Re: [-empyre-] locative city, annotated space

["Naomi Spellman" <spellman@34n118w.net>]

hello list.

>  while i think that what is really fascinating in
> your work is that you propose a 'different way to look at' .. being an
> artist, couldn't one think to use tech devices in order to give  people
> a 'methodology' rather than an experience   based on one's
> individuality?
> i haven't yet it so clear, but i think this is an imortant point, i'd
> like to know your opinion..

ruben: recently i had some great conversation with sociologist brian
roberts of huddersfield university, who is working with self narrative,
memory, and healing. Like you he was also excited about the possibility of
one's personal narrative - perhaps their ghosts as you put it - being
drawn out and evolving over the course of this kind of augmented reality
experience. Some of his research centers on  the role that the creation of
personal narrative plays in one's sense of self, one's identity - a very
necessary activity which we perform constantly. We are always assessing,
mulling over, articulating, explaining and acting on a sequence of events
as we see it, and the meaning we attribute to these events is paramount.
One of the things we discussed is jeff and my attempt in the project we
are currently developing to insert the audience into the narrative, albeit
at this point in a crude way. the idea is that we will rely on the end
user to give some personal information  - name, general area of residence,
a particular place one has been thinking about, etc - to personalize an
onsite narrative experience. so, there is a hard-wired stucture and
content, but  the immediate details are soft - relying on the specific day
and place, as well as the user.

i agree this is a powerful idea, and when i think about projects like
Memex, vannevar bush's 1945 visionary application that remembers and
responds to the life of an individual in detail, or Scott Fischer's work
in VR, AI, and telepresence (1980's to present)-  and then tie it with
other more intuitive projects that respond in a sensual or perceptory
fashion - such as Layla gaye's Sonic City (2003), a reactive audio
composition using biometric sensors, or aki maebayashi's Sonic Interface
(1999) -  it seems that the possibilities are very exciting, and one can
start to configure any number of experimental works that could be really
engaging, as well as practical commercial applications that could be
really useful or really scary.

at that point  i start to think how perverse it is to develop a system
that reacts closely to an individuals' body, placement, thoughts. so that
the devices we rely on normally to express and read  these signs - our
tactile, olafactory, sight, and hearing instruments - are sidelined or
disavowed for the time being. it is like virtual reality in the 80's,
which seemed to become an obsessiv end in itself which - outside of its
practical function - now seems extreme. easy to say in retrospect, now
that the limits of virtual reality as a construct (how real can it be) and
in terms of audience interest  have been explored, and now that we have
the possibility of inserting the virtual directly into the audience space
through mobile or embedded technologies.

Someone brought up the issue of how to name this type of work. I see
mobile media going off in so many interesting directions incorporating
combinations of data, place, biometrics, location, social networking
(interconnected among participants in a group), and now commercially
viable applications such as Tag n' Scan in the UK. In New York where we
will be presenting our new piece one can't rely on GPS due to building
height interference with GPS line of site. The festival
(http://spectropolis.info/) is showcasing experimental wireless projects
relying on outdoor wireless internet access. The new possibility of
relying on outdoor wireless AP's or meshes spread out over a space, more
and more common in urban areas at least, made us reframe our idea of what
location aware means, and tie any sense of location or environment or user
specifiicity to content in this case. Drew Hemment, who writes about and
curates experimental mobile  and sound projects, has suggested "embedded
media" as a term for this kind of work. It seems to work well, in that it
does encompass any currently or imagined telecom transmission
possibilities out there. Ultimately, most of these technologies will be
embedded, at least in dense population areas. so perhaps at that point it
will no longer be a distinguishing factor. How to distinguish between
embedded and portable, proprietary or opensource, private or public,
commercial or experimental, art or guidebook, performance or installation?
 I prefer to observe and be inspired by what's out there, think about what
can be accessed with the means at hand. I leave this up to the curators!
this is a hairy issue (see the list new media curating list for endless
debates on the name issue 
http://www.newmedia.sunderland.ac.uk/crumb/phase3/main_frame.html )  In
reaading the current month's debate on the crumb list and the postings
there from April  2004, it is clear that the issue of framing new media
work (its language as well as its exhibition venues) in a time when
notions of historic relevance, author, master, audience, and even the term
art are all being challenged, is a tricky problem, one that is being
pulled in many directions due to political positions and to how a trend in
new media is at any given moment percieved - this changes constantly.

