June 27, 2007
CADAVRE EXQUIS CARTOGRAPHY (C.E.C.)
Urban Game & Mapping Exercise
FRIDAY SESSION 18 :: CADAVRE EXQUIS CARTOGRAPHY (C.E.C.); An urban game & mapping exercise followed by Talks from Dr. Maria Kaika and Julie Myers :: June 29, 2007; 6.30 pm :: Outside Bank Tube station - Take the 'Cornhill North' exit and meet us on the square outside the Royal Exchange, corner of Threadneedle St. and Cornhill :: Bring: a digital camera with its download equipment (Cables!), so we can download the images after the walk at Public Works and team-mates.
CADAVRE EXQUIS CARTOGRAPHY prompts people to explore and collect ground-level images of the City. Walks will be followed by two short talks at the public works studio at 8pm. Dr .Maria Kaika of Oxford University will talk on the continuously changing development of the City of London. Julie Myers will present - To travel Somewhere - a mobile phone / mapping project developed from a series of walks in San Francisco, USA, Cambridge, UK and Helsinki, FIN.
CADAVRE EXQUIS CARTOGRAPHY is played in pairs sharing one digital camera with display screen. Player 1 starts by taking a picture with a designated building or object in the frame as well as a second object / building of any kind. After handing over the camera to player 2, both leave the first photographed object behind, moving towards the second element of the shot. Player 2 now takes a picture with this building / object in the frame, but again with something else in the background or foreground, which will be the linking element in the next image. The camera is then handed over to player 1, who takes the next photo of the series.
THE AIM OF THE GAME IS TO COVER AS MUCH GROUND AS YOU CAN.
THE RULES:
1. A team is only allowed 30 shots and 1 camera per walk, so SHOOT CAREFULLY!
2. Images have to overlap physically and can only be of ground level building or object, so DON'T SHOOT IN THE AIR!
3. Only take images of objects/buildings in front of the team so SHOOT FORWARD!
All images will be assembled online and will allow visitors to wander through the City from behind their computer.
Maria Kaika holds a D.Phil. in Geography from the University of Oxford, and an MA in Architecture from the National Technical University of Athens as well as professional qualifications as an architect. Her previous posts include: Director of Studies in Human Geography at St Hugh's College, Oxford, Departmental Lecturer at the School of Geography, Oxford, Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College, Oxford, Lecturer in Human Geography at St Peter's College Oxford.
Dr Kaika's research focuses on urban theory, and more specifically on the politics and culture of architectural technology and design and on urban political ecology. Collaborative projects include work on: urbanism and culture; modernist urbanism and nature; urban environmental history; representations of nature and the city; governance and environmental policy; European environmental policy; theoretical approaches to sustainability; political ecology of water supply in western cities.
Julie Myers is an artist who's practice is informed by social encounter and intervention. Her work investigate memory, gesture and narrative in relation to physical environment. Sometimes recording just a brief moment captured between strangers and at other times building sustained relationship with multiple participants over a sustained period of time. She uses film/video, mobile technologies and database formats to document and present material that exists both on the web and in site specific or exhibition space.
Julie is a senor lecturer at Middlesex and Kingston Universities and lives in London. She has exhibited and screened work extensively receiving a number of awards including an AHRB research award and an Erasmus Scholarship. Previous work has been commissioned by The Arts Council of England, NESTA, The BFI, The Institute of Contemporary Art, BAA and the National Portrait Gallery. Julie has recently completed a placement at Adobe in San Francisco as part of the ACE interact program.
public works
Northgate House
2-8 Scrutton Street
UK London EC2A 4RT
Click here to view map
For more information email Jim[at]citymined.org or andreas[at]publicworksgroup.net
Posted by jo at 12:56 PM | Comments (0)
June 25, 2007
Institute for Applied Autonomy
Tactical Cartography
In taking up the term 'tactical' in an arts context, we link cartography with 'tactical media,' an approach to art production that privileges critical social engagement. Since the early 90's the tactical media label has become something of a house brand for a host of widely divergent media practices embracing themes of politics and empowerment. Particularly, the term has expanded from its origin in interventionist art to ultimately include a wide variety of "alternative" and "indy" media strategies. In considering the term here, we emphasize its connotations of instrumentality.
At root, tactical media is about intervention - it is concerned with creating disruptions within existing systems of power and control. Less a methodology than an orientation, it is fundamentally pragmatic, utilizing any and all available technologies, aesthetics, and methods as dictated by the goals of a given action. Tactical media events are necessarily ephemeral - they exist only as long as they continue to be effective; once their utility has been exhausted, they vanish into thin air. While it may form a part of a long-term strategy, tactical media itself is concerned with temporary destabilization rather than permanent transformation.
Extending these notions to spatial representation, then, we claim that "tactical cartography" refers to the creation, distribution, and use of spatial data to intervene in systems of control affecting spatial meaning and practice. Simply put, tactical cartographies aren't just about politics and power; they are political machines that work on power relations. From An Atlas of Radical Cartography.
Posted by jo at 04:56 PM | Comments (0)
June 18, 2007
Bloomsday on Twitter
Bloomsday on Twitter: A performance of Wandering Rocks on Twitter, and a commentary on both. Created by Ian Bogost and Ian McCarthy :: I do not like Twitter, the micro-blogging service that allows users to send short (SMS-sized) text-based updates that are displayed publicly and shared with friends social-network style.
For me, Twitter represents the worst trends in the new internet culture. It purports to allow people to "communicate" in new ways, a promise that mostly creates new obligation and infatuation to stay "up to date" and "connected." In the world of Twitter, you (and me, and everyone) pay constant, tiny homage to a new gimmickry.
This is a gimmickry that doesn't even rise to the level of the gadget, with its industrialist promise of technological progress. It is a kind of softer soft-pornography determined to make identity-assertion the new masturbation. Russel Davies' Twitter parody Dawdlr comments on this trend, asking users to send updates via postcard.
In the world of Web 2.0, a public sheds the chains of a tightly-controlled mass media market in which individuals are converted into the "consumers" needed to purchase mass produced goods and services. In its stead, that public gets a loosly-controlled micro media market, in which individuals are converted into the "users" needed to create databases for sale to Google or Yahoo! or News Corp for $35 a head. But now the market outsources manufacture to those very "users." The workers may have had nothing to lose but their chains, but the users are lining up to link their own together. It's the new fashion; chains are the new black.
Invective like this may amuse, but it doesn't necessarily change opinion or create discussion. My friend and sometimes-collaborator Ian McCarthy and I had been talking in San Francisco recently, looking for an intervention that would both comment on Twitter as a social force and also attempt to use the service in a culturally interesting way. What if the focus on socialization and identity is actually the least interesting way to use Twitter?
So, here's what we came up with.
Today, like every June 16, is Bloomsday, a holiday that celebrates James Joyce and his novel Ulysses, which takes place on this date in 1904. Ulysses already offers a parallel commentary; Joyce conceived of the book's principal character, Leopold Bloom, as an everyman counterpoint to Odysseus, whose adventure Bloom's parallels. Each of the book's 18 chapters take place in roughly an hour's time.
The 10th of these, Wandering Rocks, follows 19 Dubliners walking through the city, doing their daily business, some intersecting with others. It's a famous and often-studied section of the book, one that also speaks to an experience of urban modernity that has become second-nature to us now.
Enthusiasts often retrace the characters' steps on Bloomsday, and innumerable animated maps and the like have been created by fans and scholars. The latter technique still doesn't really represent the interleaved simultaneity of Wandering Rocks, the complexity yet ordinariness of space and interaction that Joyce's writing accomplishes. And the former technique turns the ordinariness of the episode into a kind of theme park, missing the importance of the Wandering Rocks as a vignette of the scenario that grounds the rest of the novel (I've written about this theme more in relation to videogames in a chapter of my book Unit Operations).
We took Wandering Rocks and adapted it into a large series of 140-character or less utterances in the first person. We organized and timed these and built a database for them. We registered key characters in the novel as users on Twitter. For example:
STEPHENDEDALUS: I see Dilly's high shoulders and shabby dress, shut the book quick, don't let see.
Then we wrote some software to automate the performance of Wandering Rocks on Twitter, so basically we just turn it on and it runs. The result, we hope, will offer both an interesting and unique perspective on the novel and on Twitter. I'll let our critics be the judge of that.
Bloomsday tradition normally demands that festivities take place on Dublin time, which is unfortunately 6 hours ahead of the US East Coast. Wandering Rocks starts at 2:55pm, which is barely the crack of dawn (especially on a Saturday) out on the West Coast. So we decided to synchronize our performance to EDT. If you wish, you can watch the public stream on Twitter starting at 2:55pm EDT. You can also watch the individual characters, or even add them as "friends" to get the updates.
Update: the performance is now completed; while there were a few hiccups that made a very small minority of the characters unable to participate, the vast majority worked as planned, and you can now click through to read their contributions. I'll put together some documentation of the live version to share soon.
