An art project by Andre Lemos, Mari Fiorelli and Rob Shields to “write” on Google maps…

[From the website: GPS Writing, SUR-VIV-ALL - The idea came from the crossing of my reading of the book by Margaret Atwood, “Survival,” with my research on locative media, city, mobility and new technologies. In the book “Survival”, the author defends the thesis that the relationship with the survival is a pattern in the imagination of Canadian literature, both of prose and poetry: fighting the forces of nature, the natives, and the animals. . So, from my research on locative media, I plan to “write” the city of Edmonton (on 40 km) with a GPS Tracker, and mapping some hotspots along the way (using iStumbler, Loki, Google Maps, Google Earth…). What I was looking for here, in addition to entertainment, was a way to get closer to the city, to understand and feel their spaces, their dynamics. But, basically, a way to see my “survival” here.

The word “SURVIVAL” has been changed to “SUR-VIV-ALL,” trying to create different meanings in English and French, the official languages Canada, and in Portuguese, my mother language. In French we can see or inferred “SUR VIV (R) E / VIE …”, something like an excess and a lack of life, just when survival is the least and last resort of existence. In Portuguese, “VIVA”, claiming to live, an imperative. In English “survival”, has its original meaning, plus the “ALL” that calls for a social dimension, the public and community.

What is at stake here is the imagination of the city, the relationship with extreme temperatures, the use of cars as standard displacement, the empty spaces, the invisibility of electronic processes (written by the GPS is invisible as well the hotspots Wi - Fi) on the actual structures in the midst of public space. We have photos, videos that attempt to capture this relationship, but with the thread to link with the outside world, the nature. The “Waypoints” on the map will show (as soon as we fished the data transfer) this multimedia content, as well as Wi-Fi hotspots open (we’ve accessed some networks on the street) or closed. - André Lemos]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhMl7_HiuKo

[blogged by Rob Shields on Space and Culture]

Its theoretical basis lies in ideas of locative art and pyschogeography. The camera and descriptive text are its locative technologies, and the pyschogeography consists of the spaces we inhabit as a global community. Cityscapes is a browser-based application. It embeds mapping software and geographical locating services in a wiki framework, which enables multiple users to contribute texts and images to a common project.

Cityscapes is built entirely on open source components and cost-free Internet services, most prominently DokuWiki, Google maps, geonames.org, and the FCKeditor. This truly remarkable freedom of technical access is important to how Cityscapes has been conceived, as inhabiting a shared imaginative space made possible by the Internet.

We hope that you will visit Cityscapes and, even more, that you will take the time to contribute. The wiki is set up so that only you have editing access to your posts; you can always come back to them, revise them, even delete them. Read about the Cityscapes Aesthetic.

In the idiom of maps and cartography, the tendency is to thoroughly identify as many attributes of the physical world and coordinate them to geographic, you know…coordinates, typically using latitude and longitude. Those attributes are usually other instrumental and worldly markers, like street addresses, nearly immovable physical markers like, you know…landmarks, buildings, franchise stores, and so on. The database tables fill in with this information, sorted, sifted, refined. Some deletes and updates.

In between the record sets are the most interesting possibilities for new services, new ways of experiencing the physical world and new kinds of adventures. What I’m thinking about are ways to creatively explore within a fully instrumented, surveilled and mapped world, with counter intuitive uses of this data. There are some excellent examples within the art-technology and design-technology communities, such as GPS Drawing, as shown above. This practice is intriguing because it couples measurement with expression and finds an alternative use for the devices involved — a GPS and a mapping application like GoogleEarth.

Surveillance Camera Players using CCTV cameras as a site for performance opportunities

Younghee wonders, in this context, what are the ways of minimizing “digital traces” — those indications of where you are, and where you have been, in a surveillance world. She says,

That leaves another interesting question: How would people drop out of, or at least minimize their digital traces and minimize contributing to create others’? We are probably not expecting stickers and badges showing “this person does NOT have cameras” or “this person will NOT use cameras”. One of the memorable Ubicomp conference talks was on the interesting concept of creating capture-resistant environment, preventing camera phones to take photos by overexposing photos attempted in the region covered by this technology. While I am sure there are certain types of places this technology would be very useful, I do have my doubts if there would ever be any technology successfully controlling people’s digital behaviors.

Similarly, in a reverse mode, Life: A User’s Manual by Michelle Teran captures the signals leaked into public space by RF-based video cameras and reveals intimate spaces in a very DIY and performative fashion.

