I’ve finally managed to find the time to read Mike Crang and Stephen Graham’s recent paper, Sentient Cities: Ambient intelligence and the politics of urban space — and it’s really good!

As I’ve said many times, Graham’s work on networked urbanism is superb, and Crang’s work on space, culture and ethnography is also exemplary. Compared to American accounts that draw on cybernetics and systems-thinking in architecture and urban planning (think Bill Mitchell, Malcolm McCullough, etc.) I find the British cultural geography approach (following Nigel Thrift, Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge) far better attuned to the variety and complexity of everyday lived experience, and the connections between place and identity (i.e. power) over time. Continue reading

e-MobiLArt: European Mobile Lab for Interactive Artists - Call for Artists and Scientists :: Deadline: March 16, 2008.

e-MobiLArt is a project tailored around the process of creating collaborative interactive installation artworks. Such interactive mediated environments may involve the use of multimodal interfaces, ubiquitous computing and mobile or locative media technologies. The e-MobiLArt project aims to provide selected participants with an ideal context, that will allow them to travel, collaborate and exhibit their work. During this project, artists and scientists who are active in creating interactive media art or pursuing innovative interdisciplinary research will have the opportunity to: Continue reading

Urban Informatics: The Internet, locative media and mobile technology for urbanites by Marcus Foth - Cities are exciting. Cities are buzzing. They are alive with movement. A rapid flow of exchange is facilitated by a meshwork of infrastructure connections: road systems, building complexes, information and communication technology and people networks. In this environment, the Internet has advanced to become the prime communication medium that connects many threads across the fabric of urban life. Continue reading

[Image: Remediation: Understanding New Media by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin] “[…] (F)ar from being a complete and revolutionary break with the past, new media maintain many intimate connections with old media, technologies, practices and (electromechanical) infrastructures and spaces (telephone, broadcasting, electricity, highway, streets, airline, logistics systems, and so forth). Therefore, the so-called ‘information age’ is best considered not as a revolution, but as a complex and subtle amalgam of new technologies and media fused on to, and ‘remediating’, old ones (Bolter and Grusin, 2000: 183) …

As Bolter and Grusin suggest: [Cyberspace] is very much a part of our contemporary world and … it is constituted through a series of remediations. As a digital network, cyberspace remediates the electric communications networks of the past 150 years, the telegraph and the telephone; as virtual reality, it remediates the visual space of painting, film, and television; and as social space, it remediates such historical places as cities and parks and such ‘nonplaces’ as theme parks and shopping malls. Like other contemporary telemediated spaces, cyberspace refashions and extends earlier media, which are themselves embedded in material and social environments. (2000: 183) Continue reading

‘Wiki City Rome’ to draw a map like no other by Greg Frost and Patti Richards, MIT News Office - Residents of Italy’s capital will glimpse the future of urban mapmaking next month with the launch of Wiki City Rome, a project developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that uses data from cellphones and other wireless technology to illustrate the city’s pulse in real time.

The project will debut Sept. 8 during Rome’s Notte Bianca or white night, an all-night festival of events across the capital city. During that night, anyone with an Internet connection will be able to see a unique map of the Italian capital that shows the movements of crowds, event locations, the whereabouts of well-known Roman personalities, and the real-time position of city buses and trains. Continue reading

Wayfarer :: September 5-8 at Sydney’s Performance Space: Wayfarer by Kate Richards and Martyn Coutts is a live game space, where teams of audience direct their player through a mysterious, hidden territory. The performer’s body-mounted computers send streamed video, audio and locative data to the Wayfarer software, which is projected back to the audience. Part exploration, part competition, part surreal thriller, Wayfarer is a truly hybrid event, where live and mediated performance, urban choreography, ubiquitous computing, gameplay and site specificity come together in a volatile mix.

