polyrhythmia video
The final test of the Polyrhythmia prototype before doing a showcase event at the Watershed.
Really exciting to see three tapping machines all responding to live GPS data!
Polyrhythmia showcase – today!
This evening we are showcasing the prototype of a new work ‘Polyrhythmia’ made during a residency at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol. We’ll do a live demo of the work and I’ll be in conversation with Laura Sillars, director of Site Gallery, Sheffield.
http://www.watershed.co.uk/whatson/3311/artists-talk-jen-southern-and-laura-sillars/
I arrived at the studio to find these three lovely new tapping machines ready for the demonstration of the work this evening. They are each linked to an iphone and respond to the movement of that phone. When they are placed next to an object they tap it, in response to the speed that the iPhone is travelling. When all three iPhones are carried by people walking in the city the tapping sounds start to make rhythms together, but just as quickly the rhythm dissembles into a cacophony of clattering, synchronisation comes and goes as different walking patterns play out across the city.
The image below shows some earlier tests of the machines tapping objects in a disused ‘rock cafe’.
Polyrhythmia in progress
A new video of the development process of the new work I’ve been making at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol. 
onwards from ISIS
The end of the residency at ISIS today. It been a great opportunity to really focus on what the Comob research becomes as a final art work. I’ve been really lucky to be able to discuss what I’m doing with Sharon and Clymene here at ISIS, Michelle Hirschorn, Lucy Livingstone and Carole Luby. And I’ve worked with John Shearer to overhaul and update our visualisation software ready for a relaunch soon. The final outcome of this work will take a few months to develop, but I’m hoping to have at least a prototype ready by next June. The video above is a sketch of what might happen, although the final project will be based on collaborations with other people. It will be part of a body of work that links data gathered from the social movement of people, with objects that those people associate with distant friends. It is an attempt to explore how GPS tracking data, instead of being overlaid onto a map, can be mapped onto other objects, places or materials. This is not a removal it from being located or situated, but an attempt to think of location as not simply geographical, but as social and relational. The other part of this body of work has been developed through a residency at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol, which is where I’m going on to next. Huge thanks to everyone here in Newcastle for such a great opportunity.
teacup travels
A project proposal is beginning to come together from this residency. When we re-release the Comob app we will then invite a group of people to participate in the work by using comob to keep in touch at a distance. After a month I will work with them to make a portrait of their distant communication. This portrait might be drawn or printed, but it could also be an installation that suggests something more about their connection. This addition of an installation element adds a more narrative, subjective, or analogue sense of communication and relationships to the data visualisation. It is intended to reflect the nature of virtual connections as part of a variety of different modes of being with people and keeping in touch that we weave together daily between virtual and physical communications.
As a brief test I’m projecting into a teacup – one that reminds me of a friend I used to go to jumble sales and charity shops with, looking for interesting crockery. This is an image of our locations while we were using comob during a performative walk I made last year.
The third image is a different dataset of a group of students, in order to see what a bigger group looks like in this set up.
turning point
In the past week as I’ve been making drawings and visualisations I’ve also been meeting with people to talk about the project, and the other work that I’m currently doing and about to start working on. I had really useful meetings at Culture lab with Atau Tanaka to talk about sonification of GPS data, John Shearer to discuss some changes to our data visualisation, Alessandro Altavilla to talk about sonification and iPhones, and a chat with Ko-Le Chen on the culture lab radio. Later in the week I met with Sharon Bailey and Clymene Christoforu co-directors of ISIS, Kaffe Matthews who is also doing a residency here with Laura Harrington, and Michelle Hirschorn (who is currently producer for acts of memory) came to my studio to see what I’d been doing. Chris Speed and I also exchanged an ongoing series of emails, skype chats and phone calls in our continued collaboration.
Through these conversations I’ve realised that the drawing process has helped me to understand what kind of data is produced by people using comob, to think about some of the issues of data visualisation when people are in distant locations, and to imagine ways of representing that data. But what is most interesting is why people use the comob net iPhone app and the stories behind their mobile connections. There is no way to retrospectively access these stories. Instead we will be re-releasing comob with a new messaging feature and a request for permission to contact users as part of our research project.
The next task is to work out how to contact and invite new people to become involved in the work, and then to design personalised ways of visualising their data as portraits of their shared mobility at a distance. This research now neatly draws these workshops back into this residency.
hand drawn data visualisation
More experiments with visualising data today. I’ve been making drawings from a projection of the comob data. It is helping me to think about what is important to visualise when we make digital versions. Its hard to know what would be revealed by different kinds of tracking before doing it. In this image I drew every location and the connection between them. I could have drawn lines between locations sequentially as if the line were a tracing of the movement between them instead, but that doesn’t seem to be how Comob is used. In the drawing below there isn’t one single base, but several, and some relationships between locations seem stronger, or more frequent, than others.
I’ve also been making animations of comob data, comparing the kinds of movement that has been recorded, while being careful to keep people and places anonymous. Again, this is a way to think through how visualisation can reveal different things about the connections between people. I am not using maps as background because I don’t want to reveal where people are, however its very difficult to understand anything about scale without the map. The distance could be revealed in the way it is visualised, for instance by becoming thicker and brighter when people are in closer proximity. The problem with that kind of visualisation is that it implies that the link is weaker at a greater distance, when it might be that this link makes the connection stronger in some way.
This animation is of a workshop that I ran in Nottingham last year.
comob sketches
Now that the visualisation app is partially working I can begin to look at the data again.
This image is of all the users of comob, although I’m not sure over what timeframe, it must be from a single day, but it doesn’t look typical of a normal day of use. The image is centred on the UK, with a stream of lines leading to North America, and a cross hatch of links to Europe and Australia.
I’ve also been experimenting with animations of a group of people using Comob. Each moving dot is made by a person walking. It is important that who they are and where they are has been made anonymous, only their spatial relationships over time are revealed. I’m interested in whether this data can tell a story. How different is it if I say that these movements are made by people at a wedding, players in a game, a herd of sheep or a pack of dogs? Could I fictionalise the stories in the data, or is it important to know its real origins?
