Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Re: [Yasmin_discussions] hybrid city as interface

Dear Martin

You may be interested in a particular 'take' that a group of us have working
on called the Comob project.

Jen Southern and I have used the software (iPhone and Nokia) in workshops at
ISEA and FutureEverything.

http://www.comob.org.uk/

Comob is a digital arts project that explores the potential for
collaborative mapping with GPS technology. Comob was developed as a research
tool to explore social and spatial relationships between people in motion.
There are a free iPhone and Nokia applications that support this research.
The software allows members of groups to see each others movement in real
time on their mobile phones. The group is linked together by a line that
shows their relative spatial distribution. We use this Olinked line¹ to
inform a Ocollaborative conversation¹ in real-time ­ in actual urban
environments. People have been asked to work together to map pollution as a
Omob¹ in the past, the discussions that happen Oin the field¹ between a
group of people who don¹t necessarily agree with what pollution is always
provokes peronsal insights into how a landscape it understood.
The idea was initiated as a digital arts project to explore social
relationships across space.

see the blog link at the website.

hope it helps


Chris

On 27/07/2010 15:55, "Martin Rieser" <martin.rieser@gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Yasminers
>
> This discussion is gradually moving in circles around certain key issues. I
> think the questions that are emerging are about real depth of *audience
> engagement,* the *radical* potential of these new technologies of mapping
> and location (Daphne and Roger) also see;
> Brian Holmes Drifting Through the Grid (
> http://www.springerin.at/dyn/heft_text.php?textid=1523&lang=en) and the *
> quality* of existing examples of interventions. This is also true of the
> use of urban screens and integrated technologies in architectural surfaces,
> as raised by Iouliani (I would cite the work of Art+Com for examples of
> subtle uses of such embedded technology in public space).
>
> I do feel we need a longer period of artistic development and better
> tool-sets for artists to realise this potential, Locative media has only
> been around for about 8 years as an accessible technology and has really
> only gone mainstream for the last five. That is a very short period to
> realise outstanding work artistically, or even to integrate coherent
> artistic vision into public demonstrations. At present artists can
> principally use mscape (http://www.mscapers.com/) - a technology tied until
> recently only to Windows Mobile phones or construct their own iphone apps
> There are other freeware solutions out there , but none for artists as easy
> to adapt as digital music or video software technologies. So please keep the
> examples coming, particularly at the sharp end of mapping interventions. The
> overhyping of emergent technologies is not a new phenomenon, but is
> invariably followed by a period of disappointment, which really masks the
> process of consolidation, which I believe is what is happening at present
>
> Martin
>
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 11:35 AM, Iouliani Theona <iouliani@gmail.com>wrote:
>
>>> Dear all,
>>>
>>> travelling around the Greek periphery, throughout small cities, I found
>> it
>>> hard to participate in this ­extremely interesting- discussion due,
>> mainly,
>>> to connectivity issues. I couldn¹t help but wonder, if in this country,
>> in
>>> the southeast of Europe, the Ospace of flows¹ is far from a continuum,
>> then
>>> what can be said about the actual process of urban hybridization?
>>>
>>> Having a more design-oriented background I was ­and still remain-
>>> interested in the incorporation of interfaces in persistent architectural
>>> forms, such as buildings and especially public spaces, thinking this is a
>>> proper and rather efficient way to reach large groups of citizens and
>>> various social groups, without the need of rather expensive mobile
>> devices
>>> and access to high bandwidth networks, that support some locative media
>>>
>>> So, we went from urban screens, to fabrics, to membranes, to smart
>>> ­building- skins, to projections and to any sort of manipulation of the
>>> available surfacesS
>>>
>>> S but what have we learned from Prada? As much as Lev Manovich (The
>> Poetics
>>> of Augmented Space: Learning from Prada (2002),
>>> http://www.manovich.net/TEXTS_07.HTM) was optimistic while authoring
>> OThe
>>> Poetics of Augmented Space¹, it can be claimed that after a cycle of
>>> experimentation, not much is left.
>>>
>>> Maybe it is a matter of the limitations of the screen, maybe it¹s due to
>>> the content that is displayed and how it is related to the actual
>>> architecture itself, its use and its internal processes, the majority of
>>> such interfaces don¹t succeed in intriguing the potential user out of her
>>> daily routine, to engage her in novel spatial experiences and
>> interactions,
>>> and are gradually rendered invisible.
>>>
>>> So what¹s in store?
>>>
>>> Content in a surface is a retinal object and therefore is easily
>>> intelligible. Efforts towards a more invisible hybridization pose, yet
>>> again, questions that are very well articulated by Daphne in her 16/7
>>> contribution, about how can such projects be used to involve/address
>>> different social groups, other than a technologically privileged and
>>> advanced class.
>>>
>>> Kind regards,
>>>
>>> Iouliani Theona
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Iouliani Theona
>> Architect/PhD Candidate
>> NTUA Athens
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>


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