BUCKMULLIGAN
STEPHENDEDALUS
[go to post for live links]
LEOPOLDBLOOM
BLOOMSCAT
BLAZESBOYLAN
JOHNCONMEESJ
ONELEGGEDSAILOR
WIFEOFSHEEHYMP
BRUNNYLYNAM
DENISJMAGINNI
MRSMGUINNESS
BLONDEINTHRNTNS
HELYS
MISSDUNNE
TOMROCHFORD
SATCHELLEDBOYZ
NOSEYFLYNN
MCOY
LENEHAN
JJOMOLLOY
UNLABORINGMEN
CORNYKELLEHER
CONSTABLE57C
THESHOPMAN
EARLOFDUDLEY
OLDWOMANONTRAM
PATRICKDIGNAM ALMIDANO
THELACQUEY
DILLYDEDALUS
SIMONDEDALUS
HAINESINDUBLIN
JOHNPARNELL
ELIJAHISCOMING
KATEYDEDALUS
BOODYDEDALUS
MAGGYDEDALUS
MISTERKERNAN
NEDLAMBERT
CLERGYMANJACK
FRBOBCOWLEY
DENISBREEN
BENDOLLARD
CASHELFARRELL
BLINDSTRIPLING
DUDLEYWHITE
RICHIEGOULDING
THEPODDLERIVER
2SANDEDWOMEN
THEPOLICEMAN
MARTNCUNNINGHAM
JOHNWNOLAN
HORNBLOWER
MANINMACINTOSH
Late last night, partly to test and partly to put a stake in the ground, we did perform the first ten minutes of the novel properly synchronized to Dublin time.
Happy Bloomsday!
[blogged by Ian Bogost on bogost.com/blog] [Related]
Bloomsday On Twitter
Perhaps one day we will remember Twitter as the peak of exhibitionism on the Internet, a phenomenon that started with blogs and social networks. It is hard to imagine anything more compulsive: Twitter is a community of thousands of people who publish brief messages answering the simple question "what are you doing right now?". It is a sort of self-imposed big brother, a Babel of self-referential statements ("I'm checking my email", "I'm buying a computer on eBay"), a massive collective stream of consciousness. On June 16, in Dublin, there are celebrations for the Bloomsday, a day of cultural activities centered on James Joyce's Ulysses. Among the most important events of that day is the reenactment of day of Leopold Bloom, the odissey of the common man that unravels on the streets of Dublin in a single day. What do the most important novel of the twentieth century and the most extreme platform of web 2.0 have in common? Nothing, or so it was before the last June 16, when Ian Bogost and Ian McCarthy, game designers and non-linear narration researchers, chose Twitter as the stage of a strange online performance. The tenth chapter of Joyce's Ulysses, that narrates simultaneously the lives of nineteen citizen of Dublin was adapted to microblogging. The original text was broken down into fragments and inserted into a database for a computer program to read and publish as messages on Twitter at the right times, signed with the names of the characters/users. The result is a bizarre short-circuit between time and space units, between high and low culture. Characters from a novel are animated by a machine and their voices mix with those, paradoxically more artificial, of real human beings. The performance, coherently with the pace of that chapter, lasted only an hour, and it probably wasn't noticed by the users of Twitter, lost as a drop in an ocean of communicating solitudes. - Paolo Pedercini, Neural.
Posted by jo at 06:49 PM | Comments (0)
Gallery TPW presents
Dubious Views
Dubious Views: Questioning Institutional Representations in Tourism and Cartography :: Curators: Michelle Kasprzak, Michael Alstad, Shawn Micallef :: A bilingual online exhibition produced by Gallery TPW and funded by the Virtual Museums of Canada.
Every time you open your eyes, a hundred different sources vie for your attention. This spectacle - the cacophonous accumulation of images superimposed over the "real" world - is built by everything from advertisements to entertainment to government. This institutional view of the world can come to stand in for and suppress any other visions or versions that might be out there.
The artists discussed in Dubious Views address the role of the "institution" in terms of its effect on the understanding of place. It is examined in relationship to the tourism industry, and in the context of mapmaking and geography. In both cases, the artists involved look at and play with creating alternatives to the institutional view, and attempt to challenge its singularity, its authority, and its monolithic profile.
Artists include: David Rokeby, Surveillance Camera Players, Michelle Teran, Proboscis, Sylvia Grace Borda, Janet Cardiff, Eugene Atget, Nikki S. Lee, Charles Marville, Roger Minick, [murmur], N.E. Thing Co., Shelley Niro, Louise Noguchi, Mitch Robertson, Ed Ruscha, Camille Turner, Jin-me Yoon, and more.
Posted by jo at 11:50 AM | Comments (0)
June 14, 2007
Conor McGarrigle's
Joyce Walks
Joyce Walks a new project by Conor McGarrigle: Because somewhere, sometimes it's always Bloomsday. Every June 16th in Dublin Joyce enthusiasts celebrate Bloomsday with re-enactments of events from Ulysses. Unfortunately not everyone can be in Dublin for that day but why should that stop you celebrating Bloomsday where you want when you want. So as Bloomsday approaches we announce Joyce Walks a web 2.0 service which will let you map routes from Ulysses to any city in the world so that Bloomsday can be celebrated in any place at any time.
Joyce Walks is a psychogeographical tool which generates walking maps based on routes from James Joyce's Ulysses in any city in the world using Google Maps. The system prints maps to be used as the basis of walks exploring the city of your choice and generates mashups using your pictures and videos documenting these walks to share with other users.
Inspired by the Situationist idea of the Derive Joyce Walks seeks to provide the walker a means of exploring the urban environment which is unique, truly random but removed from a reliance on chance. Although based on a fixed route each map generated is unique as it is based on an individual selection by the user of the center point of their chosen city thus every map provides the walker a means of exploring the urban environment which although based on routes which are predetermined according to a strict adherence to a text is individual to them. Of course removing these routes from Dublin removes specific spatial relevance but they still retain an aura of association which creates a link between the locations and Joycean Dublin.
Joyce Walks saves every map generated to a database. These walks, in addition to being specific to their creator, form part of a continuum where each specific walk performed by any user of the system is added to an searchable archive of unique performative walks from around the world. This archive over time will become a tool to explore and view many unique walks in many cities around the world creating a veritable web 2.0 psychogeographical rough guide.
Requirements: Firefox or Safari browser , in this beta version Internet Explorer is not supported, support for IE will be added shortly. Due to copyright issues between Google and the British Ordnance Survey cities in the UK and Northern Ireland are not searchable, we are working to find a solution for this.
Posted by jo at 06:03 PM | Comments (0)
LOCATIVE MEDIA IN THE WILD
Student Explorations
In the Spring quarter of 2007 at UCSD, a group of particularly rugged and conceptually edgy students volunteered to take contemporary computing topics to the wild. Venturing to the White Mountains, near the Nevada state line, and adjacent to Mount Whitney and her Sierras, the students inhabited the UC White Mountain Research Facility. Their art's practices took them out into the topography... see what they did.
Artists: Zane Andre, Christopher Baker, Adriana Barraza, Heather Clark, Sara Gevurtz, Jonathan Huntoon, Andrew Kim, Gen Kobayashi, Jose Lopez, Sarah McClelland, Christina Tam, Christin Turner, Ryan Velasquez, Thao Vo, Britni Wenck.
Projects: 37°29'59"N, 118°10'06"W, A Sound Perspective: Site Specific Azimuth at Crooked Creek, Another Methuselah, Follow the White Rabbit, GPS Animated Geoglyph, In Search of Sephiroth, MapZ, Phantom Walk (The Linear Cube), Psychogeographic Maps, Shade Walking, Sighted, Sonic Trajectory, Sonifying the White Mountain, Spiritual Geocaching, Visual Biodiversity Survey: 25 Samples, Visions From An Exhange Student.
Posted by jo at 05:43 PM | Comments (0)
June 08, 2007
Plundr
Piracy on the High Seas of NY
Plundr is a location-based game of piracy and trading on the high seas created by area/code. Start out as a bilge-spewing land-lubber in a leaky tub, search the ocean for unsuspecting ships to pillage, upgrade your ship, and amass a fortune in black market goods.
Plundr is designed to be played on laptop computers by players who are navigating through real-world space. The gameplay takes place on Islands where you can buy and sell goods, prey on Merchant Ships, and battle other nearby players. Each Island corresponds to a real-world location. [via]
Posted by jo at 11:30 AM | Comments (0)
May 23, 2007
Electronic Lens
Annotating for Civic Engagement
The Electronic Lens explores and creates new paradigms of civic ubiquitous networking with mobile technologies. We think of Electronic Lens as something of a viewfinder. Using a motion that is already familiar (think point and shoot camera phones), the citizen can use the eLens to gather information about physical objects and places.
The eLens matches electronic information with the physical environment in an innovative way. For example, eLens users can post lasting messages in physical locations, tag buildings and places, or create social networks based on interest and social affinities. eLens interactions combine the physical environment with formal and institutional information and the annotations from users’ personal experiences.
Ultimately the eLens enhances the value of the city for its citizens by making their environments more accessible, more culturally vibrant, more socially just. The eLens fosters communication among people and between institutions; as a result citizens are now better able to navigate the social, institutional and physical urban space.
Posted by jo at 08:38 AM | Comments (0)
May 12, 2007
Squirrel and Acorn
Cell phone Air Pollution Monitor
" ... Squirrel and the companion software, Acorn, also represent a bold exercise in social responsibility and cross-border engagement. "We want to make air quality data visible, accessible and legible to raise consciousness of environmental monitoring," says Spanhake. For this, she has collaborated with Calit2 researcher Kael Greco, author of a mobile webcam application that uploads images taken by the mobile phone automatically and continuously. These images are tagged and manipulated with the sampled pollution data -- the grittier the image, the more polluted the air is -- then displayed in real time on a web page. "This, along with other visual and audible ways, will help to demystify what 20ppm is in a meaningful way," says Spanhake, adding: "Low-cost technology will also make it available and scalable to the technological, environmental and cultural needs of individuals, communities and cities."
