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.”
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
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.
i have linked to the program that we will be using to create mediascapes. It is under the links section in the sidebar and here.
It took me a while but I found something: Socialight. The demo video kind of creeped me out. Not only was it backed with a jazzy, muzak, shopping mall soundtrack, but there was no mention (of course) about the surveillance issues surrounding this service. Of course, I have been reading a lot of Naomi Wolf lately, so that could just be the paranoia about closed societies talking.
Anyway, this Socialight service offers location based information generated by consumers for consumers that loads to your cell phone to give you suggestions on where to shop, dine, and be entertained. Think Yelp.com but tagged to locations for you to discover as you move through the environment. The example in the video of looking for the pretzel cart–that happens to be right around the corner–raised many questions for me personally: Would they have ever tried this pretzel cart if they hadn’t been notified? Will this help fill out entertainment venues? Is this service likely to aid impulsive purchases? Will this drive people further out of reality and into the lcd screens of their mobile devices? This service/project looks like the beginning of corporate/capitalist adaptation of the locative media format. Would anyone use this service, or is it too Patriot Act creepy?
by Future Applications Lab- Viktoria Institute: Lalya Gaye, Margot Jacobs, Ramia Mazé, Daniel Skoglund
http://www.viktoria.se/fal/projects/soniccity/
Here is a piece that translates location into sound. The technical aspects sound very complex. The person experiencing the piece wears a jacket of various sensor devices which senses things like ”heart rate, arm motion, speed, pace, compass heading, ascension/descent, proximity to others/objects, stopping and starting” and ”light level, noise level, pollution level, temperature, electromagnetic activity, enclosure, slope, presence of metal” as they walk through their environment. These factors get translated into sound which is played through headphones.
It is interesting to think of one’s environment as becoming a musical experience. We may be used to ambient noises in our daily lives, but for things like pollution, metal, and slope to give us sound information is a new experience altogether. The experiencer becomes truely integrated into the environment through music.