Minimzing traces is one possible perspective. I think, perhaps in this era where digital kids do not reflect so much on how much of a trace they leave behind, and indeed have entirely different perspectives on the meaning of surveillance and its implications. How many digital kids (the next “us”) have read “1984″ for example?

In contrast to the Surveillance Camera Players and their performances — where they are maximizing their impact and traces for counter-intuitive purposes, and counter-systemic purposes — groups like the Institute for Applied Autonomy have constructed — years ago, pre-Google Maps — a digital map system called iSee of surveillance cameras that would allow one to plot a course that does precisely what Younghee wonders about — minimizing one’s impact. In other words, the mapping system plots routes that avoids surveillance cameras.

It may be that the question is no to much avoiding “capture” but how to turn that space into something where your voice can be heard. I’m not convinced, but it seems that we (a bit older people) think of surveillance in one way that digital kids (the next “us”) will see as an opportunity for a new form of living.

Beyond this, I am interested in a kind of Personal Positioning System that points out the absences in my experiences in the world. For example, showing me where I have not been rather than showing the entire world from above, as if its fully prepared for my exploration. I’m interested in finding things like longer route between two points, rather than the minimal route. Or routes that are deliberately constructed based on streets or regions I have not been. Purely as a form of creative, digital-era perambulation or motoring. Exploration in a world that is pretty much completely mapped, indexed, databased and optimized. What is exploration in an optimized, instrumented world? [posted by Julian Bleecker on Near Future Laboratory]

Featuring: Tiziana Terranova (IT), Christoph Wachter (DE), Mathias Jud (CH), Yolande Harris (UK), Bureau d’etudes (FR), and Di Mainstone (UK).

Topology is often mentioned as an ultimate example of the same subject being studied in parallel within various branches of science and art, each branch approaching the subject from its own background and with its own methodologies. Today, there are numerous initiatives on the radar in which representatives of the various branches of topology explicitly state a desire to exchange ideas and methodologies related to the topic. But do all these diverse branches even share a common understanding of what topology is?

In practice, it seems that there is still a fair amount of confusion surrounding the notion of topology, and that its definition is a matter of debate rather than consensus, with a single commonly agreed-on defining characteristic: topology deals with the qualitative properties of geometrical structures. Should the confusion surrounding the notion of topology discourage topologists from trying to unify the field? Or could it perhaps serve as a commonly shared ground for collaboration and exchange?

This topology edition of Test_Lab will feature several new and exciting artistic Research and Development (aRt&D) projects within the artistic topology tradition and will investigate the common understanding of the notion of topology in the arts. Audience members are invited to actively involve themselves in the practices of topological aRt&D and, on the basis of this involvement, discuss what defines the field and whether the proposed exchange and collaboration with other topology branches is justified.

Test_Lab: Topology will reveal censored areas on Google maps and the true networks of the world s power structures, and will include a sonic navigation walk and a fashionable artist intervention. The different branches dealing with topology will be represented by international experts participating in the project A Topological Approach to Cultural Dynamics (ATACD).

Test_Lab is a bimonthly public event organized by V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media, that provides an informal setting for the demonstration, testing, presentation, and discussion of artistic research and development (aRt&D).

Preceding this edition of Test_Lab, the Piet Zwart Institute will organize a seminar on mapping as a medium of cultural reflection and critique with presentations by artists, activists, and theorists, titled: The Map is not the Territory?! April 16, 2008, 19.30.- 21.30, Mauritsstraat 36, Rotterdam.

Presenters: Bureau d’Etudes, Theo Deutinger, Christoph Wachter and Mathias Jud, with an introduction and moderation by Florian Cramer.

The group exhibition No Place - like Home: Perspectives on Migration in Europe features eighteen Belgian and international artists. Their videos, photographic works and installations take a closer look at what lies under the surface of the migration issue. Migration is a thing of all ages. Where Europeans once colonized various continents and emigrated en masse to other lands both in and beyond their own continent, movement from the opposite direction has now taken hold. Capital, goods and information circulate freely in the late-capitalist, globalized world economy. For people, however, mobility is arranged somewhat differently. Borders and territories are still the primary expression of national sovereignty, however multi ethnic populations may have become. For Europe – which permanently shifts between regulating, even attracting, and then repelling strangers – these are the outer borders, the so called Schengenland regions. No Place - like Home (mark the hyphen) investigates how inner and outer space, how ‘we’ and ‘they’ maintain complex relations with one another and the frictions this generates. The media, like tourism – a phenomenon that on the Italian island of Lampedusa vacillates with the refugee issue – have little to do with transparency. By way of the varying perceptions of 18 artists whose work focuses on the illegal refugees who are today’s modern nomads, this exhibition hopes to help visualize an issue that cannot be summarized in black-and-white contrasts: an interwoven, variegated tale of migration networks and refugee trafficking, cartography and geographical military data, migration management and border infiltrations, international rights, lack of rights and lawlessness.