The device is low-cost, mobile, and scalable. It is also intended to be a building block for the creation of a mobile wireless sensor network dependent upon those who breathe the air -- people. "Squirrel is meant to monitor an individual's personal exposure to the air, thus providing a means for agency in the production of air pollution data," says Spanhake. "It will enable supplemental data to the environmental protection agencies that cannot afford to scale their technology to population growth and urban sprawl." ..." From Tracking Pollution and Social Movement: Love Fest for Calit2 Technologies at 'Make Fest 2007'.
Posted by jo at 01:35 PM | Comments (0)
May 11, 2007
Heavy Opera: An Audio Tour to Awaken Londoners to
The Impact of Financial Systems on Climate Change
John Jordan and James Marriott’s operatic audio tour set in London’s Square Mile is intended to awaken city workers to the impact of financial systems on climate change. But not only does And While London Burns misgauge how much the suits already know, its hysterical tone also harmonises too easily with the coming new eco-order.
A fountain of water from the river Walbrook shoots up above my head, drums are pounding, a sound system’s bass rumbles. I hear cheers but I can also hear the clatter of police shields and batons around the corner. Seven years after London’s Carnival Against Capital, when protesters outside the LIFFE exchange broke a water mains sending a thirty-foot jet of water into the air, I am walking just a half a mile north of the same spot. Now I can hear the Thames rushing up the valley the Walbrook follows, bursting its banks, laying waste to the tall glass-fronted buildings as some of the most expensive real estate in London collapses around me. I’m swept up in a sonically induced fantasy driven by the tracks on my MP3player. I am taking part in And While London Burns, an operatic guided walk written by John Jordan and James Marriott, set to music by Isa Suarez and produced by the cross-disciplinary art and education group Platform.
John Jordan has played a role in both these participatory dramas, firstly as a member of Reclaim the Streets – one of the anti-capitalist groups that coordinated the Carnival Against Capital in June 1999. This time around as an artist commissioned by Platform – an interdisciplinary arts, campaigning and research group committed to longer term, less partisan approaches to transforming the activities of the financial institutions and corporations with head offices in the Square Mile. The walk is an attempt to dramatise the research Platform has conducted into climate change. James Marriott, its co-founder, explains:" from Heavy Opera by Anthony Iles, It's Not Easy Being Green, MUTE VOL 2 #5.
Posted by jo at 01:36 PM | Comments (0)
April 21, 2007
Turbulence Commission:
Handheld Histories as Hyper-Monuments
Turbulence Commission: Handheld Histories as Hyper-Monuments by Carmin Karasic, Rolf van Gelder and Rob Coshow, with special thanks to the HP mscapers team, Brett Stalbaum, and Jo Rhodes :: Part of the Boston Cyberarts Festival, pick up a smartphone at the Judi Rotenberg Gallery, 130 Newbury Street, Boston :: April 21-28, 2007, Tues-Sat 10am-6pm. Gallery talk today: 2:00 pm.
Designed for HP iPAQ 6900 series smartphones, Handheld Histories as Hyper-Monuments uses GPS and mobile technologies to address historic bias in Boston's public monuments. The artwork gathers non-official stories to socially construct hyper-monuments that exist as digital doubles, augmenting specific historic monuments. For example, imagine you are near the Old South Church in Boston, MA, USA. The smartphone sounds church bells to get your attention. It then displays an easily identifiable image of the Old South Church circa 2007, followed by images of the church that take you back in time. Finally you see the location as it was in its natural, wild state. You can send text, image and audio content to the website from the monument location via any internet enabled device. Or use any internet browser to view and add histories to the hyper-monuments.
HHHM requires HP mediascapes locative media software to create content rich hotspots on GPS aware maps. Once the HHHM mediascape is installed on a handheld device, a GPS fix is required to automatically display the hyper-monument. WiFi internet connectivity is best for viewing and contributing to the hyper-monument via the handheld's browser.
“Handheld Histories as Hyper-Monuments” is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the LEF Foundation.
BIOGRAPHIES
One November morning in 1994, CARMIN KARASIC was listening to digital artists on NPR when she realized she was a digital artist trapped in a Fidelity Technical Project Manager's body. This simple realization changed her life. A multimedia artist focused on Internet Art, she is also an Assistant Director of Boston Cyberarts, and on the faculty of Lesley University. Her work can be seen online in several e-zines, websites, and galleries, such as CAGE. She has exhibited in the Boston area at the DeCordova Museum, MIT List Center, the Attleboro Museum, Computer Museum, New England School of Art and Design, The Art Institute of Boston, and The Brodigan Gallery; in NY at the Studio Museum, Harlem; Brooks Gallery at Cooper Union, and the New York Hall of Science; and Austria, Canada, Japan, and Germany. Carmin has been awarded a Mudge Fellowship from the Groton School and a duPont Fellowship from the Art Institute of Boston.
ROLF VAN GELDER is an artist and web developer. Self-taught, he has been creating visual art since the early 80s. He has been collaborating with Carmin Karasic since the 1990s. They created "d{s}eduction dialogue" for the 2001 Boston Cyberarts Festival and "Virtual Quilt" (2002) for the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA, USA (with Clara Wainwright). In 1995 Rolf founded one of the first on-line art galleries, CAGE - Cyber Art Gallery Eindhoven (http://www.cage.nl). His work has been exhibited in over 50 exhibitions in the U.S.A., Canada, Austria, Portugal, Italy, Sweden, Germany, UK, Spain and the Netherlands.
ROB COSHOW is an artist/photographer who recently graduated Magna Cum Laude from the Art Institute of Boston. Trained in classic wet-lab photography as well as digital and new media, Rob has honed his experimental approach to create works that bridge multiple disciplines. In 2006, he exhibited his “Crab Cake” robots at Axiom Gallery, and collaborated with Jeff Warmouth, Roland Smart and other Boston artists to create “Art Show Down” at Art Interactive. He has received various honors for his photography and illustrious reviews for his new media work.
Posted by jo at 10:10 AM | Comments (0)
LOCATING OURSELVES
A KQED Digital Storytelling Summit
LOCATING OURSELVES: A KQED Digital Storytelling Summit :: May 26, 2007; 10-4 pm (Bonus: Friday evening, May 25, 6-8 pm party and showcase celebrating the Coming to California contest) :: KQED, 2601 Mariposa Street, SF :: All are welcome ::Lunch provided, so please RSVP: lrule[at]kqed.org
Come participate in an exploration of the current Digital Storytelling Landsacpe, with special attention given to place-based storytelling, locative media, and mobile technologies. So much is happening, and it's been a long while since we've come together to discuss where we might be going.
Many of us are practitioners, so please let us know what themes you'd like to see explored. Email Leslie Rule at lrule[at]kqed.org. We also invite you to join us Friday evening as we celebrate our high school digital storytellers who participated in the 5th Annual Coming to California Digital Storytelling Contest.
Posted by jo at 08:21 AM | Comments (0)
April 18, 2007
AreYouHere?
Venice - Urban Mobile Game
AreYouHere? :: 2007 - June 6th/15th - Venice - urban mobile game :: AreYouHere? is one of the 12 urban interventions of Migration Addicts, 52nd International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Collateral events :: Site: the whole city - starting point at Chiostro Ex Chiesa Santi Cosma e Damiano, Giudecca, 620.
AreYouHere? is an urban mobile game that aims to explore Venice through its inhabitants/migrants. More and more Venetians are leaving the lagoon to settle in other towns. In the next 30-40 years, it is certain that Venice's population will be dramatically reduced. Bar and hotel owners now come from abroad while the town is losing its original inhabitants and becoming more and more globalized. Thousands of tourists arrive to Venice everyday. The Observer provocatively wrote that if the only destiny of the town is low cost tourism then it would be better to have Venice managed by Disneyland Corporation. A kind of paradox is happening. Venice could be everywhere, that "exotic" does not exist anymore. Labor migrants from Asia are welcoming you and serving you Italian food. You are in Venice. But are you really in Venice? What do you see? Who do you meet?
AreYouHere? is an urban exploration through the faces of the people anyone can meet during his/her stay. Faces of migrants that have become the actual inhabitants, while the player is the stranger. A touristic and personal exploration of people and their faces. Those photos will be joined together into a personal postcard. He/she will receive the postcard at home. A postcard that is actually sent by him/herself. The player will receive the postcard to his/her home: a postcard that is actually sent by him/herself.. But the places you are supposed to visit, however, are not the ones you would expect to go, the top visited.
Surely you'd never take a photo of people who lives and works in these places. But that's what you have to do: shoot photos at immigrant people who live and work in Venice, carefully following the path that has been created for you, because you are the stranger, the tourist, and they are a part of Venice instead. You should take those photos with your mobile phone and send them by MMS to the number you found on the invitation. But remember, the first photo you send must be a photo of yourself: because you are a part of the game. [via]
Posted by jo at 04:34 PM | Comments (0)
April 16, 2007
Locative Media Summer Conference
Call for Papers
Locative Media Summer Conference: Call for Papers :: September 3-5, 2007 :: Research Center "Media Upheavals", University of Siegen, Germany :: Submission deadline: May 15, 2007.
