Art Center Nabi Workshop on Urban Play and Locative Media, Day 1

Day 1 was comprised of a series of speakers discussing their insights and projects relating to locative media and urban play. This was followed by an excellent expert guided tour of Myung-Dong, the region of focus for the workshop. After that was a dinner on the epic 33rd floor of the SK Tower.

Speaker

Joel Slayton
Summary

Joel Slayton
ISEA2006.sjsu.edu
Presented himself as an artist who works with geography and location, landscape and artistry.

Landscape Painting as Counter Surveillance of Area 51 is a project of landscape painters who positioned themselves as artists so as to become painters effectively perform counter surveillance on Area 51.

Military responded with Blackhawk Helicopters. Painters were marketed on the web for sale.

A simple example of landscape, place, geography and play.

C5 Corporation

Looking at other areas, primarily information visualization, network visualization and issues along those lines. One can make the analogy to landscape by thinking of landscape as data space.

C5 Landscape Initiatives

1. Analogous Landscape
Mount expeditions of terrains of some top peaks. Trying to develop a predictive algorithm to prepare expeditions.

2. Other Path
Another aspect of the project. Remapping Great Wall of China on California. Based on GPS tracks of Great Wall, predict where it could have been if it were in California. Installation is two video projections on glass etched walls. Documentation of California and China expeditions.

3. Perfect View
Invited geocachers to submit locations areound the US that they consider “submlime”. Then sent a member on a 10,000 mile motorcycle expedition to create digital panoramas of those submlime spots. Also created a digital model of those areas.
Board meetings for C5 are geo-cached, so anyone can show up and participate. Use the board meetings to do research on the projects that they#039re going to do.
C5 created some open source software that can look at any terrain and determine best transit routes.

ISEA2006 Symposium/ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge

August 7-13th, 2005.

Approximately 3,000 attendees from 54 countries. Four international summits, including Pacific Rim Summit.

Largest cultural event in Silicon Valley.

Four themes:
1. Transvergence (“the new” what happens when disciplines merge and form new disciplines, and what flows out of those mash-ups)

2. Interactive City (use the city of San Jose as a canvas for experimentation)

3. Community Domain (recognition that not everyone is interested in art; engage with the diaspora of San Jose; give them mechanisms for telling their own stories)

4. Pacific Rim
Over 40+ organizations acxross the Bay Area participating, organizing their own parallel events.

C5 working on a project to have GPS enabled cars, story telling competitive event like a reality TV show, with the competitive pay off being 10 minutes of time with someone important, yet to be announced.

Commissioned Residencies

1. San Jose Mineta International Airport – Ben Hooker and Shona Kitchen
Use interactive ticket dispensors that have staged sensors around the airport that gather information and deposit it on the tickets. Also embeds and image of yourself on the ticket.

2. CADRE/Interactive City – Katie Salen, Nancy Nowacek, Marina Zurkow – Karaoke Ice Cream Truck

3. IDEO – Cobi van Tonder an interactive skate board system that will interpret weight and distribution to create a sound space

4. Sun Microsystems Research – Ashok Sukumaran
CADRE/Social Network – Antoni Muntadas, looking at value structures and how they can be mapped.

(Oyo Electromagnetic Radiation Detector allows you to see breathing occur under rubble. A theory object, beyond its practical import.)

Joel Says
Transparency is a divisive thing; it doesn#039t bring us together; it separates. Distinguish between authorship

Making distinction sis a methodology to discern difference, where divisions serve to articulate conflicting positions.

Between experience and authorship

Between meaning and the emptiness of subjectivity

Between ambivalence and participation

Ubiquity is transparency as a distinction.

Ubiquity = social divisiveness

This is a suggestive reversal of what we often think about when we think about..transparency


Agnes Jiyoung Yun from SK Communications R&D Institute
Mobile Communication & Play as ordinary interaction
Space, Social Interaction, Play
The way people interact has changed with the introduction of mobile communication.

