Monthly Archive for April, 2004

Locative media workshop @futuresonic

urbis-workshop tuters-russel-galloway

On-the-fly notes_

Futuresonic 04, Manchester 30th of April 2004

Sadie Plant: social and cultural effects of wireless technologies

Whe need still to have a geographical sense. There is a fear to loose the privacy. Cultural location is an important issue. Is not just where we are but alse we are you going and where have you been.

Network commons: Armin Medosh

Building indipendent networks is a growing-up phenomenon. This goes against laws because the government tries to regulate the communication. On the other side people wants to communicate. They wwnts to be conneccted.

Technology does not change the world. We make technologies. We the title “network commons” they want to express the wish for a political vision which gives a value to the technology that should be available to everyone.

Is it possible to build a network commons? Is it possible with the kind of technology we have? The democracy we have is a kind of represantationism. We look at this circumstances with the aim of realising a global plant to bring power back to people. Another hint is that the technological development of this should be back to people and not controlled by the government or corporates.

Network commons: Adam Burns

I have been working in network security. Leading the gorup free2air, and work with the group consume. Is the only free network in uk at the moment. I would like to exand on this idea of networks commons. The first idea is that people wants to exchange data and make links. This is limited politically and technologically. The way we see madia and the way we consume media can change isf we change the way we access these media. There is already technology that enables us to talk with the power lines.

An example of this may be to have a pico GSM cell which would enable the users to have their own local network for calling, surfing the web, exchanging messages.

Network commons: Jonah Brucker-Cohen

This project is called WiFi-hog. The context in which has been developed is the ownersip of a wireless space.

“Do public wireless networks endeager a rejection of hirarchy and the dissolution of social stratification.” [Jurgen Habermas]

The point of the project is “What is the acceptable use policy of public acess wifi nodes?” What happens when provider vbecome territorial?

How do you catch a WiFi hog? So finally the aim of the project was to increase awareness on the control of the wireless networks and to make people aware of the way their space is “invaded”. Also the goal is to enable people to choose a public network against aprivate one.

Richair.waag.org: finall holdout of the free network nodes.

What does it mean a “network of trust”?

We are already the infostructure surrounding us anyway. We start to have network in our homes. We need to rething profoundly the way we consider our communications. {cyberco/cibiko}

With the connection of ad-hoc group there is also the closeness of the group aspect. The communication may be confinated into the group without any possibility to span to different domains. An example of this may be “Dodge Ball”.

What does it mean decentralization? There should be a connection between the the decentralised discussion and bringing then the decentralised bits back into a centralised sharing otherwise we can still get to the isolation problem.

Locative media: Mark Tuters

the locative case corresponds vaguely to the preposition “in”, “at”, “by” of english and indicates a final location of action or a time of the action. Locative media and mobile urbanism. [wikipedia]

area(code) – is a mobile phone project where you can access data about manchester at a different location. We were interested in the rigeneration process that is going on around Manchester at the moment.

murmur.ca involve the posting of audio stories from particular locations which gets aggregated through the internet site.

teletaxi – a vigeoclips guide for people moving around with cabs. The clips were played in accord with the gps location.

?? – how new media is going into public spaces and how these new media can influence a revival. “Shrinking cities”. interactionfield.de

Anne Galloway & Ben Russell
intimate assemblieties – accountabilities
We talk about technologies about what they are but how about talking about how they become to be? From the cradle to the graves we have to think about the physical impact of these technological tings.

Machine learning is mercyless. I am scared by the idea that everything you say is going to be remembered for the rest of your life and in a particular form.

The performative dimension of technology has to deal with how people really use it, rather than how they represent it or how they simbolise it.

Is nice to talk about digital object because in fact they can be exchanged so they start to be perceived as real.

What is the functionality of a breackdown?

Assuming that locative media are not necessarily LBS, what is promising about them and what is the deceit? Well, the bad side is that a person is alredy tracked a lot. The positive side of them is that …

Location is about context.

Buckminster Fuller proposed to visualise all UN data into an earth kind of visualization and try to create a common denominator for a certain understanding. A map is not a territory (Nico …)

The final question if the locative media is going to be about maps or if this has to be outside in the street.