"Everything is related to everything else, but closer things are more closely related" (Waldo Tobler's First Law of Geography, 1970)
Nowadays everything in the media world gets tracked, tagged and mapped. Cell phones become location-aware, computer games move outside, the web is tagged with geospatial information, and geobrowsers like Google Earth are thought of as an entirely new genre of media. Spatial representations have been inflected by electronic technologies (radar, sonar, GPS, WLAN, Bluetooth, RFID etc.) traditionally used in mapping, navigation, wayfinding, or location and proximity sensing. We are seeing the rise of a new generation that is "location-aware". This generation is becoming familiar with the fact that wherever we are on the planet corresponds with a latitude / longitude coordinate.
The term "Locative Media", initially coined in 2003 by Karlis Kalnins and the 2006 topic of a special issue of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac, seems to be appropriate for digital media applying to real places, communication media bound to a location and thus triggering real social interactions. Locative Media works on locations and yet many of its applications are still location-independent in a technical sense. As in the case of digital media, where the medium itself is not digital but the content is digital, in Locative Media the medium itself might not be location-oriented, whereas the content is location-oriented. Can Locative Media like digital media thus be understood as an upheaval in the media evolution? This is one question we want to discuss at the Locative Media Summer Conference in Germany.
Locative Media can now be categorized under one of two types of mapping, either annotative (virtually tagging the world) or phenomenological (tracing the action of the subject in the world). Where annotative projects seek to demystify (see all the Google Earth Hacks), tracing-based projects typically seek to use high technology methods to stimulate dying everyday practices such as walking or occupying public space. The Japanese mobile phone culture, in particular, embraces location-dependent information and context-awareness. It is thus projected that in the near future Locative Media will emerge as the third great wave of modern digital technology.
The combination of mobile devices with positioning technologies is opening up a manifold of different ways in which geographical space can be encountered and drawn. It thereby presents a frame through which a wide range of spatial practices that have emerged since Walter Benjamin's urban flaneur may be looked at anew. Or are Locative Media only a new site for old discussions about the relationship of consciousness to place and other people? In the early days of sea travel, it was only the navigator who held such awareness of his exact position on Earth. What would it mean for us to have as accurate an awareness of space as we have of time? In the same way that clocks and watches tell us the exact second, portable GPS devices help us pinpoint our exact location on Earth. As we dig a bit deeper into how particular Locative Media projects negotiate local and global spaces, we see the increasing "technologisation" and commodification of urban and public spaces. Are Locative Media the avant-garde of the "society of control"? If this kind of media practice resides in pure code (tracklogs), what is the difference between Locative Media and software development? Or is the recent rise of Locative Media just a response to the disappearance of net art?
In reaching beyond art, many of us are becoming familiar with GPS units, such as navigation systems. GPS technologies now appear in mobile, location-aware computing games such as "Mogi" or "Tiger Telematics Gizmondo," which utilize GPS to enable players to see each other's locations. Most of the location-based games nowadays seem to emphasize collecting, trading and meeting over combat. Does this indicate a social trend in mobile entertainment? Do Locative Media generate more accessible than aggressive play plots? Can we say that the numerous distributed geotagging projects (Flickr, Geocaching etc.) unleashed have given rise to a new genre of collaborative "geocommunities"? Could these geolocated spatio-temporal web portals become a dynamic visualization matrix for all scales, from nano to astro, and incorporate interoperability standards for the biological sciences, the geosciences, history, economics, and other social sciences? And finally, are Locative Media a kind of manifestation of what Bruno Latour means by the "Internet of Things"? By geotagging objects instead of people, and having these objects tell us their stories, do we create what Jean-Jacques Rousseau called for, an awareness of the genealogy of an object as it is embedded in the matrix of its production?
This summer conference will attempt to give an overview of actual research on this topic, especially focusing on how Locative Media tackle social and political contexts of production by focusing on social networking, access and participatory media content including story-telling and spatial annotation. Participants from all relevant disciplines are invited, especially researchers in social science, IT design, urban, media and cultural studies. Project demonstrations are warmly encouraged, but the main objective is to move beyond presentation and to build conceptual and theoretical links and exchanges between disciplines. This kind of conference is meant a forum for the presentation of papers, further discussion, collective reading work and as a preliminary step for the publication of an edited volume in 2008.
Invited Speakers:
Prof. Dr. Lev Manovich, University of California, San Diego (USA), http://www.manovich.net/
Prof. Dr. Stephen Graham, University of Durham (GB), Department of Geography, http://www.geography.dur.ac.uk/information/staff/personal/graham/index.html
Dr. Miya Yoshida, Malmv Art Academy, Lund University (S), http://invisible-landscapes.net/
Dr. Drew Hemment, University of Salford/Futuresonic Festival (GB), http://www.drewhemment.com
Dr. Adrian Mackenzie, Lancaster University (GB), http://www.lancs.ac.uk/staff/mackenza/
How to participate:
Submissions should include 1) Title, 2) 500-word abstract 3) Selected bibliography and 4) 200-word CV for the presenter.
These should be sent to thielmann[at]spatialturn.de as pdf or doc attachments by May 15, 2007. Notification of acceptance will be provided two weeks later so as to allow adequate to make travel arrangements. Full papers for publication are due on December 31, 2007.
For further information contact Tristan Thielmann: thielmann[at]spatialturn.de. The summer conference is organised by the research group "Media Topographies" of the Collaborative Research Center "Media Upheavals", University Siegen, Am Eichenhang 50, 57076 Siegen, Germany.
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April 15, 2007
Turbulence Commission: The Simultaneous Translator
ONLINE Performance Today
Turbulence Commission: The Simultaneous Translator by John Roach and Willy Whip [Requires Windows OS] LIVE PERFORMANCE: Sunday April 15; 12:00 PM EST to 3:00 PM EST [Mac users can listen via the player of their choice].
"The Simultaneous Translator" (SimTrans) is a Windows based audio interface that enables anyone to load audio streams and manipulate them in real time on the Internet. SimTrans makes the delays and fluctuations of the Internet visible and audible. The Internet becomes your collaborator as you create your mix, and the instability you usually try to avoid becomes a tool for creation. Distance and delay are manifest within the interface numerically and as a series of sliding heads; there is also a link to Google Earth where you can watch the dynamic flight of data travel between yourself and the audio source.
“SimTrans” is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Murray G. and Beatrice H. Sherman Charitable Trust.
THE PERFORMANCE: "The Simultaneous Translator" grew out of the artists’ live networked performance project "Simultaneous Translation," in which the delays of the internet are used to dynamically effect the live performances of geographically distant artists.
The upcoming performance will take place from 12:00 PM EST to 3:00 PM EST on Sunday April 15. Log on via http://turbulence.org/Works/simtrans.
Participants: Greg Davis (USA), Kenneth Goldsmith (USA), John Hudak (USA), Keyman (France), Lawrence Li (China), Mice69 (France), Miguel Ramos (Spain), Joe Reinsel (USA), John Roach (USA) and Willy Whip (France).
BIOGRAPHIES
JOHN ROACH doesn't consider himself an installation artist, a sound artist, or a sculptor, but prefers to think of himself as a nomad, touching down in whatever place is most hospitable to his ideas. Recent projects have been an installation at the 2B Gallery in Budapest, Hungary; a collaborative performance with objects and video at the Saint Stephen Museum in Szekesfehervar, Hungary; and a web video project called Sweet Music. He continues to work with Willy Whip on their long-standing live networked performance project Simultaneous Translation.
WILLY WHIP is a designer and teacher in hypermedia interactivity. Outside his institutional work he likes to produce mashups that fertilize his own secret garden. This personal research and development leads him on a quest for hybrids: connect this information to that information; grow new contents; release new senses. Recent activity includes projects with the artists Anika Mignotte, Reynald Drouhin, and Du Zhenjun.
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April 12, 2007
Social Tapestries'
Snout Performance
Images from Tuesday's Snout performance around Hoxton, London can be viewed on our Flickr site and we are pleased to announce the prototype 'scavenged' sensing and public authoring site for Snout is now live. View the sensor traces collected during the performance together with other local information and links to ways to stimulate local conversations and action.
Social Tapestries will be publishing the technical documentation for the Snout sensor hardware and software (an updated version of last year's Feral Robots sensing system) later this summer, along with video documentation and a Cultural Snapshot exploring Snout's concepts and ideas – a recipe for others to create their own participatory sensing events and websites for bringing communities together to discuss and act on local issues.
Posted by jo at 12:23 PM | Comments (0)
April 11, 2007
[-empyre-] Brooke Singer: Thoughts on the topic
TechnoPanic: Terrors and Technologies
"... In the last several years I have seen the rise of work termed "Locative Media" and my own work is sometimes grouped in that category. I usually ignore labels but this one is particularly bothersome to me because there is a trend here to collapse this ever-growing field of terror technologies into infotainment objects. This gets to the issue of what Tim calls the "ambivalent attraction to technologies of terror" and, as Horit questions, "what is the relationship between the production of art by means of digital technologies and the production of terror by the same?" Locative Media (as with the term Web 2.0) is deceptive in its appearance of being simply shiny, fun and new. Yet, do we question computer art for its use of the digital computer, originally designed to quickly crunch numbers to project missiles more accurately -- wherein lies the difference? Is it only distance from inception?..." -- Brooke Singer, empyre. Read the full post >>
Posted by jo at 08:52 AM | Comments (0)
April 10, 2007
DEAF: Snack&Surge Brunch: Marked Up City
You Are Not Here.org: Gaza - Tel Aviv
Marked Up City: You Are Not Here.org: Gaza - Tel Aviv :: Hosted and introduced by Nat Muller (NL) :: Saturday 14 April 2007, 11:00 – 13:30 hrs :: Location: V2_Studio :: Entrance: € 7,50 :: LIVE STREAM (REALVIDEO) - 14 april, 11:00-13:30 (Clicking on the above link before the indicated time will result in an error message!) This live stream can be viewed with the free RealPlayer.
