well as by other creators located in the region with longer histories of international practice.

The theme of the workshops and exhibit is loosely related to the theme of feedback, feedback in games, feedback in audio-visual remixing, and in other interactive works such as hacked Kinect games, as well as through mediated social feedback. The alimentation in this event's title also hints of a desire to feed, to consume, an addiction to mediated reflections and immediate responses to actions. We are easily drawn into expecting continuous feedback, whether provided by human agents, such as comments in socially mediated software like Facebook, or taking the form of artificially programmed audio-visual responses. Feedback satisfies our sense that our actions have consequences, and this addiction is being harnessed for developing commercial design products and games.

But feedback can also be distorted creatively into noise. Audio and visual effects ripple out from electronic sources. Players intuitively follow paths through digital artifacts based on negative and positive responses to their actions. Feedback then becomes both a guide and a lure, noise and art effect."

Participating Artists:

Andreas Siagian [lifepatch.org]
Anne-Marie Schleiner [opensorcery.net]
Brian O'Reilly
Debbie Ding [dreamsyntax.org]
Kenneth Feinstein
Luis Hernandez Galvan [ungravity.org]
Tengal Nolasnem
Vladimir Todorovic

Organizer:

Janitzio Alatriste

Opening Speech

The Director gave a short speech to the crowd outside before everyone burst inside. It was a small gallery with many projections and "interaction zones" so as a result the first half hour of the exhibition was quite chaotic and I mostly only have pictures of people's heads, arms and shadows...

Luis Hernandez Galvan

Luis showed a number of works projected on the far end of the wall and on a temporary wall in the centre of the gallery. One of them was an exact model of the HDB flat they had been living in Singapore.

As it was hard to take good photos of projections in the gallery, you should also visit Luis' website at http://ungravity.org/ to see more of his work.

Anne-Marie Schleiner

Anne-Marie showed two games, one more abstract video game involving rearranging cut-up bits of music made in different places, and another game about bees that she had worked on during the workshop with input from students.

As it was hard to take good photos of projections in the gallery so for more, do also take a look at more of Anne-Marie's work at http://www.opensorcery.net/.

Andreas Siagian

Andreas spent days working on building an installation that amplified the sound of water being filtered through a series of boxes with the power of gravity, entirely from local materials found in Toluca. Even the PCBs were printed in Toluca, thanks to Relder's help!

Debbie Ding

Sun Cycle (see also previous post for more information):





The Singapore River as a Psychogeographical Faultline:









I showed two kinect-based works at the gallery. People seemed to enjoy it, especially the seeming "unpredictability" of the Sun Cycle (that eventually reveals itself to be quite simple).

Other Artists

A cluster of iMacs were in the gallery to show the video works from the other artists. This was one of them.

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PS: If anyone else has other photos of the exhibition, please let me know at 04.48am @ gmail and i will add them or link them to this page as well! Thanks!

Getting Started with TUIO, Reactivision, AS3, and PD

Recently, a bunch of us were at Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México (Facultad del Artes) in Toluca, teaching a workshop and having an expocision there! Luis gave a class on Blender, Anne-marie taught about Gamemaker, Andreas taught about Pure Data, and I attempted to teach about TUIO/Kinect/Reactivision.

I say attempted, because I and Andreas did not speak much spanish (or rather we did not actually speak ANY spanish on arrival), and as I am a particularly longwinded and wordy person (with some incredibly longwinded and complicated ideas to communicate about the purpose and meaning behind interaction or programming), there were many things lost in translation due to the language barrier, despite the very kind attempts by some of the MA students such as Julio and Blanca (who tried to bridge the language and learning gaps for us by teaching the younger students a little bit more about flash and programming before we got there). But I hope everyone there still learnt something from my murmurings about tangible touch (and thanks to Janitzio for having us all there to teach as well!).









Some pictures from the part of the workshop that Andreas and I were teaching

The class was actually very sweet and it was lovely to go there and teach them all for a week, although there were truly some moments of utter exasperation of not being able to communicate an idea better as I simply did not have any common words to do so. In the end I also had to improvise and turn the class into a reactivation focused lesson because there were too few kinect sets in the classroom (I had only brought two from Singapore). I suppose I too have learnt a lot of things from this experience:

1. it is truly very difficult to really teach programming to people who speak a different language to one's own (especially when simple pseudocode examples do not make any sense to them)
2. its easier to teach a short workshop with opensource tools like pure data, rather than a program like flash that requires a licence, or with external hardware like kinect, because one really needs to have a day in advance to do a pre-setup session or installfest. i had not catered for this earlier unfortunately. also, that part about Flash files not being readable by more than the version before it (ie: Flash CS5 files are only editable in CS4 and CS5, but not CS3) really bothers me. (caveat: despite this drawback, i feel Flash is a pretty practical tool with its own commercial uses so i would still recommend learning Flash although its a little more bothersome...)
3. it is very difficult to learn how to make a tangible touch setup AND to write the program if one does not have any basic understanding or grounding in programming. IN FACT LET'S JUST SAY ITS IMPOSSIBLE. this is not going to be the easiest "MY FIRST FLASH APP" to start with. perhaps i could eventually find a way to write a simpler tutorial, but at this point i suppose i don't have enough teaching experience to know how to make it understandable to someone with TOTALLY ZERO programming experience. it would take much longer. but i suppose maybe as i slowly accrue more teaching experience, i might also learn the mystical way of magically teaching anything to people who have zero knowledge of the thing that you are teaching about......

Julio and Blanca in a funny moment. The MA students really helped translate and communicate some of the things I could not say in Spanish to the rest of the class. Thank you so much guys!

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at the workshop i tried to show examples in both as3 and pure data. having played a little bit with max and pd before, it was straightforward for me to figure out how i could start using pd and tuio from the examples provided although this was also my first time really using PD.

I am by no means some sort of ultimate expert on learning about TUIO (as these were things I had slowly figured out by myself on my own from reading on the internet and posting on forums) but I suppose one thing I've appreciated about this in the few years that I have been trying to figure it out is how TUIO is easy and consistent so that when you code up something, say for Flash AS3, you would then have a consistent way to refer to things and a flash app could be built for a touch table OR also used for kinect and it would still work immediately both ways for both setups (assuming you used the term TUIOCursor and TUIOObject consistently)

The difference between TUIOCursor is that a cursor is like a dot on the screen that is tracked and does not have rotational angle. There can be many many Cursors as well, whereas an TUIOObject is something that is already defined an object number and it is an object which has an "Up" or "Down" while on screen and can be rotated around and around. (There is also a TUIOBlob, but suffice to say since its been all pretty homebrew I rarely get around to calibrating my blobs)

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Click here to view the full
TUIO + Kinect/Reactivision + AS3 Workshop Guide
http://dreamsyntax.org/tuioworkshop

- This guide is for Mac Users who use 10.5 and above.
- Windows users can also use the guide but some instructions may differ (such as the way one uses the Terminal/Console)
- Example start file available at http://dreamsyntax.org/tuioworkshop/tuioclientexample.zip
- Solution file available at http://dreamsyntax.org/tuioworkshop/tuioclientexample_solution.zip
- Presentation built with slidedown

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BONUS! - Getting started with TUIO and PD

To get started with TUIO and PD, download PD Extended from the puredata websitew.

Download the TUIO Client Reference Implementations for PD

Download reactivision and print out some fiducial markers to wave at your camera to test it

Open the programs in this order: reactivision > pure data > the tuio pd patch of your choice, and voila it should work out of the box when you wave a symbol at your webcam!