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.

Pogue goes on to talk about Bluetooth audio gateways, like the Motorola and the Kyocera, which exploit one of the most interesting Bluetooth profiles. It’s called A2DP, short for Audio Distribution Profile … It means wireless stereo and wireless audio. In a two-way Bluetooth audio gateway, it makes possible some intriguing possibilities.

Read on >>

Floating Fabulousness: Representation, Performativity and Identity in Musical Ringtones by Isabella van Elferen and Imar de Vries - ABSTRACT: In this paper, we consider musical ringtones of mobile phones to act as virtual, communicative and cultural performances. They appear unpredictably, they communicate signs which are interpreted by a variegated and dynamic audience, and establish stages upon which cultural meanings are portrayed. We will argue that the musical ringtone functions as a musical madeleine in Marcel Proust’s sense, an involuntary mnemonic trigger of a complex web of individual and collective memories. Having this quality, the ringtone lends itself perfectly for the performative manifestation and display of (sub)cultural identities in the public sphere. Keywords: Performativity, ringtones, mobile phones, communication, representation, identity. Mobile Music Workshop Proceedings, page 38 [PDF]

URBAN SENSING: Urban Sensing systems research is a collaboration between CENS and the Center for Research in Engineering, Media and Performance (REMAP) that seeks to develop cultural and technological approaches for using embedded and mobile sensing to invigorate public space and enhance civic life.

Unlike scientific applications, many sensors for urban applications are already ‘out there,’ watching and listening. Mobile phones provide us with sounds and imagery from our homes and neighborhoods, and the near ubiquity of wireless access in many future urban settings will allow us to publish or share data easily, immediately. Soon private citizens will have access to a great diversity of sensors, allowing them to make even more detailed observations of their communities. They will be able to cross-reference spatially and temporally tagged data they gather with publicly available data from private and municipal monitoring of the city—traffic, weather, air quality, pedestrian flow—the environment and rhythms of urban life.

At the edges of culture, lightweight web applications, built on this publicly available information and free web services, emerge already almost daily to explore new linkages among these varied data. Expanding on their approach, we are exploring how these intermittent georeferenced media records of everyday life can be coordinated to achieve ‘distributed documentation’ of the urban environment, as well as be fused with other sensed data about the city and fed back into the physical, collective experience in urban public spaces. Unlike scientific applications, the hardware is not owned and managed by a small number of central authorities. Citizens carry sensors and contribute data voluntarily. A single entity does not pose interesting ‘hypotheses,’ design experiments, force participation. Instead, the process of learning from an urban environment can be organic and decentralized, existing more in the realm of social networking software. However, the power of this network still comes from our ability to verify the context of shared data, to actuate (to filter, identify and respond to events); to aggregate data in space and time; and to allow individuals to coordinate activities.

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.

The Pads are entirely wireless (they communicate with each other over a small wireless network), and they are 100% solar.

The Pool is composed of roughly 100 pads. Spaced in concentric rings, the pool will span approximately 120 feet x 120 feet.

Each pad glows blue. By stepping on the Pad it will brighten to white and will emit a simple sound. Based on how you are standing on the pad (with your weight more in clockwise or in the counter clockwise direction) the pad will then send a message to its neighbors in your direction to begin to glow white. The Sound from your pad will also travel, lowering or increasing in pitch along the ring.

If your weight is in the clockwise direction, light will travel clockwise,
If your weight is in the counter clockwise direction, light will travel counter clockwise,

Once your light path had traveled the full circle, the light and sound will jump to your neighboring circles.

In this way, by keeping your weight in one direction, eventually you will fill the entire Pool with light and sound.. Once full, the light will wrap back on itself in a new color with a new sound.

If another user steps on a pad, and places their weight in the same direction as your path, the paths will mix by adding color and changing the sound pallet.

Each additional person leaning in the same direction will add additional colors and sounds.

If another user steps on a pad with their weight in the opposite direction of your light path, your paths will collide, and colors and sound will be subtracted.

With time, or with the addition of new users, colors and sound will be subtracted entirely.

This addition and subtraction will allow users to mix colors in a kaleidoscopic interplay.

Each pad’s sound will be a subtle and fairly quiet sample, created from different recordings from nature. For example, stepping on a pad may emit a hushed sound that resembles a drop of water…. As this drop sound travels along your “path”, it will change slightly in pitch…. You will then hear it as it travels away from you, and then returns.

Because the sounds themselves will be fairly quiet, each user will most likely hear only the sounds in their vicinity. As more users interact, the Pool will have a very natural and ambient sound quality, similar to standing in a forest or near a rushing creek…… where you can hear the tide swelling or pebbles in a waterfall.
Definitions:

“The Pool”
A collection of wireless interactive pads, each with an identical set of generative rules triggered through interaction. The pool will span roughly 120 feet x 120 feet and is viewable only in low light (evening or night).

“Pads”
A 3 foot x 6” tall semi transparent wireless pad with a platform meant for standing. Each pad has a small microprocessor, several bright RGB controlled LEDS, movement sensors, and a sound controller. Each pad is 100% wireless and contains an identical set of generative rules based on user interaction. Although each pad is identical in all ways, this programmatic rule set, when combined with interaction, will create diverse and complicated behavior.

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… But music’s characteristic as a communications medium has been neglected in the design of musical instruments. Two of the problems are portability — many instruments are too large and too heavy to carry around — and the difficulty of communicating complex information by sound alone.

Several wearable musical instruments have been developed: YAMAHA BIBURI and BODYCODER, although their use is still restricted to the stage. MIT’s Musical Jacket has achieved true portability, but is a simple extension of ordinary musical instruments and it is not designed for communication.

The artist/engineers of CosTune designed it to be a communications tool. To read about it, download their pdf, “Toward Forming Communities Using Wearable Musical Instruments”here

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 r�cepteurs, qui font les m�dias.” 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.

Each day a specific song is active. It is composed of fragments representing a verse, a chorus, or a bridge. As players walk around, they piece together the fragments, and develop the sense of their path being a song. Each day yields a different song, and all of the components for each day are composed within the limits of a singular musical idea or theme. The album is generated over the course of the week.

The album also focuses on a particular story element, which is sung by one of the characters, Mack, Mackbot, or the Narrator. It is up to the player to discover these musical story fragments and piece them together to form a cohesive story. In particular, the Narrator�s purpose is to contextualize the album within the setting of Culver City and to help the player with hints and instructions.

Location33 also adds elements of game play, asking the player to move around the space to find story fragments in a type of musical and narrative scavenger hunt.

Besides, players can alter the temporal structure of the album, performing time travel operations to experience the album without having to be in Culver City on each day of the week.

Location33 is the thesis project of William Carter, student in Interactive Media at the USC School of cinema and TV.

Read the PDF and doc presentations to see how it works. [blogged by Regine on near near future]

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.

Regular taxi-users are caught off guard in the confined space of a car, abducted for a short amount of time from their everyday business. The artists seek to surprise and entertain the passenger by confronting him or her with an insight into the memory of a stranger, provoking a memory lapse. Due to the geographical distance of the interviewees an overlay of two pictures occurs: The out of date view of the ex-patriot merges with the current situation on site, and the meeting of the two lives on in the memory of the passenger.

To experience TAXI MADRID call Teletaxi: 91 371 21 31 / 902 501 130 and ask for a taxi from MADRID ABIERTO. Conditions are the same as usual.

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.