Cities are more than their streets and squares, their commerce and inhabitants: they are part and parcel of a whole economy which brands and markets "the urban experience" to us as a commodity. Tourism is of course the latter's most logical instrument: more often than not we are sold a sugar-coated product, which discards the dynamics, frictions and population groups, which make up the city proper. Marked Up City dips into the belly of city branding and urban tourism... with a twist.
You Are Not Here.org (YANH), urban tourism mash-up project by artist Thomas Duc (US), media activist Mushon Zer-Aviv (IL/US), interaction designer Kati London (US) and new media hacker Dan Phiffer (US) :: Laila El-Haddad (PS/US), journalist and writer :: Merijn Oudenampsen (NL), specialises in issues concerning flexibility of labour, precarity, gentrification, and city branding.
The SNACK & SURGE Brunches create a performative and gastronomic theatre of operations addressing political, technological and artistic questions relating to the poetics of power. We invite the DEAF audience to kick off their day pondering the aesthetics, actions and media of resistance and critique. Part hang-out, part culinary experiment, SNACK & SURGE intends to be a caress for the palate, an opener for the mind, and a rebelliously festive wake-up for the mood.
Rise and start your day deliciously: biting at the poetics of power!
Food by: anders eten.com
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April 06, 2007
Upgrade! Brussels/Ghent
On Public Space and Sound Practices
Upgrade! Brussels/Ghent: On Public Space and Sound Practices :: We examine and discuss meshed networks in public space. Artist networks reappropriate public space by means of sound, and comment and annotate public space by soundtags. Can we speak of hybrid transmission spaces? Do these mobile modes of exchange provoke new creative practices? Project presentations by Tapio Mäkelä; Justin Bennett; Sarah Washington and Knut Aufermann. Discussion moderated by Annemie Maes and IRC chat by Dusan Barok.
Tapio Mäkelä: My first radio project was called Sound Calendar in 1994 with artist association MUU. Sound Calendar consisted of 24 sound pieces by participating artists, broadcast before morning and evening news on Finnish national radio and through intercoms at eight Finnish railway stations. My own piece in the work made me an accidental radio hacker as it caused a shut down of the entire Finnish radio network for approximately 10 minutes. My interest in hybrid uses of radio has to do with combining Internet radio with listening or participatory interfaces in public spaces.
I am currently developing “Translocal radio workshops” in two locations in the Barents Sea region. Inter-connected artist led workshops in Kirkenes (No) and Murmansk (Ru) bring together media and sound artists and community groups to develop content locally and across the border. The work is presented through public events and temporary listening environments as well as through Internet radio and temporary FM. The workshops are planned for late summer this year and Spring 2008.
In the summer of 2008 a fourth Polar Circuit workshop will take place in the Baltic Sea. Concept:Islands, among other topics, invites participants to experiment with radio and mesh-up networks and alternative energy solutions. In both of these workshops I am working on a sound archive with geo-annotation, not with an interest of GPS as such, but how the location of samples and interviews can also be a meaningful archival interface.
Justin Bennett is an artist and composer working with sound and visual media. While living in Sheffield in the 1980's he colllaborated with bands such as Hula, TAGC, and Fabricata Illuminata. Since 1989 he is based in the Netherlands. Bennett is best known for his work with field recordings, which he uses to create installations, soundwalks, CD-releases and live performances. Much of his work is concerned with urban space and the relationship of sound to place. In the last few years he worked with GEM Den Haag, the CCS, Paris, the Guangzhou Triennial, moorroom Roma, Sonic Arts Network, UK. Upcoming projects include a permanent sound work for a public space in The Hague and a text-based piece for a park in Luxembourg. He collaborates with, among others, BMB con., Renate Zentschnig, Grand Mal, 242.pilots, Kreutzerkompani.
Sarah Washington and Knut Aufermann talk about the radio lives and works that have been encountered by in their last one and a half years on the road around Europe. Working in more than a dozen countries and meeting people from all over Europe, visiting their projects, doing workshops and participating in radio conferences, festivals and live-to-air events, has give these 'radio gypsies' a unique overview of the state of experimental radio activity across Europe today. In this presentation they will also give you a taste of their own approach to radio production, and demonstrate how their ongoing enthusiasm for the medium allows them to develop singular radio events in cooperation with others.
Posted by jo at 11:39 AM | Comments (0)
SPACE2/ | Transcendence
A Psychocartography of Conceived Presence
(Oslo, 03.04.2007) Following the success of the installation Space2 at ROM for Art + Architecture, its new location is now at Euklides (Pilestredet 75C, Oslo). Space2 is the continued development of Transcendence, developed by the Norwegian architectural laboratory SERENDIPIT:US (Eli Goldstein & Kjersti Wikstrxm) at Dispatx Art Collective.
During 2 simultaneous journeys in Berlin and New York, an archive of experience (atlas of emotion) was established. Through conceiving presence, the project Transcendence crystallizes the condition of sensing one space while imagining / conceiving the presence of another - a process that mirrors the shared experience of being in two places at the same time, whilst co-existing in the shared virtual space.
Hundreds of visitors from architects and artists to established writers, sociologists, anthropologists and philosophers have experienced the playful and interactive installation in the past three weeks. Space2 has a critical focus on the processes and procedures of design - constituting in a methodological experiment within the borders of art, architecture and research.
Focusing on the creative method - the organisational process that translates creative vision to creative product - is fast moving beyond online curatorial platforms such as Dispatx. The Norwegian Architecture Association (NAL), the Association for Interior Design, and KHIO, the Oslo School of Art, have all expressed significant interest in SERENDIPIT:US as a result of this work.
Euklides is focused on crossing borders between art & design, looking to make anti-standardized products and building commercial models related to them. For SERENDIPIT:US, this touches on some of the main reasons for engaging in the study of subjectivity, personal habitats and spatial values, as well as these factors' role in the perception of space and in generating new spaces or objects. Focusing on methodology and analysis in generating and exploring real or imagined spaces, their work approaches phenomenological aspects of spatial conditions.
Dispatx Art Collective is a curatorial platform for the development and presentation of contemporary art and literature.
Posted by jo at 11:19 AM | Comments (0)
April 04, 2007
Participatory Urbanism
Phone as Environmental Instrument
Last week in Oslo, i attended a very inspiring talk that Tom Igoe gave at the Oslo School of Architecture. He presented open source ideas and explained their impact on the way we think about space.
Among the projects he showed was Participatory Urbanism, a work by Eric Paulos, Ian Smith and RJ Honicky that turns the mobile phone into a “networked mobile personal measurement instrument."
On the one hand, there's a sophisticated device, the mobile phone, which provides us very little insight into the actual conditions of the terrain we traverse with it.
On the other hand is the fact that we must defer to a handful of civic government installed environmental monitoring stations that use extrapolation to derive a single air quality measurement for an entire metropolitan region. Such data doesn't reflect the dynamic variability arising from daily automobile traffic patterns, human activity, and smaller industries.
[Left: Carbon Monoxide readings made with taxicabs across Accra, Ghana] The goal of Participatory Urbanism is to provide mobile devices with new “super-senses” by enabling sensing technologies such as noise pollution, air quality, UV levels, water quality, etc. to be easily attached and used by anyone, especially non-experts.
Integrating simple air quality sensors into networked mobile phones promotes everyday citizens to uncover, visualize, and collectively share real-time air quality measurements from their own everyday urban lifestyles. This rich people-driven sensor data leverages community power imbalances, and can increase agency and decision maker understanding of a community's claims, thereby potentially increasing public trust.
Other projects Tom Igoe presented: Public Air Quality Indicator, Area's Immediate Reading and i'll add Neighbourhood Satellites. [blogged by Regine on we-make-money-not-art]
Posted by jo at 03:38 PM | Comments (0)
April 02, 2007
Judgement Day for 1st Life Game Figures
Tagged City Play for Real Players in Real Cities
The Ludic Society's Tagged City Play for Real Players in Real Cities was recently presented at Social Hacking, a series of temporary public art commissions for the city of Plymouth (UK).
Attracted by the slogan Become a game figure by implant!, participants were invited to get an injection of “RFID Judgement tags” under the skin. They then become Real Players, 1st life personae who are also game figures in the Reality Engine while playing in a real city. They can drive tuned Plymouth racing cars to tag the city and receive a tagging toolbox containing graffiti, spray stencils, stickers, RFID stickers and implant injection kits.