Futuresonic workshop in Manchester

Locative media workshop in Manchester this week.
urbis-workshop

Location awareness and opinion forming

This last period I have been thinking about these ideas on localised communication. The only glimpse which I had is to connect in some ways the notion of space with the opinion forming. To do this we can take two context in which a communication system is supported by location references: in the first case you take the physical geographical reference (like in the shoutSpace idea); otherwise you take the offer a more contextual reference (like in the ThinkPill idea). Then is possible to compare the outcomes of these two different systems to see what’s going on and how people are using the references into the message and for which purpose. This eventually reflect on the cognition and on the opinion forming.

AUTO CRIT: I don’t have a clear idea of what is “opinion forming”. I don’t know how to tackle this field; I don’t see where the learning is and finally I don’t find a interest still.

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TeamFrames second questionnaire construction

We have recently brainstormed about the construction of the second questionnaire for TF. We mainly discussed about the methodology concerning TF. First of all what we want to take out of this project is how a technological interface can support the group management in the epfl population.
Therefore we need to define some categories and caracterise them with a certain usage style of the internet site. Secondarily we want to show that is possible to predict that a person belong to a certain category looking at the usage pattern of the site.

From the methodological point of view we also discussed the way of achieving this goal. We started defining the three group of students through the analysis of the first questionnaire. The next step is to design the second questionnaire in a way to proof that the categories of the first are correct.

A second perspective suggested by Patrick is to build other questions starting from scratch. After we can again create some profiles and make a comparison between the profiles of Q1 and those of Q2.

In conclusion is that the following step is to find contextualised questions concerning situations which really happened or in hypothetical situations. We need to define a couple of events with some example of behavior which distinguish between the different profiles we have in mind.

(0)

Secrets in the city

This is another example of hidden messages spread through the city. It was left using a “stencil”. It represents a person injecting something in the throat os someone else. It is quite scary and violent. On the right hand side there are three dots which probable may refer to an additional information to the symbol. It may be the distance from the sigh or even the day of the month in which the meeting should happen. The title also is quite scary: “Astuzia y Dolor”, in Spanish: “Smartness” and pain …
astuzia

Hidden communication in the city

This is one of the hidden communication systems I am trying to trace in Torino. It was clearly left using a “stencil” and it represents a small ninja.
hiddenninja

Alba

One of the old building on the pedestrian promenade of Alba.
alba

A postcard

The view on the lake from EPFL: a postcard!
fleurs

Margherite

Spring is here. I like small field flowers like this. Barely anyone take a look at these things, which is why I like them.
fleurs

Milano

Milan city centre is not like Italy … This is the only truly italian multicultural city. I heard many voices, many languages …
milano

A swan

A Swan.
lacleman

Lac Leman

This is the best place I have found in Switzerland so far … I like a lot to walk around the lake and sit for a while looking at this while rambling around with my thoughts.
lacleman

Il Po alla Mandria

Il Po passa lento …
la mandria

Non-Places, by Marc Augè

Non-Places, Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, by Marc Auge,

Translated by John Howe

Verso

Due/Published June 1995, 128 pages, paper

ISBN 1859840515

As an increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets, airports, hotels, on motorways or infront of TV and computer screens. Marc Auge investigates the profound alteration of awareness that has resulted from this invasion of non-places.

Marc Augè

Marc Augé

Marc Augé a présidé l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales de 1985 à 1995. Directeur de recherches à l’ORSTOM jusqu’en 1970, puis directeur d’études à l’EHESS, il a effectué de nombreuses missions en Afrique, principalement en Côte d’Ivoire et au Togo. Depuis le milieu des années 1980, il a diversifié ses champs d’observation, effectuant notamment plusieurs séjours en Amérique Latine et essayant d’observer les réalités du monde contemporain dans son environnement le plus immédiat (Paris, la France).

Il est l’auteur de nombreux ouvrages, dont : Génie du Paganisme (Gallimard, 1982), La Traversée du Luxembourg (1985), Un ethnologue dans le métro (1986), Non-Lieux (Seuil, 1992), Domaines et châteaux (1992), Le sens des autres (Fayard 1994), Pour une anthropologie des mondes contemporains (Aubier 1994), Fictions fin de siècle (Fayard, 2000), Journal de guerre (Galilée 2002)…