Today, illegal migration into Europe comes primarily from southeastern Europe, Central Asia and Africa. One exceptional focal point of the exhibition is the sanitary cordon being placed around that last continent. Peripheral locations such as the Strait of Gibraltar and a number of Sicilian islands, almost perpetually besieged by refugees, connect several contributions to the exhibition. Miguel Abad and Herman Asselberghs are showing images of Ceuta, the Spanish enclave on the Moroccan coast, where Europe is establishing part of its migration policy outside its own borders. Pieter Geenen, Raphael Cuomo and Maria Lorio, Federico Baronello and Takuji Kogo indicate how, on the Italian island of Lampedusa, the reality of tourism runs hand in hand with that of asylum seekers, being repatriated or otherwise, without the two worlds ever touching. In her comprehensive installation, Sahara Chronicle, Ursula Biemann highlights the sub-Saharan exodus to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Schengen, the Castle by Xavier Arenós, charts how things move on from there. His work is not only a typology of the streams of mobility to Spain, but also reveals the underlying macro-economic space. Cartography is also found in the contributions of the Migreurop network and the magazine collective, An Architektur: on the one hand a map of all possible transit, relief or detention camps connected with European territory, and on the other hand as a specific analysis in the form of an architectural dissection of Polish refugee centres.

The fact that European political space is not consistent with European immigration is a subtext in the work of Erzen Shkololli, Yves Mettler, Herman Asselberghs and Thomas Locher, as is the question of what common value systems still mean on this continent from a cultural, historical perspective, once stereotypes are set aside. The paradox of an interior European space that defends its borders versus a world where nothing stops at national frontiers any more is evidenced in the photographic work of Armin Linke. His work draws attention to the most diverse effects of globalisation and serves as a kind of resonance chamber for the exhibition, as does an ironic installation by Pravdoliub Ivanov with some thirty different cooking surfaces and pots. What remains is the individual voice of the migrant, which is generally kept out of the media. Its tone is allegorical for Hans Op de Beeck, a naked testimony in the work of Ursula Biemann and in the participatory documentary, Pour vivre j’ai laisé. In this last project, initiated and directed by Bénédicte Liénard, asylum seekers at the Petit Chateau refugee centre in Brussels take the camera into their own hands in an introspective document that does not lack humor and is made from a non-voluntary, and therefore powerful perspective, in a plea for a world as a place that can still be created by mankind.

Thinking about migration means making a close examination of oneself. With No Place - like Home, Argos lays claim to a trans-national political space. What public space, what identity stands counter to this? What and where is ‘home’? These are questions that will be further investigated in a parallel programme of lectures and video presentations.

Curated by Paul Willemsen with contributions by Miguel Abad, An Architektur, Xavier Arenós, Herman Asselberghs, Federico Baronnello, Ursula Biemann, Raphaël Cuomo, Maria Iorio, Provdoliub Ivanov, Pieter Geenen, Takuji Kogo, Bénédicte Liénard, Armin Linke, Thomas Locher, Yves Mettler, Migreurope, Hans Op de Beeck, Erzen Shkololli.

Watermans gallery will be converted into a live design / mapping studio where investigatory, locative media artist Christian Nold together with the designer Daniela Boraschi will be working with local residents to gather information for digital and physical visualizations of the ecological, cultural and economic ‘health’ of Brentford.

Instead of taking tissue samples as one would from a human being Christian Nold and participants will be using a range of cultural probes to investigate the local social body and its unique ailments. Like eastern medicine investigators will be taking a holistic view of Brentford that looks for interconnections between problems and challenges to get a sense of the whole. The project acts as both creative art project as well as hard-nosed consultation with invited stakeholder groups like politicians, historians, the local chamber of commerce as well as ecologists and the general public.

WORKSHOPS

Everyone - young, old and in-between is welcome to take part! First public workshop April 5, 2008 1 pm - 5pm FREE!* Bring your local newspaper, favorite story, images and anything you want to put on the Brentford map!