Real objects in the city are subjectively chosen for tagging. The tags are functional but useless (RFID-tags with zero data.) By putting this zero-tag on an object, players de-valuate real world things into virtual play-objects. If the Real Players find a tagged object with a value assigned to it, they zap it. The goal is to change the value of tags into the value Zero by using their “Wunderbäumchen” (inspired by the car air fresheners in the shape of a pine), technical toys used for finding and reading tags and/or emitting a target-oriented electro magnetic pulse..." Continue reading >> [blogged by Regine on we-make-moeny-not-art]
Posted by jo at 11:30 AM | Comments (0)
March 27, 2007
Vague Terrain
Locative
vague terrain: locative: Why is location interesting? Several years ago, I inherited a broken television set from my grandmother. I had little use for a TV that displayed everything in shades of green, and so it stayed in the attic. It was only when I was later preparing to move that I decided to turn it on. What I found when I turned the dial to the highest UHF channel was that the TV picked up what sounded like eight simultaneous cordless phone conversations. I could barely decipher anything in the cacophony, but it did make me wonder who these people were, where they were standing as they were speaking these words, if these conversations were passing through me, and if they knew I was listening.
I have to thank both Greg J. Smith and Neil Wiernik for inviting me to be the first guest editor. Neil and Greg have both done an enormous amount of work on the journal since its inception. Their efforts are creating an amazing archive of the state of the arts during this nascent period of technological curiosity and exploration.
Even though the digital age has been around long enough that we possess theorists' interpretations of its implications, it's almost as if artists are only just wending their way through these new ways of communicating, and it's this excitement of exploration that's palpable in the art work. Projects that begin with an exclamation of "oh, neat!" quickly give birth to perspectives that come to reshape our understanding.
When I was first asked to edit the journal, it was to be on the subject of mobile technology due to my experience with projects such as the Warbike, an artwork that creates music from WiFi networks through which a cyclist rides. But to consider mobile technology is not to marvel at the ability to watch TV on one's cell phone—merely shifting content created for one medium to another—it is to consider the implications of our new-found ability to take it with you. Watching TV on the subway is not the same thing as watching TV in your home.
The latest PDA and cell phone developments are easy targets for theorising about mobile technology, but a device as simple as Sony's Walkman in 1979 drastically altered the ways in which people communicate in public. Although it innocently allowed you to take your music out of the home, it actually created an entirely new set of communicative gestures using headphones: disregard for others by playing music too loudly, taking headphones off to signal an openness to engage verbally, putting headphones on to avoid contact in public.
What changes when we take it with us? The parameter is space, or place. The term locative, in many ways, gives one the impression of a device with some artificial intelligence that allows the little thing—if I'm forgiven to personify our cute gadgets—to know something about the space in which it's situated or moving through. Of course, artificial intelligence, especially confined to the current power of mobile processors, is nowhere near smart enough to truly understand anything about space. It cannot contextualise the same way that you or I would if placed in a foreign space. What it does do is give us information based on the space according to the parameters and design that we've set up for it. It doesn't give us information outside of the media we've chosen, but this still allows for a great amount of surprise and discovery.
The renewed interest in space generated by mobile technologies such as the cell phone, and location-specific technologies such as GPS, has spread to areas beyond the high-tech. People are finding connections between their perceptions of space and those of the Situationists in the twentieth-century, and the wanderings of the Surrealists before them. Communities are forming psychogeography societies to explore their urban surroundings. Civic interest and concern in urban centres is not only healthier than ever before, but gaining momentum.
Several of the projects in this issue deal solely with the radio spectrum and eavesdropping as a means of understanding the human facet of their immediate surroundings. This is a technology that has existed for decades. But the discourse generated from the interest in more sophisticated technologies has allowed us to contextualise the implications of older technologies and our perceptions of space, especially the blurring of public and private spaces.
Each of the projects featured in this issue deal with space in several manners. It's the synthesis of the experiences and understandings created by many focussed projects that allow us to understand not the gadgets' relationship to space, but our own.
The explorations of ssim-el and Sawako's 2.4Ghz Scape examine the invisible layer of communications that passes through public space unbeknownst to us.
The Context Photography project follows a traditional approach to locative technologies: using the technology to help us better understand aspects of the space. Evamaria Trischak's 4816 also touches on this, as well it and and Patricia Rodriguez's cell phone videos explore technology as medium for our conduct: although it provides insight, at the same time it imposes limitations through its structure that may hamper our ability to understand space.
Mobile technology is also an enabler, either helping to create new forms of narrative not previously possible, as with knifeandfork's Hundekopf, or to foster community and civic interest, as discussed in my interview with Île Sans Fil's Michael Lenczner.
Finally, the articles of Marc Tuters and Jeremy Hight question our definitions and understandings of the field of locative technology, its possibilities, and its future.
Thank you very much to all of the contributors who made this issue possible not only through their projects, but also with their co-operation in compiling all of the information. Feel free to send any comments my way to locative [at] vagueterrain [dot] net, and please let the contributors know how their work engaged you.
david mccallum
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March 14, 2007
Franck Ancel's Triptych
5/5 + 5C + 5G
5/5: In 2004, Franck Ancel completed a triptych on architecture, image and technology by projecting the words "Mobile Wireless Digital" onto the screen of the Montparnasse Tower in Paris. Today, under the title "5/5", he is projecting on the Théâtre de l’Agora à Evry, France his two projects "5C" and "5G", in connection with this line of research.
The trail presented here in the shape of a diptych challenges known and recognized limits, and the outdated boundaries of the past. These documents trace the use of a special form of GPS tracking based on a real experience, that of a separate journey, while also questioning virtuality in the age of world globalisation. Therefore, it is not about abandoning criticism of technological uses to technological uses of criticism. After all, it is through a person's very existence that the temptation to understand the space of his or her time arises, and this forms the focus of this presentation, in which a particular journey becomes an objective creation.
5 Continents (5C): Between 18:00 and 19:04 hours, Paris time, on Saturday 17 December 2005, the first artistic creation from an in-flight passenger plane took place. It was transmitted live over the Internet during a flight from Shanghai to Munich, at an altitude of 30,000 feet and at a speed of over 900 kilometres an hour. This live transmission at "X" moment was the culmination of a series of 5 communications "From Scenography to Planetary Network", for and on 5 Continents.The transmission was posted in real-time on our website, via a wifi satellite link relaying images and sound from the plane. This performance was made possible thanks to Lufthansa's offer to provide FlyNet with Boeing's in-flight online connectivity service, Connexion by Boeing.
This webcast makes a formal nod to the sleeper John Giorno, the poet of "Sleep", a legendary film for the Neo avant-garde art movement made by Andy Warhol in 1963, New York. This time round, a sleeper has left the Asian New York of tomorrow. This world first lasted 64 minutes. In the video recording 64 key words appeared in a combination of 12 interplays on five themes (five continents, colours, senses, elements, years), initiated with an eye to the forthcoming 2010 World Expo in China.
5 Guggenheims (5G): In 2006 we collected data in front of the 5 Guggenheim museums. The traces of this journey echo the possible virtual construction of a space on a planetary scale symbolised by these museums. The shift from a fluid virtual architecture to a constructed reality takes shape in the form of a 3D video animation created by Bryan Bey and a resin model created with 3D prototyping, made in collaboration with the IDO creation company from the elements we had gathered together. 5G is made up of photos and GPSb.
Posted by jo at 11:03 AM | Comments (0)
March 13, 2007
Digital marks
Augmented Realities
A little bit on digital marks, I selected a variety of them.
The semacode, a two dimensional code that encodes a URL. The picture (left) is the semacode of architectradure. Thank you Michael Surtees for the link! This tag embed the URL address of my blog, that can be read by your cell phone and send you to its page. I guess it avoids typing in the URL and you can rapidly go through a series of web sites using the respective tags.
It is especially useful for combining physical space to digital content. The Semacode's Software Development Kit has is developed for ubiquitous computing by creating visual tags for objects and contexts, and read them using a mobile camera phone. The physical Wikipedia called Semapedia, created by Alexis Rondeau and Stan Wiechers, allows you to add place tags on places and things to link them to the relevant Wikipedia articles.
[images: trash can with a wikipedia tag] Semacode technical paper.
Urban Tapestries allows public mapping and sharing by combining mobile and internet technologies with geographic information systems. This system was linked to Natalie Jeremijenko's famous feral robots -open source robots for investigating contaminated urban sites- and called Robotic Feral Public Authoring: "Adding the sensor readings to online mapping tools, such as Urban Tapestries, suddenly brings the relationships between environment and home vividly to life. It enables people to feel they can learn about their environment and have the evidence to do something about it"
Yellow Arrow allows a community to tag places using arrows. You can post a message using the arrow and anyone could retrieve it using their cell phone. Another method to link digital content to a physical place. The community of yellow arrow is quite big. Their blog.
Elens allows anyone to create talking landmarks. Developed by the MIT Media Lab it allows anyone to tag a place by adding a sticker on a physical location, sticker that can later be scanned by a cell phone, in this case the Motorola A1000.
M-views developed at the MIT media lab in the interactive cinema group -media fabrics- with Glorianna Davenport, explores the "ideas, methods, and culture of mobile cinema, which is experienced in temporal and spatial narrative segments that can be delivered on context-aware mobile devices."
In 2002, I researched with Glorianna Davenport on technologies to allow digital information to communicate with the physical space. I worked on Passing Glances a system that enables users to create ambient urban interludes through the use of SMS text messages. Associated graphics and storytelling were projected in the urban space.
CHI'04 paper
Enarrative5 2003 paper
With these tags, the physical space is tagged to the digital space. One can think the other way around and tag the virtual space with physical content. That is what Josh Lifton told me he was working on the other day. Josh created a plug sensor/actuator network, called the dual reality lab, that links the MIT Media Laboratory space to a virtual lab space in the Second Life online virtual world.