1. Phenomenon: Intervention of space
People attempt to exchange their experience and feelings by sharing memories. One such attempt is leaving memories in certain locations to build consensus with people they have never even met, a practice that has been around for along time.
They become implicit acquaintances.
Message on a log on the guardrail of Han River Bridge
The traditional concept of “log” now combines both the tme and space elements. Google acquired Keyhole and launched Google Earth by adding satellite map service to an existing platform.
Dodgeball is a location-based matching servicce for mobile. It interfaces with online, provides an online blog for each user, where the user#039s mobile activities are captured.
Key question: How is this phenomenon of “space as a medium of social relations” impacting the way we interact with each other?
“Re-valuation&quot of psace can be witnessed at two fronts:

1. Mediation of (physical) space
Evolution of media;
Past: how to overcome space limitations? (space = to be conquered)
Present: how to use space for commuication? (spcae – intermediary)
Re-valuation of space: Teampl
Exists to service the needs of users at particular locations. Location-based community of Teample.
Scenario
1. At coffee beans in college street – anything fun?
2. Log onto Teampl and search, find out that people are going to the movies.
3. Request to participate
4. Afterwards, post after-thoughts in the Teampl Room and also post a copy in your mini homepage.

Becomes a part of your social life. Concept of play expanded into everyday actions.

Other example:

1. Data based on location up-loading
2. link with other people (network) – instant grouping
3. Public space becoming private

Personalized Public Space -> Instant Local Community -> Shared Space

Plaza What is it?
* Space of shared memories
* Each message and history intersect and converge..the path to the plaza is full of inexplicable expectations
* Space of new encounters and discussions, of stories, sense of homogeneity and belonging

The whole mechanism of the Plaza concept:

Permanent connectedness: Habitual access to the Internet, tension from the always-present mobile phone
Always-on connection with small cliques: unspoken sense of belonging to a social network (subconscious, implicit relations)

1. Personalized messages (contents) creatd
2. Message uploaded; connection with context
3. Simultaneous reaction by users: link!
4. Instant network created by real-time feedback

Value? Sense of togetherness -> Implicit relationship & sense of belonging.

Sociological reinterpretation of the redefinition of space
Past: Space is something to be occupied (space/(belonging/possision/)people; being together; modern society)
Present: Space is an intermediary of relations (people/sharing/space/people;living together; postmodern society)

Then what are the elements of “living together?” How are users#039 interactions reconstructed?

1. Spcae: expansion of the concept
* Past: phsyical space is something occupied
* Present: dynamic (flux) space that changes by relationship and flow of message
* Question of “through what process/path” is the space created?

2. Social interaction: living together
* Social interaction is crystallized (social form) by repetition of the 3Rs (Rule, Rhythm, Ritual).

3. Play: expansion of the concept
* Routine = non-routine: play becomes part of the everyday life (or non-routine coming into the routine)
* All interactions are play

Play as everyday life & new technology
* changing relationship between users and media
* changing relationship between users and space
* changing relationship between users

Drew Hemment
Play as social space.

Locative media captures a moment of cultural and technological change.

Free Netowrkks (Consume) by Julian Priest.

Mobile Connections, Futuresonic 2004 looked at wireless, mobile and locative media.

Reviewed some locative media projects:

aesthetic/representational projects
GPSDrawing
Amsterdam Real Time
OpenStreetMap

annotation projects
Geograffiti
[murmur]
Yellow Arrow

embodiment in augmented environments

Sound Mapping
Oscillating Windows looking at proximity and the way it affects data migrating between them.

Marc Tuters
Theoretical Approaches Panel

Back story on how getting lost in the Bonaventure hotel lead him to study and consider locative media as a topic of research and execution.

Hyperlink analysis of the meme of locative media.

locative.net/FrontPage
angermann2.com

Together with Ben Russell and Jo Walsh thought they would come together to work on projects that are interested in the area of mapping, etc.

The idea of “locative” came out of a noun tense in the Latvian language.

“The Summer of LOcative Media” – work with a group in Latvia. Summer Latvia was integrated in the European Union. EU funded a project that allowed them to fund a network of conferences on the topic throughout the EU.