I like to think of the kind of work we are pursuing as interpretive media,
because the location, the history or events associated with it, the
audience, any data, are all pre-existing, and being exploited or
manipulated in order to hopefully build an experience that incorporates
these factors in a meaningful way.

I think Lev Manovich's article The Poetics of Augmented Space
(manovich.net) is worth reading because he lays out a trajectory from
tromp l'oiel through las vegas to installation work to mobile cell space
in an attempt to frame all this historically. .

One resource I would highly recommend to anyone is Jonah Bruecker Cohen's
Blog, at http://coin-operated.com/ because he keeps up with and catalogues
so many interesting developments in experimental mobile media. He is
making wonderful projects himself as well which are maybe more about
rethinking our relationship to adn use of existing teleom technologies as
a society, versus building a specific experience as jeff, jeremy and
myself have been concentrating on.

another thing I spotted in this list:
>> I do see these technologies becoming quite commonplace in a not too
>> distant future.  A lot will utilize smart lens technology which is
>> currently being developed for such applications as high rise building
>> visual field data overlays for hostage situations.....data placed on
>> rooms with security officials, rooms overlaid with data of possible
>> suspects, danger levels color encoded.......

Is this smart lens the same as Celdar, being used like radar in the UK to
land planes, and also being used to look inside dark buildings, around
corners, by the military? This would be an ulta cool thing to get hold of
as an artist. I imagine how it would be to hack this space - to reimagine
an existing space on the fly, so that it is misread or misnavigated, or so
that it mutates. But for me it is like trying to get hold of 3D
prototyping facility - a nice idea, but where and how. . .

naomi


> hi!
>
> i think this is very interesting, i like this suggestion of layers of
> data and informations
>  that are usually not experienced, interlaced with the first layer of
> reality, the one that we usually perceive, and with the other
> stratified layers of past..
> it's like a kind of magic that through technological devices the two
> invisible layers, the data and the past, can be embodied in something
> that can be sensed, and mixed with the physical reality of what is 'here
> and now'.. well, in my opinion technological devices are not the problem
> in this case, they are becoming every day less invasive and at the same
> time more present, we are going to live all kind of machinery as a
> natural part of our body or environment as we already do  with things
> like telephones or elevators or airplanes, i am quite sure about that; i
> think this is an interesting general question, the issue of
> human/machine interaction..
>
> but in  the case of 34n there is another thing i was thinking about..i
> was thinking a lot about it this weekend, i tried to look the city
> surrounding me focusing more on the invisible layers..the point is that
> every person has its own ghosts! even in the same place and at the same
> time, with the same 'boundary conditions', imagination works in
> unexpected ways.. if i understand, in your work you 'choose'  a number
> of 'ghosts', based on your personal experience/knowledge/imagination of
> the places, and propose them to the participants.. you propose
> 'something to look at', while i think that what is really fascinating in
> your work is that you propose a 'different way to look at' .. being an
> artist, couldn't one think to use tech devices in order to give  people
> a 'methodology' rather than an experience   based on one's
> individuality?
> i haven't yet it so clear, but i think this is an imortant point, i'd
> like to know your opinion..
>
>
> ruben
>
> http://people.na.infn.it/~rcoen
>        ~(R)~
>
>
>
>> Others, like 34n are working more with sound and data and this allows
>> a focus on physical place and content can work with layered data,
>> metaphor, juxtapositions, ghosts of past incarnations as sound files
>> so a person sees the physical place and learns to question it as well
>> learn more of it in present and past.
>
>
>
>> Some of the sound files are old wooden carriage wheels, an older car
>> horn and trains where remnant tracks appear in streets or where trains
>> would have passed.  The effect is almost always people startled
>> looking for the car or train or even carriage (all what would have
>> been heard at different times in the past) and then realizing what
>> just happened.
>
>
>
>> I do see these technologies becoming quite commonplace in a not too
>> distant future.  A lot will utilize smart lens technology which is
>> currently being developed for such applications as high rise building
>> visual field data overlays for hostage situations.....data placed on
>> rooms with security officials, rooms overlaid with data of possible
>> suspects, danger levels color encoded.......
>>
>> The artistic applications are endlessly exciting
>>
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>


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mining the urban landscape