[left: Location of the MIT Media Laboratory in Second Life] More info technical about the plug. [blogged by Cati Vaucell on Architectradure]
["Dual reality" is the concept of maintaining two worlds, one virtual and one real, that reflect, influence, and merge into each other by means of deeply embedded sensor/actuator networks. Both the real and virtual components of a dual reality are complete unto themselves, but are enriched by their mutual interaction. The dual reality Media Lab is an example of such a dual reality, as enabled the Plug sensor/actuator network that links our actual lab space to a virtual lab space in the Second Life online virtual world.]
Posted by jo at 01:30 PM | Comments (0)
March 12, 2007
UPGRADE! AMSTERDAM:
[TAG & TRACK}
UPGRADE! AMSTERDAM: [TAG & TRACK} :: When: wed. March 21st 2007 || start 20.30 hrs. / doors: 20.00 hrs. :: Where: Melkweg, Theater, Lijnbaansgracht 234 A, Amsterdam | free entrance | LIVE webcast: www.fabchannel.com
'Locative media' are hot: from cell phones to GPS, to other means of satellite communications. A world without the latter seems unthinkable, or perhaps even non-navigationable. Experiments with locative media within the arts have mostly focused on and taken place within an urban context. Upgrade! Amsterdam [tag & track] offers a counterbalance and highlights projects where the technology itself is not the main feature, but rather how their usage functions within specific contexts, and generates a multitude of meanings and experiences: from Fulani nomads in Nigeria to what the migration mapping of Montagu's Harrier brings about between ornithologists from Groningen and farmers in Mauritania.
Introduction to the theme by Assia Kraan: Recently Assia Kraan wrote an article on locative media for 'Open - magazine for art and the public domain', titled 'Public action through geo-annotation - social encounters by ways of locative media arts'. Her introduction to this Upgrade! [tag & track] will be a continuation of this article focussing on narrative possibilities of locative media and the sence thereof.
Nomadic Milk - Esther Polak - Michiel de Lange: Nomadic Milk is about mapping migration patterns of Fulani nomads as that of the diary industry their milk is processed by. Nomadic Milk visualises both social entanglements and mental maps of the two systems.
Capturing the migration of Montagu's Harrier - Ben Koks c.s. Not even as much the data produced by the tiny 7 gram satellite backpacks of migrating Harriers between the Netherlands and Mauritania, Senegal and Nigeria is of interest, but more the narratives arising from it among the Dutch ornithologists and farmers in Western Africa. http://www.grauwekiekendief.nl
After the presentations there will be a panel with Assia Kraan, Ben Koks, Esther Polak, Just van den Broeke and Michiel de Lange, moderated Lucas Evers. Just van den Broeke will be present at this panel since he has been involved in numerous projects working with a variety of locative technologies. http://www.justobjects.nl
UPGRADE! AMSTERDAM is a series of gatherings for and by new media aficionados, artists, geeks, media makers and breakers, and the generally curious. Point of departure is the premise: "No upgrade without a downgrade." UPGRADE! AMSTERDAM is organised by Nat Muller & Lucas Evers, is actively hosted by de Melkweg, and kindly supported by VSB Fonds and Mondriaan Foundation.
UPGRADE! is an international, emerging network of autonomous nodes united by art, technology, and a commitment to bridging cultural divides. Since April 1999, a group of new media artists and curators have gathered in New York City. The first meeting took place at a bar in the east village with Tim Whidden & Mark River [MTAA], Mark Napier and UPGRADE! founder Yael Kanarek.
Posted by jo at 12:33 PM | Comments (0)
March 07, 2007
G-Turns
Satellite Scratch
After the GP4, a player that uses the earth as a disc and its portable version the G-POD, BRAND is launching a range of brand new softwares. The first one, G-BEE (Global Beeliner), allows you to create direct sonic connections between two arbitrary locations on Earth: select two places (just avoid water surfaces as they are silent), pick the duration (5, 10 or 15 minutes of a selected satellite), and order the music.
The G-ONE (Global Orbit Navigation Engine) invites you to virtually hop on a satellite and scratch across the Earth's topography, just as the needle of a record player scratches across a record. The satellites (there are more than a thousand of them) and their orbits are real and calculated in real time. You can also subscribe to a daily thirty minute podcast of satellite scratch.
It's only recently, when i met Jens Brand and his collaborator Sukandar Kartadinata, that my doubts were confirmed: Brand's g-playing works are essentially tongue-in-cheeck. If you still have any doubt about that, just try to apply for an I-God membership card gold.
This month, Jens Brand is presenting his work in Oldenburg for SOUND//BYTES, an exhibition about electronic and digital soundworlds, Berlin and Luxembourg during the Festival Musique Visuelle. [blogged by Regine on we-make-money-not-art]
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March 06, 2007
Word Finder, Google Earth Edition
1st Life / 2nd Life Game
Julian Bleecker writes: This is a 1st Life / 2nd Life game that is based on paper-based word-finder games. In this game, you try to identify dictionary words within a grid of letters and circle them. In this variation, the landscape becomes the game grid and you have to walk (or run!) to generate a virtual line that runs through the letters in order to "capture" the word and score points. A GPS is used to help the team identify where the letters are in 1st Life space, and to "capture" the words composed of those letters by recording "track logs" through them. The GPS is able to record where you are in 1st Life, and to create "tracks" of locations, which are essentially connected points that make up lines on the GPS. These track logs can be seen as a way of geospatial drawing — the tracks you make delineate lines which can compose various forms of drawing. In our case, the lines are meant to create lines through the letters that make up the words. (Note that in the more traditional word finder games one circles the letters — that would be a bit tricky in this variation, so we'll just draw an approximate line _through_ the letters. Continue reading >>
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February 24, 2007
Sakura_mapping system
Call for Participation
[posted by Yukihiko Yoshida] Sakura_mapping system is a mapping system that can make visualization of "Sakura (Cherry blossom) front" on satellite image. "Photograph of cherry blossoms" and the location information are contributed with mail. You can see it with Google Maps and Google Earth. (Sorry, Text is Japanese only) http://mapping.jp/map/sakura_gmap.html http://mapping.jp/sakura_mapping.kmz
You can participate by sending the cherry blossoms image with mail. Please add GPS information to exif header of the image. map07[at]mapping.jp We are waiting for the contribution from countries other than Japan.
Cherry blossoms are national flowers in Japan. This is a non-profit-making project, co-sponsoring of arbitrary group "Green photon" and "Committee of Earthday Tokyo". It is possible to participate from all...cellular phone with GPS, usual cellular phone, and PC. In Japan, the location information is judged from the mail text when there is no GPS information.
Posted by jo at 04:03 PM | Comments (0)
February 19, 2007
In-Site Montréal
Hotspot Interventions
In-site Montréal: Curator’s statement by Michelle Kasprzak :: In-Site Montréal is a collection of site-specific art presented on the portal pages of five wireless internet (Wi-Fi) hotspots in Montréal. Artists Nicolas Fleming, Maria Legault, and Virginie Laganière have created artworks that may be viewed when users of the free service provided by Île Sans Fil log in to their accounts at the selected hotspots.
The five hotspots are rooted in specific spaces, each one with its own unique properties. The In-Site Montréal project grew out of a desire to augment the experience of place for Wi-Fi users, offering an additional layer of information within the hotspot environments. The artworks that are presented on the portal pages are inventive responses to the characteristics of the spaces that the hotspots inhabit.
“The window appears to look out onto a dataspace that continues beyond the borders of the window itself. [...] But the illusion quickly wears off. The window starts to feel more two-dimensional, more like a piece of paper than a portal. The view-space appears to flatten out, to the point where the window and the data contained within the window merge.”i
Here Steven Johnson is describing the effects of using a scrolling window on a computer screen for the first time, and I am referring to it (ever so slightly out of context) to illustrate a point about the works that are being presented within In-Site Montréal. The users of the Île Sans Fil wireless network are, arguably, all hardened internet users, for whom the complexities of scrolling windows and portals and most other graphical user interface-related things are trivial.
However, since they have reached the secondary stage that Johnson refers to, where the “window and the data contained within the window merge”, there are certain expectations for an experience that can keep pace with their ability to leap from hyperlink to hyperlink.
Portals, by and large, are clumsy. The portal that occasionally pops up on my screen, which is associated with my Hotmail account, assumes I am interested in all manner of celebrity gossip and sports scores, and regional news for an area that is 45 miles to the west of where I currently live. But the works presented as part of In-Site Montréal are not attempting to form part of a portal experience that would guess the preferences of each user. The works are dealing directly with the particularities of the site where the hotspot is, which is a small enough area to be clearly defined as a common element in each user’s experience. For the elite users, something at last may jump out at them from this flattened dataspace where things feel as twodimensional and familiar as a piece of paper. Instead of the usual hurried clicking to get past a familiar “roadblock” and get to the destination they intended to go to, they may now feel that the artists of In-Site Montréal have added an observation on their local café, library, or artist-run centre that matters, that they can respond to, that strikes them out of their reverie.
