panoramas + 3D
my first try at making a quilted panorama.
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my second try
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my first (and, so far, only) attempts at 3D
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September 26, 2005
September 24, 2005
Playing FLICKR
Playing FLICKR is a public space installation by Mediamatic on the 11th floor of the PostCS building in Amsterdam. The diners in bar/restaurant/club 11 will be subjected to the wrath of fellow visitors SMSing whatever keyword they want to the installation that pulls photos from the online community flickr and projects them onto Restaurant 11's huge panoramic screens.
from [telecom-cities]
September 23, 2005
Cell Scavenger
Cell carriers don't often make the location of cell towers publicly accessible, which means that customers won't know if they'll get good coverage (it's also a pain from the point of view of "location-based storytelling" since knowing cell location would be a big step towards generating automated location-awareness).
Cell Phone Reception and Tower Search, however, has a "searchable databases of over 117,000 cell phone tower locations registered with the FCC, and over 16,000 cell phone carrier comments submitted voluntarily from real customers using their service all over the U.S."
Some of the towers in L.A. are amusingly disguized to look like Palm trees and stuff. I spotted one on my down Washington the other day. I think I'm gonna start a new set to my Flickr photostream dedicated to cell scavenging.
September 18, 2005
Digital Derive & Redefining the Basemap
Kazys Varnelis from the Annenberg's Networked Publics research lab forwarded me this link that he's found on Archinect. The Digital Derive project will be shown at the M-City exhibition (curator: Marco De Michelis) in Kunsthaus Graz, Oct 01, 2005 - Jan 08, 2006.
"Digital Derive harnesses the potential of mobile phones as an affordable, ready-made and ubiquitous medium that allows the city to be sensed and displayed in real-time as a complex, pulsating entity... Digital Derive (re)presents the city displayed simultaneously in the Kunsthaus Graz and in a publicly accessible website... The Real-Time City Map will register and visually render the volume and geographic source of cell phone usage in Graz, thus showing a different layer in the use and experience of the city. Furthermore the users of A1 Mobilkom Austria in Graz will be tracked anonymously by 'pinging' their cell phones as they move through the city. The record of this movement will be collected, processed and finally displayed as set of dynamic traces showing their paths through the city on the same map..."
The rendering of the peaks & valleys of cell phone usage here is reminscent of some oceanographic map of a deep sea trench, as if the city were drowned in a tsunami of spectrum (immersive media?).
As astonishing as this image is, the Digital Derive project arguably reproduces a static notion of urban space by using a conventional GIS overlay aesthetic. As Ali Sant notes in a text she has written about her "Trace" project, a collaboration with Ryan Shaw, entitled "Redefining the Basemap":
"Current collaborative mapping projects using locative media technologies have often overlooked the conventions of the basemap as a site for reinvention. Although these projects imagine alternative organizations of urban space through the way it is digitally mapped, they remain bounded by datasets that reinforce a Cartesian and static notion of urban space."
Thus reading the Digital Derive through Ali, perhaps the next big step for locative projects interested in mapping how a space is actually "practiced" will be to deform the base map into a kind of cartogram of cell usage.
Here I consider those famous "purple maps" of the last US election as deeply inspirational.
September 13, 2005
Friday Night File Share & The Database Imagination of Andreas Kratky
Some of us have been discussing the idea of putting on a (semi)regular IMD evening event for local media artists to share ideas (and media).
Remember the heyday of Napster when you could see what people had in their hard drives? Why is file sharing anonomous? It's social activity right? So I'm proposing a file sharing party... you bring your hard drive... you live mix your favourite music and video... and talk about what's "hot" over a drink and a Cat5 cable...
What I'm hoping for, is that, ideally, the whole thing will eventually evolve into a laptop mash-up jam session. For this first week though, I'm not expecting that, just yet. So, I'm pleased to announce that Andreas Kratky has offered to provide some focuss by showing-off his collaboration with Lev Manovich "Soft Cinema" as a centre piece of the evening.
Abstract:
"Soft Cinema mines the creative possibilities at the intersection of software culture, cinema, and architecture. Its manifestations include films, dynamic visualizations, computer-driven installations, architectural designs, print catalogs, and DVDs. In parallel, the project investigates how the new representational techniques of soft(ware) cinema can be deployed to address the new dimensions of our time, such as the rise of mega-cities, the "new" Europe, and the effects of information technologies on subjectivity"
So... you're encouraged to bring your own media (and, of course, liquor) to the Santa Fe Art Colony this Friday evening (7pm).
