futuresonic event[31], Manchester, the 29th of April -1st of May 2004
By Mauro Cherubini
DAY/PART 0
Nicolas and I arrived in Manchester on the 29th with bad weather conditions. After rumbling the city for a while, taking hundreds of pictures, we decided to rest for a while when we saw the public installation of “Uncle Roy – all around you”[1] presented by the Mixed Reality Lab[2] at the CornerHouse:
Uncle Roy All Around You is where the console game breaks out onto the streets; a game that pitches Online Players around the world alongside players on the real streets of the city. Street Players use handheld computers to search for Uncle Roy, using the map and incoming messages to move through the city. Online Players cruise through a virtual map of the same area, searching for Street Players to help them find a secret destination. Using web cams, audio and text messages players must work together. They have 60 minutes and the clock is ticking…
The same system was presented on the morning of the 1st of May by Matt Adams of Blast Theory. He began with some interesting points – such as a new version of Hakim Bey’s “Temporary Autonomous Zones” (TAZ) played out over mobile phone telephony as a “Temporary Performative Zone” (TPZ) where people have to adjust their body language and voice depending on their location and the social circumstances of their immediate surroundings.
DAY/PART 1
During the morning of the 30th we participated in the Mobile Connection conference, where Sadie Plant started the discussion talking about the social and cultural effects of wireless technologies[3]. Interesting points she described: We need still to have a geographical sense in mobile virtual communication; there is a fear to loose the privacy being traced constantly; Cultural location is an important issue: is not just where we are but also were are you going and where have you been.
After this initial kick off, we enjoyed the panel about Network commons lead by Armin Medosh[4, 5]. His central question is: is it possible to build a network commons? He is interested by this growing-up phenomenon of indipendent networks. This emergence pf people broadcasting network access and resources is against the law, because the government tries to regolate the communication. On the other side people wants to communicate freely. They wants to be connected. With the title Networks commons they want to express the wish for a political vision which gives a value to the technology that should be available to everyone.
The next speacker in the panel, Adam Burns, highlighted the fact the people wants to exchange data and make links, and this is limited politically and technologically. He claims that the way we consume the media can change drammatically if we change the way we access these media. An example of this may be to have a pico GSM cell which would enable the user to have their own local network for calling, surfing the web, exchanging messages[6].
The last speacker in the panel, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, my ex-collegue at MLE, concentrates his talk on what is the acceptable use pollicy of public access wifi nodes. He offered some examples of providers which become territorial and started fighting each-other providing sooper boosted signal which avoid users to access public networks in a certain area. His project, WiFi Hog is an attempt to reclaim back this space through hacking the communication of those providers. The system, in fact, creates noise over the air making communication to those sistems impossible[7].
A possible critic to these discussion could be phrased as the risk of encouraging isolation towards communication which these a hoc network create.
After lunch the talk restarted with the locative media panel. Marc Tuters was coordinating the speeches[8]. Unfortunately Antony Townsend could not make it[9]. Mark went briefly through a definition of what Locative media means:
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][10]
After a flow of descriptions of project was presented. The first one was (area)code[11]: which is an sms mapping system and evolving archive of memories and hidden histories behind five key sites in Manchester city centre:
“A textile trade centre since the Midle Ages Manchester has been transformed into a retail and leisure boomtown. What is the significance of these changes and how do they impact on our daily lives? Are you involved with the decision making process? Have you lost a fovurite place to urban regeneration?”
Other projects: murmur[12], which involves the posting of audio stories of a particular location which gets aggregated through the internet site. Teletaxi[13], a videoclips guide for people moving around with city cabs. The clips were played in accord with the gps location. Other stuff: biomapping[14] and shrinking cities[15].
The following part of the panel was presented by Ben Russell[16] and Anne Galloway[17], which discussed intimate assemblages, locating accountability, problems with black-boxing and technological determinism, amongst other things. An interesting reference which comes out of the discussion was the reference to Buckminster Fuller[18] Dymaxion[19] idea to visualise all UN data into an earth kind of visualization and try to create a common denominator for a shared understanding. The final question of the panel was if the locative media are going to be about maps or if these have to be outside in the streets. Saying if they have to be ubiquitous or less.
DAY/PART II
The day started with a very well structured presentation by Chris Heathcote[20] with the inspiring tite: “The forgotten role of humans in collaborative cartography”. Most of the project running at the moment concentrate in the way information van be added to the system other than concentrating in the way the same information can be retrieved and displayed in an accessible way by the user. His idea is to get the rough location from the system and then ask people to refine. As for the quality of localisation we can say that mental models can be places and things, not postcodes and streets numbers, which are difficult to remember, centainly not GPS, which is incomprehensible to understand, eventually it can be the street crossing or shops names.