“A provisional conclusion might be that in advanced art practices of the past thirty years the operative definition of the site has been transformed from a physical location —grounded, fixed, actual— to a discursive vector—ungrounded, fluid, virtual.”ii
Parts of this definition of site – fluid, virtual – are key concepts that that In-Site Montréal works with. The layer of information that floats on top, as a meta- layer to the usual experience of café users in the Île Sans Fil network is meant to be something a bit fluid, virtual and unexpected. The only definition that it does not fit is that of “ungrounded”, precisely because it is the grounding in the site that sets this project apart. Maria Legault’s interventions with her Free Sugar project may be considered particularly grounded in the sites in question. She worked with two locations, Studio XX and Café Utopik, and developed an extension of her Free Sugar project around both locations. At Studio XX, a feminist art centre that primarily consists of an office space and computer lab, she created a performance event entitled the Free Sugar Salon, that was open for anyone to attend and have the holes in their lives filled with pink pudding. She filled cracks in the architecture of Studio XX with pink icing, and then turned her attention to the attentive public that arrived at the studio, counseling them and filling their mouths with pink pudding to console them. At Café Utopik, a café/bar that regularly hosts bands and spoken word events, she conducted a surreptitious intervention, filling crevices and holes in the architecture and surrounding environment of the Café with pink icing, and documenting it in photographs. Both of these projects are presented on the portal pages of Studio XX and Café Utopik as video documentation of these actions.
Artist Virginie Laganière focused on two very different areas: the Jean-Talon Market and the area around the popular meeting place, Café Utopik. Her site-specific video pieces were shot with regular video cameras, as well as custom camera rigs attached to her body. She then manipulated the footage further in the editing suite, adding her own compositions as soundtracks and prolonging moments that happened oncamera, providing us a moment to reflect on their significance. She specifically chose to document moments where people were not as present in these spaces, and where the patterns of movement in the “off-peak” hours would become more apparent.
Through her augmentations in the editing suite, she also aims to create a piece of work that allows us to see beyond our usual clouded and harried view of the urban environment, and enjoy a view of the built environment that is tranquil, constructed, and part of an aesthetic experience. In particular, her video piece presented on the portal page of the Jean-Talon Market, usually a place so buzzing with activity as to be nearly impossible to navigate, was shot in the very early hours of the morning, when market stall owners are setting up. This meditative and slow period of the Market’s activity is hidden from most of the Market’s patrons, and Virginie’s artful editing brings out the poetry in the stasis of these moments.
Nicolas Fleming's performance art videos also present us with an alternate view of our public spaces. His work is presented at Café Kafeïn and Laïka, because of both the subject matter that he chose and the locations that he performed in. At Laïka, an extremely popular and hip bar/restaurant/club, he presents se traîner, a piece wherein he drags himself out of his apartment (which is within the same building complex that Laïka is in) and down the stairs to an escape portal – an automatic garage door. Throughout the performance he can be heard grunting with the strain of moving himself in such an unconventional way, and by the end of this performance, he is clearly exhausted. Users viewing this video must marvel about this strange and strenuous test to his body, that took place in relative secret behind the scenes of the Laïka’s festive décor. In the other piece, traîner un dj, Fleming travels to Île Sainte-Hélène to encase a dj in a canvas sac, and drag him along the pavement, with the sounds of Piknic Electronique (Montréal’s outdoor summer dance club) pounding in the background. This work is presented at Kafeïn due to the dj culture that is resonant there; the dragging of a dj must be somewhat humourous to the clientele.
Telematics is a term used to designate computer-mediated communications networking involving telephone, cable, and satellite links between geographically dispersed individuals and institutions that are interfaced to data-processing systems. It involves the technology of interaction among human beings and between the human mind and artificial systems of intelligence and perception. The individual user of networks is always potentially involved in a global net, and the world is always potentially in a state of interaction with the individual.iii
The virtual spaces that In-site Montréal inhabit are amorphous areas around several accepted gathering places such as cafés, galleries, markets, and bars. They are perhaps places where as an internet user, you may intend to use the opportunity of connectivity to the network to look outward, to read news of distant places or connect with friends far away through e-mails and online social networking sites. The art practice of telematics in particular addresses the creative possibilities when two parties are connected over distance to communicate. In some way, the pieces presented on the portal pages of Île Sans Fil’s network as part of the In-Site Montréal project present something that is almost anti-telematic, in that the works look inward rather than outward. In the case of this project, a connection to someone across the globe is not sought, it is shunned in favour of a further examination and rumination on the details of the local environment. A local resident, who is perhaps used to the culture at Café Utopik, may be best able to chuckle at the video of pink icing being added to the sign above the door. This intense inwardlooking that these pieces commit to is the essential point of the project. Instead of seeking to look outward and connect with others who are in a radically different geographic space, In-Site Montréal hopes to reconnect locals with their own space, through the language of culture, compelling users of the network to turn their gaze inward enough to consider the cultural resonances that are possible.
- Michelle Kasprzak, 2006/2007
i Steven Johnson "Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the
Way We Create and Communicate" 1997 Harper Collins, New York. Pg 86
ii Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity, October 80 (Spring
97): 95.
iii Roy Ascott: “Is there love in the telematic embrace?”
http://www.receiver.vodafone.com/07/articles/03_page01.html
Posted by jo at 04:05 PM | Comments (0)
February 16, 2007
You Are Not Here
Reviewed by Luís Silva
"From a strict physical, corporeal point of view, ubiquity is an ontological impossibility. For as much as one would like, being in two places at the same time, for instance, the city of New York and the city of Baghdad, is not possible to accomplish. Only electrons, netart and god have the uncanny ability to present themselves in several places in one given moment.
You Are Not Here departs from and builds itself from this inability. Developed by Thomas Duc, Kati London, Dan Phiffer, Andrew Schneider, Ran Tao and Mushon Zer-Aviv and inviting people to “explore Baghdad through the streets of New York”, YANH presents itself as an urban tourism mash-up. Not only can you be in two places at the same time (the ubiquity concept we departed from), but also both places become interconnected in a psychological enactment of a meta-city. The underlying mechanism is pretty simple: users (the so-called meta-tourists) are invited to download and print on one side of a sheet of paper a map of Baghdad and on the other side a reversed map of New York. As soon as that task is accomplished the exotic sightseeing can begin. Scattered around New York are YANH street-signs that provide warned explorers (those who printed the map) as well as random passers-by the telephone number for the Tourist Hotline, where audio-guided tours of contemporary Baghdad destinations in NYC can be listened to." Continue reading You Are Not Here - You Are Not Here by Luís Silva, Furtherfield.
Posted by jo at 05:17 PM | Comments (0)
Proboscis
London As We May See It
On Wednesday February 14th 2007 Proboscis presented a new 'map' of London as part of "Uncharted Territories: the Brave New World of Mapping" at the British Library, London.
London As We May See It is the city re-imagined through a landscape of 105 StoryCubes. Each one has 5 pictures taken in a particular street or place (as well as an image of the street sign). The StoryCubes can be assembled together – connected – in any way in three dimensions to describe the route of a walk, or the places one has lived or worked in. They can describe experiences one has had across the city or the places in which one has made friends, had trysts with lovers or where we seek solace and rest from the manic energy of the city. These cubes could also be used to create a shared map between a community or group of friends - ever evolving and changing with each person's contribution.
The pictures used in the map were all contributed to the group photoblog The Way We See It. Thus the map is organic and can grow alongside the photoblog, adding new StoryCubes as new streets are photographed and 'mapped'.
"London As We May See It" is the beginning of a new series of collaborative mappings of places and communities in the UK and abroad by Proboscis. As such we hope it could be the basis of or model for a tool of engagement within a community, or across different communities, combining the ease of new digital technologies, for capturing and sharing images, with familiar technologies (print / paper based) that result in tactile and tangible spaces of their own for telling stories and sharing knowledge and experiences. More pictures and details are available here. Buy your own Blank StoryCubes here.
Posted by jo at 08:51 AM | Comments (0)
January 26, 2007
Biomapping Brixton
Workshop
Biomapping Brixton-How do you feel about the area that you live in? Which areas do you have a physical and emotional response to? The Hayward are running workshops with artist Christian Nold to create bio maps of areas in Brixton and Clapham. These workshops are FREE and promise to be a fascinating insight into your community
The Bio Mapping tool allows the wearer to record their Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is a simple indicator of emotional arousal, in conjunction with their geographical location. This can be used to plot a map that highlights points of high and low arousal. By sharing this data we can construct maps that visualise where we as a community feel stressed and excited. These workshops involve a walk around the area followed by a download session where your physical responses are downloaded and mapped on Google Earth.
It is strongly recommended that you register your interest beforehand as the number of participants has to be limited to a maximum of 10.
Meeting and download point:
Brixton - Monday 29 Jan. Meet at Brixton Library at 2.30pm
Clapham - Monday 12 Feb. Meet at Clapham City Learning Centre
For more information and to register your interest in either of these workshops please e-mail Paul.green[at]southbankcentre.co.uk
To find out more about the Southbank Centre's programme of socially engaged digital arts projects please visit.
To find out more about Christian's work and bio mapping visit:
http://www.biomapping.net or http://www.softhook.com
Posted by jo at 04:14 PM | Comments (0)
January 09, 2007
Dune & Devil
Tracking Vienna + Tokyo through Dune+ Devil
Dune & Devil (2003-present) explores a space- and time-based phenomenon through communicational technoculture. The aggregation of «•» applies different structures like global positioning systems, audiovisual media, mobile technology, tele-communication tools and specialized software, to experience the stereotopographical synchronization of two individuals in different urban situations. We are trying to translate this spatial experiment under the conditio