http://www.mscapers.com/msin/ABA0000053
GPS game. Pick a place to play where nothing much you find obvious. Then audience find a mening, where they are going, from the field or beach.
It is interesting to investigating or find some meaning from blunt place. There is a role in this game so that people know it has a life and meaning at some points they pick. When there is some role exist, the game gets more interesting. I like those role as closer to the place but has some different perspective.
by: Iain Mott, Marc Raszewski, and Jim Sosnin
I found another sound oriented locative project: http://www.reverberant.com/SM/index.htm. It produces sound that relates to “tilt, azimuth and forward and backward velocity”.
I thought this was interesting, because the technical aspects of the sensors seem to be fairly basic, yet still provide a variety of interaction information. Technology that must travel with the user also takes a form that I haven’t seen in other locative projects, which is rolling luggage. It also uses a more accurate GPS system called a Differential Global Positioning System, which uses “an additional radio receiver that receives an error correcting broadcast from a local base station.”
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.
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
Shanghai’s city gardening administration is using GPS to to map all the trees in Shanghai that are 300 years old or older. More than 1,500 trees have been mapped, and the city is sharing this list with construction companies and the cities construction administration department, in order to protect these trees. There is also an interactive map which will give users the details about each tree in each location. <link>
Well, I had fun. What a perfectly legitimate way to get outside on such a nice day.
I wish we found that last location in the art school. When we were first tracking it, we went down that walkway right next to the student services building, and the trail led us promptly into a corner. We continued the long way around the building, then headed back up towards Humanities, but I supose that was the wrong way, too. I figured we needed to get inside the abandoned area somehow, but we didn’t succeed. Retrospectively, I think I remember seeing a way in, but it was so far from the waypoint that I hadn’t yet suspected that would be where to go.
That silly little tracking device was no good at determining orientation once the signal got weak when we were between buildings or when the clouds eventually came. I had to rely on the cardinal directions and my knowledge of the school’s orientation like some kind of primitive non-GPS enabled barbarian…
It’s interesting to see how people change when they become exhausted.
Many things ran through my head while experiencing these hunts and observing other people take our hunt on, much of which is echoed in Phyllis’ post. Another take-home lesson I learned from the whole experience was that everyone in the whole class has their strengths. I’m very interested to see a whole class project come together in the future. Each one of us has a strength or skill set that they are proficient at, and in a team effort, I think could be fully realized.
I also realized while on these hunts how unadventurous we can be. Are we really that domesticated so as to completely avoid having to trespass, and clamor through an overgrown pathway, or to even fathom that yes, you might have to duck under those bushes in order to get where you’re going? I reflect on this often living in the city, how fearsome I’ve become of what I step on, lean against, or what my long skirts are dragging through on the sidewalk. People, I used to walk BAREFOOT in the forest all summer long, the soles of my feet thick with protective callouses and stickled with pitch and leaves. I’m reminded of the summer I spent in Oakland attending classes at CCoA (formerly CCAC). I remember walking a block and a half down the street from my apartment to Safeway with my RA Gauri. We needed fresh ginger for the chai she was making for all of us girls at the apartment. I went with her, barefoot, all the way down the street, into the store, and right as we were about to leave, the security man came up to me and reprimanded me for going barefoot in the store, spouting lawyer rhetoric about people suing stores they get hurt in. I told him that the store should keep their floors swept and clean so that it wouldn’t be a problem. “You might slip on the floor without shoes on,” he said. I remember telling him, “I might slip with them on.” and scooting out of the store left perplexed at how domesticated we have become.
Now I can’t even imagine walking on the cleanest flattest concrete in my new environment. I need my callouses back! This was a big point in two of the scavenger hunts for me: the domestication of mankind, how far removed and sometimes fearful we are of nature and natural things. Overall things could have improved with the waypoints, devices, and satellite drift issues, but that’s what the future is for. I think everyone made a great effort in their own ways.
PS - Arosh, is the remix ready?
First of all I wanted to say how much I enjoyed being involved in this project. I had a great time working with my team to try and create a project using a type media that is new to me. After going on the other two hunts, I am imagining more that can be done than just what we accomplished. I learned a lot from the other teams.
That said, some of the things I learned that could be improved. For one thing, me and my team didn’t take into account the fact of GPS drift. For the most part this didn’t affect us too negatively, but we were unable to find the final location on a team’s project. We got close, but we never found their marker. As for our project, had we not pointed the team in the right direction of the first point, they may have never found our markers. So…that in mind, I think it is doubly important to make the first marker really easy to find, and the clue to the first marker a bit easier to decipher.
Another little tid bit I noticed is the design of the web pages. One group had a really sleekly done web page…but it didn’t seem to match the rest of the project. Another group had simple yet elegant pages done and they went really well with their markers, but in the light of the day, it was very hard to see the screen. We chose to make our web pages rudimentary because we felt like it would match our markers, tie into our overall message, and with the high contrast be easy to read outside. Although I liked this idea, when I saw how amazing the other team’s web site’s were, I was truly impressed and starting thinking about the other elements we could’ve incorporated to give more visual clues to our markers.
The final thing I took away from this project is that I feel like I had a ton of energy for the first hunt. By the time we got to the last location on their hunt I started getting tired. When we encountered technical difficulties with the second hunt my instinct was to give up. In the future as a designer, I might want to make my hunt fool proof so there would be no chance of technical difficulties. How I would accomplish this is something I have not yet worked out. But what I did enjoy about this media type is the social interaction it brings coupled with interaction with the physical space.
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.
