The disappearance of wires and the growing wireless technology industry is the subject of a David Pogue article in the New York Times’ Circuits: As Pogue writes, wires are disappearing at an alarming clip. The cord between your home phone handset and the phone body is gone. The wire between your cellphone and clip-on earpiece, also gone. The cable from your laptop to the network router. Yes, it too is gone.

Gone, gone, gone. Bluetooth was, of course, specifically invented to eliminate cables. It’s range is about 30 feet and it draws very little battery power. Continue reading

Social Mobile Music Navigation Using The Compass by Atau Tanaka, Guillaume Valadon, and Christophe Berger - ABSTRACT: During a regular day while on the move, most people interact with multiple portable devices: a personal music player, mobile phone, and digital camera. People driving cars in addition may also use navigation systems. Whereas each of these devices are getting more and more sophisticated, and packed with numerous functionalities, they are each optimized for specific usages. Modern mobile phones for example, claim to function as digital cameras and music players, but these are features that are more often than not added on almost as an afterthought, and are not integrated with the connectivity that the mobile phone represents. From an engineering point of view, the goal of this project is to push mass-market mobile phones to their limits in networked musical exchange by implementing The Compass. Specifically, we are targeting phones embedded with WiFi, music player and location1 capabilities. The idea was to build a true convergence application that integrated localization, mobile networking, and music listening. Mobile Music Workshop Proceedings, page 34 [PDF] Continue reading

“The Pool” by Jen Lewin - The Pool is an environment of giant concentric circles created from interactive circular pads. By entering the pool, you enter a world where movement and direction trigger light and sound effects that bounce, collide and grow against and within the directions of others.

Each Pad, is an individual interactive glowing platform filled with controllable RBG leds and a small mp3 sound controller capable of playing up to 240 different samples. Based on a simple set of generative rules trigged by human movement, the pads can communicate with their neighbors creating dynamic patterns, colors and sounds that grow and evolve on their own. Continue reading

CosTune (costume + tune) by Yukio Tada, Kenji Masi, Ryohei Nakatsu and Tadao Maekawa of ATR Media Integration & Communications Research Laboratory and Kazushi Nishimoto of the Japan Institute of Science and Technology, is not only a wearable instrument, it is also equipped with wireless communications functions that can communicate with other CosTunes. CosTune users can make collaborative compositions and perform ad hoc sessions with others who share similar musical tastes. Thus, it’s creaters hope, it may foster a novel musical culture as well as support the formation of communities mediated by music.

Music plays an essential role as a communications medium. For example, members of a jazz band communicate with each other by performing music, and the band conveys a certain impression to their audience by their music… Continue reading

Nabaz’Mob: an opera

Atari is happy to present Nabaz’Mob: an opera for 100 communicating rabbits by Antoine Schmitt & Jean-Jacques Birge featuring Nabaztag by violet.

Installation http://nabazmob.free.fr/ from September 27th to October 1st 2006 during Wired Magazine’s nextfest at Atari Showroom Javits Center, HALL 3B, Chelsea, NY.

100 Nabaztag meet at Javits Center to all play together an opera specially composed by Antoine Schmitt and Jean-Jacques Birge after an original idea by Guylaine Monnier. Inviting John Cage, Steve Reich, Conlon Nancarrow and Gyorgy Ligeti, this musical and choreographic partition in three movements, transmitted via wi-fi, plays on the tension between the music ensemble communion and individual behavior to create a strong and involved showpiece.

The matrix…net of all nets

“…Indeed, radio — and therefore the beginning of all electronic mass media — is invented by receivers, not by broadcasters. One might modify Duchamp’s famous quote that the onlookers make the pictures: “Ce sont les récepteurs, qui font les médias.” And even though today it seems as if the broadcasters alone possessed all power over the mass media, there is an almost anarchical criterion, on which all is based and in which the power of the receivers has been preserved: In TV ratings are everything.

How could the power of the receivers be great enough to turn the entire media machine upside down and change it from a strategic into a distributive system? What fascination initiated all that constitutes our present-day electronicized worldview?…” From Sending and Receiving by Dieter Daniels, tout-fait, issue 2. [via]

Envisioning Post iPodalyptic Mobile Music

Location33 investigates the potential for new types of music made possible by location tracking and wireless technologies. Listeners, with a GPS enabled PDA or mobile phone, walk around downtown Culver City, California and create a musical album that merges the traditional model of the song cycle with interactive narrative, location awareness, and game play.

Twenty nodes throughout the Culver City area act as portals into the world of the album. Each node is linked with a fragment of a song and when a player approaches one of the portals the music file is streamed to their device.
Continue reading

Another Taxi Installation

TAXI MADRID is a mobile public art intervention by artists Anne Lorenz & Rebekka Reich addressing issues of perception and the logic of memory. Equipped with installations, 12 taxis will operate in Madrid throughout the duration of Madrid Abierto, transporting their passengers into someone else’s mind and memories of Madrid, those of an ex-patriot.

By interviewing former inhabitants of Madrid, who now live spread all over the world, artists Anne Lorenz and Rebekka Reich seek to find intriguing personal memories related to the city. From this material they devised sound-collages to become part of more complex installations, consisting of objects and other memorabilia, fitted into the taxis.
Continue reading

GPS-Trans Net-Cellphone Performances

GPS-Art is a new field of art activity based on motion in open spaces. GPS-Art is the global interactive instrument used for the creation and processing of audio and video material. It integrates elements of audio-visual installation to be used as a new media transmission. The project is based on large outdoor scales of cities and open spaces; it is ready to be realized on land, air, underwater as well as in outer space.

All GPS-Art projects use the GPS-12 device (Global Positioning System), as well as the cell phone system. GPS-12 refers to the 12 satellites hanging above the Northern half of the globe; it’s used for navigation and measures in an interactive way many topographic parameters including latitude and speed. These measurments are the starting point of many art projects of GPS-Art. Since 2001 GPS-Art has been realized by a series of GPS-Trans net-cellphone performances.

Rhizome.org ArtBase Exhibition

Location is Everything–curated by Jillian Mcdonald–explores ways in which artists repurpose mapping as a creative medium; or perhaps it reframes mapping as a procedure that is intrinsically creative. The cartographic forms in these projects are drawn according to, as Mcdonald explains, personal or collective experiences, some informed by external factors like weather data or pop-culture references, and some allowing the map itself or local residents to inform them. These reciprocal actions of forming and informing effect both maps and their makers, suggesting that who? and why? are equally important questions to pose when interpreting a map as simply where?.

Works included in this exhibition are “PdPa” (2003) by Julian Bleecker, Scott Paterson and Marina Zurkow, “[murmur]” (2003) by Shawn Micallef, “Louisiana Walk #14″ (1996) by Janet Cardiff, “Atmospherics/Weather Works” (2003) by Andrea Polli, “GPS Drawing” (2000) by Jeremy Wood, “Hlemmur in C” (2004) by Pall Thayer, “Survey Field” (2003) by Germaine Koh, and “Infrasonic Soundscape” (2001) by Hidekazu Minami.