Spatial Annotation

“I’ve been photographing layers of conversation in graffiti, and tagging the pictures with conversation. Prior art for spatial annotation?

Spatial Annotation Projects: a (GREAT) list of spatial annotation projects and platforms. Thanks to physcomp, interactionfield and aware for inspiration.” From elastic space [via]

Writing Your Own City

“…Psychogeography and cognitive mapping offer two suggestions for recording wireless experiences, using a term we’ve coined, emotional GPS. Whereas traditional GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and GPS (Global Positioning Systems) tend towards an empirical representation of the world, emotional GPS is biased towards the personal, temporary, and imaginary. In most cases, the prevailing impact of wireless on the definition of a place is not so much on its static form as the potential experiences that this place can afford. The wireless environment provides an alternative use, an augmented interface, or new associative mnemonics. Providing an annotative mapping framework, use of emotional GPS fosters a networked mobility within these environments that undermines the authoritarian bent of traditional GIS and GPS mapping techniques.” From Towards an Emotional GPS: Writing Your Own City by Scott Paterson, with Marina Zurkow and Julian Bleecker, Intelligent Agent, Vol. 3 No. 2.

Ubiquitous Computing and the City

Abstract: Ubiquitous computing seeks to embed computers into our everyday lives in such ways as to render them invisible and allow them to be taken for granted, and social and cultural theories of everyday life have always been interested in rendering the invisible visible and exposing the mundane. Despite these related concerns, social and cultural studies remain in the background of discussions of ubiquitous technology design. This essay seeks to introduce researchers in both fields to each other, and begin to explore the ways in which collaboration might proceed. By exploring mobile and ubiquitous technologies currently being used to augment our experiences of the city, this paper investigates notions of sociality, spatialisation and temporalisation as central to our experiences of everyday life, and therefore of interest to the design of ubiquitous computing.” Resonances and Everyday Life: Ubiquitous Computing and the City (DRAFT) by Anne Galloway. [via]

Temporary Networks

“Abstract: We describe the concept of ad hoc information spaces as a way of distributing information in an environment depending on user mobility and relative location. Ad hoc information spaces are realized using a decentralized approach to ubiquitous computing, which is based on functionally self-contained devices and ad hoc networking. Users are able to contruct and manipulate the properties of these information spaces by means of moving and manipulating a variety of devices. In order to explore the possibilities of using ad hoc information spaces to support group collaboration, three prototypes were developed: the Hummingbirds, the Generalized Hummingbirds and the NewsPilot. These are described along with some of the empirical findings that support their design.” Ad Hoc Information Spaces - Johan Redstr?m, Lars Erik Holmquist, Per Dahlberg and Peter Ljungstrand. [via]

Flexible Storytelling

“…Storytelling is one of the oldest art forms of human beings; initiated in the oral tradition, its form has evolved with changes in society and available media with which to work. The oral storyteller often altered the tale as it was told, choosing words based on response from the listeners to build the collective moment. Of particular relevance here is the Australian Aboriginal storytelling tradition in which territory is not perceived of as a piece of land enclosed within borders but rather as “an interlocking network of ‘lines’ or ‘ways through’” (Chatwin 1987). Sung into existence by the ancestors, these stories actually function as maps of their terrain that can be augmented by travelers to account. Interactive in the beginning with the advent of the written medium, storytelling, however, evolved into a non-interactive narrative style…” From Geo-Heritage: A Living Archive of Spatial Culture by Scot T Refsland, Marc Tuters & Jim Cooley. Also read Bits and Bytes of Locative Geo-Heritage by tV.

Virtual Girlfriend

“The International Herald Tribune writes about Vivienne, the new 3G girlfriend created by Artificial Life, a software house in Hong Kong. It’a a virtual application with a computerized synthetic voice who likes to receive flowers and chocolates, translates six languages and can converse on 35,000 topics. The service is already available in Malaysia and Singapore, and will arrive in Europe later this spring.

At the moment V-Girl is basically considered a game (it won the global Best Mobile Game Award by Ericsson). Apart from this use for lonely hearts, the application developed by Artificial Life might become very interesting, especially for companies that want to enhance the management of the relationship with their customers.” [blogged on making money out of mobile]

global_interface workshop series

New Media comes to University of California at Riverside in a series of workshops on new media practice.

They purpose that “this critical collaboration across the disciplines of the academy mirrors the global interface itself. Mark Poster outlines how digital technologies like the Internet can traverse the limits of traditional communication models, such as print and broadcast, as follows:

1) Enabling many-to-many communications;
2) Enabling simultaneous reception, alteration, redistribution of cultural objects;
3) Dislocating communicative action from the posts of the nation;
4) Providing instantaneous global contact;
5) Inserting the modern/late modern subject into a networked information machine apparatus.

Humanity is no longer constituted by clearly bounded subjects, but instead begins to function more like a network, in which individuals act “as a point in a circuit.” The global interface serves as the site where this transformation occurs.”
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Radio Arte Mobile

Sound Art Museum, Rome, February 26th, 2005; broadcasting live on http://www.radioartemobile.it (Boston and N. Y. 12:30 p.m.; Bogota 1.30 p.m.; London 5.30 p.m.)

18:30: Larissa Harris at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Boston; Fran?ois Bucher Bogota. Artists participating in the show Inaudita Roma, Ron Kuivila for Art in General New York.

19:00: Daniel Soutif at Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci Prato; Claire Staebler at Radio Day De Appel Amsterdam; Ian Aman, Joachim Granit e; Carsten Holler at Fargfabriken Stockholm; Richard Crow e Lucia Farinati at IOR London
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Performances in Musical Form

“The first examples of what were to become Fluxus event scores date back to John Cage’s famous class at The New School, where artists such as George Brecht, Al Hansen, Allan Kaprow, and Alison Knowles began to create art works and performances in musical form. One of these forms was the event. Events tend to be scored in brief verbal notations. These notes are known as event scores. In a general sense, they are proposal pieces, propositions or instructions.

The first collections of Fluxus event scores were the working sheets for Fluxconcerts. They were generally used only by the artist-peformers who were presenting the work. With the birth of Fluxus publishing, however, colections of event scores soon came to take three forms…” From the introduction to the FluxusPerformanceWork book edited by Ken Friedman, Owen Smith and Lauren Sawchyn.

Free Communication

“Reclaiming the streets, producing an emancipatory public sphere - how does that work in a society that many call the information society, in which it seems that the spectacle has taken the place of political debate, in which urban space is progressively trimmed to neoliberal/economic imperatives. What has thrust itself onto the stage of a globalized public sphere since the protests against the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle[1], politically ambiguous[2] yet unmistakable in the potpourri of forms of expressions, represents a practice of dealing with these kinds of questions.
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