Then Chris elencated a couple of principle for designing a localisation system or a locative media: (a) chunkability: find a way to slice the problems into maneagable chunks; (b) accuracy: the accuracy of the tracking we have got already is enough for any kind of reasonable purpose. For instance a person can normally see at 50 meters in a city environment, therefore that should be the edge of the accuracy of our suystem; (c) questioning and disputes: gives the system the possibility to handle conflicts; (d) data expiry: things may change during a short amount of time, the system then should take this into account; (e) data ownership: a bigu issue for enabling strangers to see personal references, but it should also be upfront for future usages; (f) assignments and constitution: this should be codified and open to change.
Another interesting topic is the scale of the project(g). The London data Garden[21] is a good example: increasing scale makes technology harder. How much data do we have to input before the system starts to become useful? (h) Tangibility: how can we give a sense of the nearby data? How can we create tangible explanation? (i) participation: this is a crucial point of the design: participants have to care; the project has to be publicised otherwise is not useful. (l) community: this is the enemble of creators, coders and users; more people participate more community feel is needed. Community need real-world participation.
Afterwards the workshop becomes unstable. In fact, no structure was prepared for the interaction so people started grouping and chatting randamly. At some point, the communication flow auto-organised in a sort of spontaneous presentations.
Jo Walsh[22] presented one of her project called Openguides[23], which is a kind of collaborative cartography using wikis. The project enable the user to search for a particular resource into the city filtering usigng postal coordinates, geographical coordinates, or street names. The system has also an RDF aggregator for a particular zone. At the moment the resources are not displayed in a map style but this kind of feature may be added later on. The system can also be interfaced with other systems of data.
Other projects presented included Blogmapper[24], WorldKit[25], GPSDrawing[26]. The second, WorldKit, is a toolkit, which consists of some php code and a bunch of Flash actionscript, which helps the user to map a prticular content expressed in axml format to be represented in a map environment. Some examples[29, 30].
Finally I have met Mirjam Struppek[27], a german urban planner who has worked for a thesis concerning interactive installations for public spaces. Mirjam argument is that cities are shrinking. This is due to the increasing numbers of people living into the city which produces a “donuts” effect. She reviewed a bounch of techniques which can be used to overcome this effect. She especially concentrated on interactive installations able to give a different sense of the public space to people[28].
She created divided the projects into five categories: (1) Promoting interaction to the fearless confrontation and contact with strangers; (2) Promoting formation of public sphere by criticism, discussion, reflection on the society; (3) Promoting formation of public sphere by criticism, discussion, reflection on the society; (4) Perception of the current development by technology reflecting, sensual system experiences; (5) Activation to the conscious participation in the creation of the public space[28].
REFERENCES
[1] http://www.uncleroyallaroundyou.co.uk/
[2] http://www.mrl.nott.ac.uk/
[3] http://www.motorola.com/mot/doc/0/234_MotDoc.pdf
[4] http://kop.fact.co.uk/
[5] http://www.rixc.lv/ram/
[6] http://www.free2air.org/
[7] http://www.mle.ie/~jonah/projects/wifihog.html
[8] http://www.locative.org/locative/people/artistsw/marctute.html
[9] http://craftsrv1.epfl.ch/MT/mauro/archives/000582.html
[10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
[11] http://www.areacode.org.uk/
[12] http://murmurtoronto.ca/
[13] http://www.year01.com/teletaxi/
[14] http://www.softhook.com/biomap.htm
[15] http://www.shrinkingcities.com/
[16] http://www.headmap.org/
[17] http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org/
[18] http://www.bfi.org/
[19] http://www.wnet.org/bucky/dymap.html
[20] http://www.anti-mega.com/
[21] http://undergroundlondon.com/antimega/archives/000149.html
[22] http://www.locative.org/locative/people/semantic/jowalsh.html
[23] http://openguides.org/
[24] http://www.blogmapper.com/
[25] http://brainoff.com/worldkit
[26] http://www.gpsdrawing.com
[27] http://www.interactionfield.de/
[28] http://culturebase.org/home/struppek/HomepageEnglisch/Kategorien.htm
[29] http://www.kayaktrips.net/geo
[30] http://www.gobayview.com/map
[31] http://www.futuresonic.com/futuresonic/mobile_connections/
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