ART511 - Locative Studio Spring 2008

Net_Dérive
“Their work sets up social interactions, supported by mobile phones and internet technologies, within a loose network of people that are exploring a city, in this particular case the urban environment around the exhibition space near the Bastille in Paris. From the paths they take and the experiences they have, a collective narrative emerges which is fed back through audiovisual means to each participant and thus shapes their evolving experience.”

I couldn’t get their video to work, but got a sense of their goals achieved through the description and accompanying photos on the article about this piece at We Make Money Not Art dot com.  I feel this project may be a new way to collect personal experiential information to publish to other media such as websites and blogs.  To have a map created, photos taken, and audio recorded, and uploaded instantly to the web might be a fun way for people to share their experiences online fairly effortlessly.  Quality of recorded media–mainly the photos and the audio–is my only concern since the devices just kind of “hang” in the scarf piece and really aren’t totally directed by the person wearing them at anything in particular.

Perhaps the software coupled to a GPS enabled cell phone with a built in camera would be more approachable and useful on a consumer level.  Some kind of all-in-one device that would automatically import to a blog entry would be a smooth way to make entries, without the hassle of uploading photos and audio via internet connection at a computer–not to mention creating a kml or kmz file–to a server host such as Flickr from a camera.  And with the jump from Alphanumeric key pads to full alphabet key pads on mobile phones, text entries could also be attached to the blog file.  An early precursor to this potential sort of real-time blogging service is my friend’s blog that he started not too long ago.  http://www.espressoandmilk.com  He has it set up so that he can take and send pictures with his camera phone along with a text entry to the blog from cafes in order to post his personal reviews of cafes and the coffee that they serve.  I like the model a lot, seeing as there’s always time to take on my commute or anywhere I am in public to think and journal, but I never have the time at home, nor do I want to sit in front of the computer anymore than I already have to.   There was discussion in our readings of the land line being replaced by the mobile phone, to which I agree; personally, I don’t have a land line, only my cell phone.  I imagine that our computers at home may someday be replaced at least in a large part by these all-in-one phones, as far as communication goes.