Further workshops will take place on:
Saturday, April 12 1-5pm
Wednesday, April 23, 6-9pm
Saturday, May 10 1-5pm
Wednesday May 14 6-9pm

Register online: http://www.publicbiopsy.net/join.htm

If you care about the Brentford area you are invited! Come with your own agenda and we will include it!

If you can’t attend a workshop we have arranged for you to be able to contributer online. For online contribution please log on: http://www.publicbiopsy.net/upload.htm.

Imaging Beijing is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Mixed Realities exhibition. It was made possible with funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Teleport to Imaging Beijing in Second Life.

BIOGRAPHY

John Craig Freeman’s work has been exhibited internationally including at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Beijing, the Kunstraum Walcheturm in Zurich, Eyebeam in New York, City, the Zacheta Narodowa Galeria Sztuki (the national gallery of Warsaw), Kaliningrad Branch of the National Center for Contemporary Arts in Russia, Art Basel Miami, Ciberart Bilbao and the Girona Video and Digital Arts Festival in Spain, La Biblioteca National in Havana, the Contemporary Art Center in Atlanta, the Nickle Arts Museum in Calgary, the Center for Experimental and Perceptual Art (CEPA) in Buffalo, Art interactive, Mobius and Studio Soto in Boston, the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City, Ambrosino Gallery in Miami, the Photographers Gallery in London, and the Friends of Photography’s Ansel Adams Center in San Francisco.

In 1992 Freeman was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His writing has been published in Leonardo, the Journal of Visual Culture, and Exposure, as well as a chapter in the book Electronic Collaboration in the Humanities. His work has been reviewed in Wired News, Artforum, Ten-8, Z Magazine, Afterimage, Photo Metro, New Art Examiner, Time, Harper’s and Der Spiegel. Lucy Lippard cites Freeman’s work in her book The Lure of the Local, as does Margot Lovejoy in her book Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age.

Freeman received a Bachelor of Art degree from the University of California, San Diego in 1986 and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1990. He is an Associate Professor of New Media at Emerson College in Boston. The focus of his academic activities throughout the last decade has been to integrate computer technology and theory of electronic culture into visual art curriculum and to explore interdisciplinary approaches to education and technology.

In Charles Cumming’s story, inspired by John Buchan’s old novel The 39 Steps, we follow a man, watching from above, in an omniscient satellite view. Someone is tracking his movements through London, as well as his trips south and north across the country. At one point, for instance, our narrator wakes up on a beach, unsure of where he is or what the date might even be. A loose piece of newspaper came cartwheeling along the sand and wrapped itself around my legs. I picked it up and looked at the date. Two days had passed since I had arrived in Edinburgh. The newspaper was the Evening News. So I was still in Scotland. If the story is about a man being tracked and followed, then it is also told in a way that allows us to track and follow, clicking onward through maps of the man’s experience. But what are the possibilities for science fiction?” Continue reading Google Maps of Sci-Fi by Geoff Manaugh, io9.

‘The model was then taken into Rhino and contoured into horizontal and vertical 2d layers. The intersections were set and vectors cleaned in illustrator. After that individual parts were cut with a laser cutter and assembled into the final work.’

The density of the cell sites reflect the speed and frequency of movement within the city. The more often Andreas visited a place, the more cell sites were added to the map. Aside from the aesthetics, the work was aimed at making people aware of the German telecommunications data retention act (Vorratsdatenspeicherung) which requires the telecommunications providers to collect the connection data of all customers. This is a good example of the confluence of two growing areas of interests within the computational art scene, abstract data visualisation and digital fabrication. [posted by Paul Prudence on Dataisnature]

Also: YesYesNoNo’s Invisible Journey’s (Datalooknise) project aims at mapping fields of Wi-Fi node signals during bike and car trips. Using various kinds of representation systems to visualise different properties of the nodes (such as encryption settings) these abstractions act as timelines of the journey and, at times, give the impression of some kind experimental music notation. Detailed information on the methods used to collect and apply the data is annotated with each image in the development sequence. More >>

To create a double image of space and place, Esther Polak used the “mashup website” VeoGeo.com. The website combines images of GPS registrations with YouTube route-footage. Combined and synchronized, tracks and video’s can be followed step by step resulting in an extremely realistic experience of armchair traveling.

Esther Polak is best known from her earlier prize winning GPS projects like AmsterdamREALTIME and MILKprojec.