Issue Crawler map of locative media meme
issue crawler map

Paul Yuen
vaka (practice name?)
(A)Synchron-City (presentation name?)

Paul is trained as an architect and practicced. Recently switched to mobile technologies. Limitations to architecture. Architects expect certain social behaviors within their designs. How can we enable new forms of social interaction without the limits of bricks-and-mortar architecture?

vaka stands for “virtually almost known as”

an identity thing thing, the ontology reference to “known as”

virtual identities: mobile and virtual social status”

* Mobile Moment: From “Time-Killing/Saving” to “Ego-Enlargement”
* Mobile Device: Social-Networking Enabler
* Mobile Service: Psycho-Nip/Tuck-ing Enabler (Ego-Booster)

The Semantics of “Locative” and the “Contextual”

* locative is about the GPS data and Structural Address; static and instrumental. (example of javax.microedtion.location.Location Java class from the JSR179 – Location API)

* contextual is about social practice, eg the experience of going to Starbucks can be a different thing for tourist, single-guy, artists, etc.

Aptio-Temporal (A)Synchroni-City – what sustains communities are asynchronous cities.

Next-Gen Moblogging = Personal City-Mapping
* A social-technology platform that allows users to create their own maps, making new associations with physical contexts
* rewards users#039 activities and contributions
* mediates among retailers (publishers) and consumers (producers)

Adrian David Cheok, Mixed Reality Lab, Intearaction and Entertainment Research Center, NTU Singapore

http://www.mixedrealitylab.org

Research Issues
* merge real world and virtual world as seamlessly as possible (but not just mixed reality)
* interaction of natural physical space with virtual world
* networked social interaction in physical/real world and virtual world
* computing for purpose of bringing delight and social bonding in humans and societies

Milgram#039s Reality – Virtuality continuum

Free Network system using physical tags/markers to show where open nodes are, coupled with a system of visualizing traffic flows, both instrumental but also semantic aspects of network traffic.

Connects to Carnivore server to track data, both the kind of traffic (ftp, http, etc.) as well as the content of the data.

Metaphorical representation of physical meanings.

ACE2006 in Hollywood.

Daejeon Municipal Museum of Art * Digital Paradise * Strolling in the New Nature

SK Telecom LBS – key current service features

2. 1. Friends Locator (1999) (Total 2 million subscribers; provide GPS and cell-based location, with high quality vector map; enhance user satisfaction with recent location in case of terminal off)

Traffic Information (2002) (public transportation information and highway traffic status; highway traffic status provides images of highways and inner city traffic in one image frmae)

Area Information (2002)

Map Service (2004)

Proxiity Alerting (2004)

I-Kids (2004) (activated by pushing GPS button about 3 seconds in heandset; alarm when kids move away from pre-defined zone; connect up to 4 people simultaneously and send kid#039s location)

Bus Arrival Report (2004)

Location Based Game (2004) Each player owns their own territory and fights with each other in order to gain more land

Mobile CAPS (2005) Emergency notification using hot key on handset; control center track down the location through GPS and dispatch security service)

Safe Card (2005) SMS alert when user credit card is used

Telematics (2002) Route guide – 400k subscribers; server-integrated route guidance

Safe Driver Helper (2003) – displaly and alarm on specific traffic signs or dangerous locations
Route-related Information Service (2005) – provide related inftion to go alo with route guides; differentiatinformation into position-related
Challenges:

* Inaccuracy and lack of coverage
* Insufficient geographic data and UI Capability
* Static content – dynamic content related to user#039s location are needed because conventional contents is insufficient for user#039s changing needs
Insufficient types of services – LBS is an important presence compentnet. It is required to be combined with value-added convergence services

Why do I blog this? The Art Center Nabi workshop on Urban Play
is an event at which is discussed how various forms of locative media, urban context, play, place+space and it is particularly fun to hear about these topics from a wider audience than the usual locative media tribe. (Even though the usual locative media tribe is well-represented here..)

[posted with ecto]

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