Diclaimer: Santa Fe Art Colony assumes all files exchanged will be released under an open content licence.
(please email me for directions: mt AT x-i DOT net)
September 12, 2005
Locative blogs
All the sites mentioned here are worth (RSS) subscribing to if you're taking "Location-Based Mobile Media: Maps, Games and Stories", or if you just interested in locative media.
* "Angermann2" blog from new media art world (don't be put off by the somewhat avante-gard design aestehtic), about AI, architecture, art, audio, brainstorm, cartography, computing, conference, default, ethnography, hacking, haptic, information design, location-awareness, mobile, mundane, retro, social, space-place, spatial, swarming, urban, walking, wearing, wi-fi, and stuff.
* "We Make Money Not Art" a G-R-E-A-T site which looks at locative media as new media art, (for more specific focuss on location-based wireless select the "We Make Money Not Art locative tag"
* "Networked Performance" http://www.turbulence.org/blog/ a site looking at locative media, augmented reality, distributed performance, environmental theatre, pervasive play, immersive gaming, telepresence?...??? (once again for more specific focuss on location-based wireless select the "Networked Performance locative tag" on the right side of the screen)
* "In duce" an extremely comprehensive site on all things locative related
* del.icio.us is a bookmark sharing application, that is useful for all kinds of things, here i've included the link to the "del.icio.us locative tag"
* "Elastic Space" Timo Arnall's blog of things locative. (Kazys says "his Flickr stream is equally engaging")
* "Purse Lips Square Jaw" a research blog by Anne Galloway, concerned with urban space and mobile/ubiquitous technology
"pasta and vinegar"http://tecfa.unige.ch/perso/staf/nova/blog/
Nic Nova's blog, exhaustively researched. The place to go for anything locative
"informationlab"
Auke Touwslager's research blog, concerned with locative public space and social network mapping
"fish are people too"
Andrew Wilson and Gilbert Roberts' blog: "What will happen when we've all got these gadgets (the next mobile phone you buy will probably be one) and how and why will it happen? "
Urban Blogs
Thoughts on mobility and urbanism from Anthony Townsend, a pre-eminent researcher now working out of Institute for the Future.
Anti Mega
Chris Heathcote is a researcher working for Nokia's Insight and Foresight group.
September 8, 2005
What are World Expos For?
Two weeks ago, in the Interactive Media Seminar, Scott presented some home movies from his visit to the last Expo in Aichi. I've been meaning to comment on the presentation for a while now.
In the publicirty that he showed us for the Aichi Expo, it was billed as "the first World Expo in the 21st C". To me this begs the question, "why drag this 19th V convention into a new millenium"? Haven't World Fairs outlived their usefulness?
Early World Fairs were essentially forums for 19th colonial powers to show off the wealth of nations (which, some say, agrivated rivalries, leading to the wars). They also had a strong interventionist component, where they reimagining urban spaces. The spectacular visions presented at World Expositions such as the White City at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, inspired intense reactions ranging from The Wizard of Oz's Frank L Baum who modeled Oz on the White City, to the father of modern architecture Lous Sullivan who was appauled by its faux-baroque decadence. In the context of contemporary urban sociology (the "LA school"), it is also interesting to note that World's Fair historians the White City was in some regards the prototypical "simcity" or "careceral archipleago", carefully managed to keep ethnicities out as much as to keep the spectracle in.
In the 20th C World Fairs further developed these themes, but also functioned as temples to new consumer technologies. While the 19th C World Fairs tended to hide the march of industrialism under the guise of the neogothic, the great 1939 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows NY helped established the Buck Rogers "look of the future", particualrly through GM's Futurama exhibit, which featured the famed Trylon and Perisphere (pictured above). The '39 World Fair was considered a high point for the era, as the was the '67 Expo in Montreal (which also featured a sphere though this time a Buckysphere).
'39 signalled a new phase in World Fairs in which corporations used them to prepare the ground for acceptance of their visions of the future. According to STS theorist Richard Rogers, GM's vision of a automotive utopia in Futurama set the tone for what he called the "zero friction society"
Richard Rogers argues that aver the past 50 years the ideological function of World Fairs to train the public in the use of technologies has however arguably been rendered irrelevant by the growth of the consumer society. We no longer need to go to a temple of progress to be trained to accept corporate visions of the future, a theory developed in Alfred Heller's "World's Fairs and the End of Progress". So what then was the point of Expo 2005 in Aichi? Perhaps today, World Fairs have become venues for interactive installtion artists interested in producing works with grand narrative themes.