From the Simplest of Interfaces: Complexity / Keith Gallasch talks with media artist Kate Richards: Wayfarer has been three years in development and has physical theatre performers at its centre. Richards has always been attracted to engaging with performers, working with them on film and for voiceovers: “and I’m a bit of a frustrated performer myself even though it terrifies me.” Continue reading

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

Ubiquitous Media: Asian Transformations (Tokyo July 13-16,2007) :: DEADLINE: April 26 :: Plenary speakers will include: Rem Koolhaas (OMA Rotterdam); Mark B.N. Hansen (University of Chicago); Katherine Hayles (University of California at Los Angeles); Shigehiko Hasumi (Former President of The University of Tokyo); Ken Sakamura (The University of Tokyo); Barbara Maria Stafford (University of Chicago); Friedrich Kittler (Humboldt University); Akira Asada (Kyoto University); and Bernard Stiegler (Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris).

Today media are increasingly ubiquitous: more and more people live in a world of Internet pop-ups and streaming television, mobile phone texting and video clips, MP3 players and pod-casting. The media mobility means greater connectivity via smart wireless environments in the office, the car and airport. It also offers greater possibilities for recording, storage and archiving of media content. This provides not just the potential for greater choice and flexibility in re-working content (tv programmes, movies, music, images, textual data), but also great surveillance (CCTV cameras, computer spyware, credit data checking and biometrics). The media, then, can no longer be considered to be a monolithic structure producing uniform media effects. Terminology such as ‘multi-media,’ and ‘new media,’ fail to adequately capture the proliferation of media forms. Indeed, as media become ubiquitous they become increasingly embedded in material objects and environments, bodies and clothing, zones of transmission and reception. Media pervade out bodies, cultures and societies. Continue reading

Ideas + Survey

Generic Infrastructures [2] by Rob van Kranenburg: Today we are in the worst situation imaginable. Our global and undisputed computing paradigm posits that computing processes are successful only in as much as they disappear from view. Our design focus is ever more following Philips untenable but seductive ‘sense and simplicity’ resulting in the-bug-as-a-feature-design of the Ipod Shuffle. Our educational system is following this systemic hide-complexity strategy that favors the large industrial labs, IT conglomerates and above all their clinging to notions of IP and the patent that are firmy tied to their notions of doing business and making money. And our users, us? We are YOU, the most influential person of the year 2006, according to TIME Magazine. You fill the Wikipedia entries in your spare time, you blog your daily activities, you co-bookmark on de.l.i.c.i.o.u.s, upload your photos to flickr, you buy mating gear in Second Life, and mark your position on Plazer or Google Earth. You fill out the forms. Isn’t it time you start questioning the principles behind the formats? And, to make matters even worse, your na¯ve ideas of sharing are corrupting notions of privacy, transparency and informational architecture symmetry. Continue reading

Massively multi-citizen science is almost here

Can a game developer be nominated for a Nobel Prize in one of the sciences by the year 2032? That’s my plan, which I presented this past weekend at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. You can download the slides from my talk, or read the related research paper (hot off the press!), or peruse some related links, on my AAAS webpage here. (Or see what Newsday took away from it here.)

My goal over the next decade is to support the development of a massively multi-citizen science through massively collaborative games (think: alternate reality games with real-world data embedded inside.) So in the near future, when the most creative, collective-intelligence gamers are grinding away 10, 20, 30, or more hours a week, they’re grinding on real scientific research problems wrapped inside a yummy fictive or fantasy shell. Continue reading

Ubiquitous Content + Pileus: The Internet Umbrella

“[…] “Ubiquitous Content” is an idea of a new design objective of our lives in the post-PC era. In 20th century, a notion of media contents has been meant contents like movies, music, animations, video games etc. Figuratively speaking, such contents were entities supplied in containers designed as “boxes”. But now, a spread of networks and a realization of ubiquitous computing technologies are going to change those styles of media. The container is not like a “box” any more: It will change its forms freely to give us advanced computer augmentations in a specific context and it will be sometimes invisible embedded into our environments. It is more appropriately called Ubiquitous Media and it will be a new style of media. When we design such Ubiquitous Media, we need to think about the container as our environments in which many things are cooperating rather than a single hardware, a single software or a single standard. Users will not need to be conscious of those medias, therefore such containers emerge for users as “their lives” themselves. “Ubiquitous Contents” are contents for such media. Those must be “experiences” in “their lives”.

As Ubiquitous Content project focuses on our lives and experiences, all things in our everyday lives are targets of the design. The 10 Laboratories of KMD are working on this wide subject from different perspectives…. Continue reading