ART511 - Locative Studio Spring 2008

We want to beautify the Fine Arts building on the San Francisco State University campus with student interactive texting and computer controlled projections of scenes, artwork, or photos to make it a more inspiring place to learn and make art.

The Fine Arts building is nothing like either of us imagined it would be when we first attended school at SF State.  Not only is it difficult to navigate through its various disjointed parts, but it is visually uninspiring both on the inside and the out.  Vast walls of cheap beige spray-plaster, white walls, windowless classrooms, fluorescent lighting grey floors, and blank modern functional fascades all contribute to the lack of creativity and inspiration that this building vibes.  Both being art majors, this was very disappointing.  The building’s exterior is bland, gentrified even, and above all, completely uninspiring.  It might as well be a hospital.  This is not an accurate reflection of the students working inside…or is it?  Would a more inspiring place to work and learn and develop one’s craft and art and style affect the output of the creative projects and evdeavors produced therein?  This is our assertion.

Since the physical features can not be altered without serious ramifications, graffiti projects can not be executed without having to remove the artwork, and the processes that allow “approved” artwork and/or murals can take months, even years to complete, we would like to use projection as our main media.  It is completely removable, portable, and has the potential to remain dynamic and changeable.  If an outdoor location is not viable for successful projection–conflicts with the sun–the interior is almost as uninspiring save for a few temporary installations sprinkled throughout the building.  Students will be able to text a disclosed word (disclosed perhaps on posters or in a text or BlueTooth issued text image) to a texting service number that will activate the projector and potentially a particular image matched to a certain word.  The associated word used may reflect in some way the image shown.  I like the idea of stickering or wheatpasting in public places the words and our webpage name to complete the circle as Loca did in their BlueTooth project “Set to Discoverable.”

We would also like to create a webpage (probably WordPress blog format) to share the project’s intentions, documentation, and potentially, an interactive interface where students can upload their own image and attach a text word to the image.  This will allow other students to help spread the word about the project by sharing the text password for their image plus the texting service number so other people can call up that image.  A digital projector is needed, along with a laptop computer with WiFi capabilities, electrical supply, a texting service account, a little programming time, and some ugly blank walls and corridors (which we already have a lot of).

We aren’t certain on the texting process but will be doing research to ascertain the direction we need to be headed in.  Any suggestions would be appreciated in lieu of that and also in lieu of connecting the texting to a computer to a projector.  Perhaps blue tooth might be a better way to go about the interactivity part, and would add to the locative value of the project; students would have to be in the area to upload a photo or other image to the computer and to activate it.  I discovered the “Use As Remote Screen” on my phone We aren’t certain what is possible given time, equipment, or programming, and would appreciate a little coaching, but that so far is our initial dream for this project.

I was searching on the “We make money not art” website when I came across this article about this art installation. It reminded me of the ropes and shims installation I saw at Jack Rabbit Hall during orientation last October. I enjoy how this artist is trying to explore what they describe as the tension between nature and technology as this struggle is something that continuously plagues my consciousness. Another theme that is implied but not explicitly discussed is the tension with the emergent social changes due to the scale of acceptance on these technologies.

Web of the Day

I just wanted to drop a few lines about the mediascape projects that everyone did.  The projects were fun and entertaining, I especially liked the fact that a majority of projects were musically based.  As for the creation of the projects, it was difficult in the begining, but over the development time of the projects, it became much more engaging to work on.  Good job on all of the mediascapes that were created.

http://www.mercurynews.com/olympics/ci_8863095

As news breaks along the relay route, points are updated on the map so you can follow it in very close to live time.  Sofar many people have begun lining the route awaiting the torch.

I found this interesting, although it may not be art, it is locative…

There’s no denying it: during the production of these mediascape projects there were a number of technological shortcomings that were nothing short of mildly perturbing.  Aside from the obvious (technology and software that actually works), I’ve been thinking about features that would be really nice to have had.

I thought that Mscape had a fairly decent user interface that was easy enough for a beginner to get into, but there was also a lack of features (possibly because it was a beta version).  I would have really liked Mscape to have uni-directional polygons or some sort of similar feature that would allow a sound to be triggered when the person walks across a marker in one direction, but not when going in the opposite direction.  Or possibly a hole that could sit in the middle of a polygon and nullify existing sounds.  This could probably be done with scripting tricks but I wasn’t successful in my attempts to do it.

And, oh, the eternal crisis of GPS drift…  We need Local Positioning Devices that could just sit fixed in local locations and then send us relative local position information.  It would work like map aligner, but give us our GPS coordinates based on it’s calculations.  As the Local Positioning Devices record their GPS information, they would average their positions and give us much more stable information based on their data.

I think there was more, but this is all I remember…

“Transforming Cultures and Communities in the Age of Instant Access”

A Professor of mine recommended this book and for those of us concerned with the subject of cell phones and culture I thought this book would be relevant. So far I’m enjoying reading excerpts from this book even though I am using it as a resource for a term paper.

I found this website that has a few mediascape projects on it:

http://artnetweb.com/guggenheim/mediascape/

Here is a passage from one of the pages.

Raw Material: Brrr (1990) by Bruce Nauman, another early practitioner of video art, also compresses experience into intense bursts of electronic image and sound. Images of the artist’s face are shown on two TV monitors, with a similar image projected onto an adjacent wall. Unlike the “talking heads” seen on TV, these faces have little to tell us, as they repeatedly blurt, in a nonsensical gesture, the simple monosyllable “Brrr.”

I was not impressed by the actual website itself, I felt like it could use some development to make it easier to navigate and help it be more intuitive, but going through it I found some interesting projects. I also though the fact that it was sponsored by the Guggenheim was pretty cool.

Personally I was pretty irritated by my own mediascape project until last week when we were able to work out all the kinks. I would have developed it further and made changes according to the beta testing, but since we had limited resources for computers, it changed the way the project came out. My biggest gripe would be that the software NEEDS to be duel platform. In this day and age Macs are just as popular among designers and artists as PCs, and for a software company to succeed they really need to accomodate both types of computers.

Penguin books has so far published 3 stories based on maps, with 3 coming up in the next three weeks. The first one is “The 21 Steps”, by Charles Cummings. Try it out: http://wetellstories.co.uk/stories/week1/

I find it to be interesting, I’m on chapter 8 so far. It might be more relevant if I had been to the locations themselves, but my imagination has put me into the story, so that whatever the medium, it is still enjoyable.

I googled GPS drawing just to see what would come up in the search and was interested by this website. http://www.gpsdrawing.com/ Here you can learn to draw or make art by using GPS images. there is a peice right on the front page from Isambard School (which is another name for Isambard Kingdom Brunel University…the school I will be going to to study Design if I get accepted into the study abroad program.)

Taken from the site:

This exhibition includes maps made to inform or to entertain, maps enhanced by imaginative embellishments, maps that show imaginary places, and works in which artists have adapted map iconography to express their ideas and experiences of place.

What an interesting concept. Some of the images they are using seem to be REALLY close up and from different angles than we can get on google earth. I wonder how this all works.

SF Zoo has a GPS system so that audience at zoo can see how zoo keeper and animals are interacting.

http://locmedia.wordpress.com/2008/03/31/gps-ranger-san-francisco-zoo/

I wonder if there is anyway that animal itself make own map while people create their map about the zoo.  For example, monkey feel this way right now, its expressions.

kyoko