ART511 - Locative Studio Spring 2008

I really enjoyed our bluetooth project.  It took a while to figure out how to convert files on a computer to files recognizable by our phones, but it was worth the effort.  In the end it took a lot of testing to see which files would be accepted and recognized,  JPG, MP3, MP4, and 3GP were the files I was able to use.  However the IPAQs didn’t work with the MP4 or 3GP file formats, so we couldn’t see our project on them.

I wanted to know more about how secure bluetooth was, and came across this site: http://trifinite.org/, which has a variety of tools  showing the vulnerability of bluetooth; but this site is a bit old, and many of these exploits may possibly already be fixes.

I plan to make a few more videos in the future, so that I can send them to my friends.  I have already sent a few pics to friends using bluetooth, and more and more people are getting bigger and better phones that can handle graphic heavy video and play loud sound…

My project will impose a science fiction adventure story onto our familiar landscape through gps and mediascape.  Each location the listener visits will trigger a new section of this ”action”-packed story that will encourage some form of user participation (ie interacting with objects in the real environment, or walking/running to a specific location.  With the use of jarring sounds and sudden changes in events, I hope to keep the experiencer on their toes.

This story should have a strong narrative and be moderately linear, but I also want to try to give the user a sense of control over the outcome with certain choices of direction or ways to succeed or fail in certain tasks.  I would also like to have the possibility of a literary death for the experiencer of something goes tragically wrong.

I would like this to be an emersive experience where the line between reality and story must compete for attention, and allow the experiencer the option of rejecting their familiar world and its social expectations (people should be able to say “I look weird out here, running around with all this equipment, and I don’t care”).

Main equipment will be GPS, IPAQ, and headphones, and SFSU’s buildings and spaces.  Additional stuff will include physical objects to interact with.  I would also involve a web component If I could think of a meaningful and viable way to incorporate one.

For our final project we are proposing to do a mediascape project that incorporates a “choose-your-own-ending” type of story. We will also incorporate the use of web pages and web design. How this will work is that the user will step into a physical space, an audio file will give choices of directions to go based on which portion of the story you will follow. When you get to the next place, there should be some sort of marker to signify that you have reached the correct destination and will give a web address with more of the story, also another audio file will give new instructions for the next location.

Our story is loosely going to give some type of narrative about traveling, some information about other cultures including their dances, their food, and their primary religious practices. The user will have choices as to which cultures to follow. Our story will be laid out on campus out of convenience, but the physical space will have no true bearing on the story. The user will need a PDA, GPS with Bluetooth, 2 pairs of headphones, a laptop with WiFi, and a partner to enjoy the story with.

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 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.

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.

Here are the artists and projects that I said I would but on the blog from class on 3/4

http://invisible5.org/

Janet Cardiff