Jen Southern

I’ve just come across 7scenes, free software for iphones and android phones that allows you to make locative narratives.

http://7scenes.com/

Here’s a nice example of one called ‘Walking Shoes:Directed by DAMMSel‘ made by an artist Leola LeBlanc in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

“The most interesting ways of looking at the GPS grid, what it is, what we do with it, what we might be able to do with it, all seemed to be being put forward by artists. Artists or the military. That’s something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: the most interesting applications turn up on the battlefield, or in a gallery.”

says Bobby Chombo a locative media programmer in William Gibson’s novel ‘Spook Country’ (2007)

In his paper ‘Locative-Media Artists in the Contested-Aware City‘ Anthony Townsend discusses a similar theme in more depth. (Leonardo, volume 39, Issue 4)

“The rapid deployment of top-down context-aware systems and the lack of holistic, sustainable, human-centred visions for aware cities has created an enormous intellectual vacuum. Into this breach have stepped artists who are co-opting this new “locative media” to highlight the flaws of these visions but also to raise fundamental questions about the nature of public space and surveillance.”

“By engaging these technologies and their social and spatial implications, artists are shaping the evolution of a space-changing technology far earlier than they ever have in the past.”

“The artists of tomorrow with have to explore the meaning of perception in a world in which we will have outsourced many of our perceptive tasks to machines, to extend and augment our abilities.”

The dangers of this position are discussed by Tuters and Varnelis (Beyond Locative Media)

“The reluctance of many locative-media practitioners to position their works as political has led some theorists, such as Andreas Broeckmann, to accuse locative media of being the “avant-garde of the ‘society of control’”

WordPress allows me to include a geotag in my blog posts, but so far it is only visible when I edit the post (see image), not on the actual blog. WordPress say that there will soon be support for making the location of posts visible on the blog.

“Where is public geo data exposed?

Geotagged posts get marked up with the geo microformat, geo.position and ICBM meta tags, and GeoRSS and W3C geodata in feeds. All of this stuff is “machine readable”, not “human readable”; it’s hidden from view.

We’ll soon be launching a bunch of human readable stuff like theme integration, widgets, shortcodes, maps, etc.

Also, geotagged posts and profiles will be searchable in the soon-to-be-launched WordPress.com Geo Search.”

from http://en.support.wordpress.com/geotagging/

Just testing the wordpress iPhone app, about to go for a walk with my new garmin gps, and to think about a proposal I’m writing.

Call for Artists: Trampoline Platform Event “Territorial Play”

Part of the Tracing Mobility Programme

Deadline for Submissions: Monday 12^th April 2010

Trampoline is inviting submissions for a platform event, Territorial Play, scheduled to take place mid May as part of Radiator Festival’s forthcoming Tracing Mobility programme launching in Nottingham.

Territorial Play aims to illustrate, annotate and animate discourse around current trends towards a ‘mobilised city’. With the emergence of location aware mobile devices and near ubiquitous access to electronic networks in urban and rural areas, a new city is forming beneath our feet.

This dynamic ‘hybrid-city’, is a city in flux, where ideas of authorship and ownership are left at the door. What are the cultural implications of this emergent public domain and what possibilities do the architecture and protocol of networked space present to affect change in real space?

We are inviting artists, performers, visualists, filmmakers, designers, game-players, writers and others to stake claims, occupy space, command territory, re-imagine the public domain, uncover hidden terrain and return to our day jobs the next day leaving no trace.

The event will take place over one day, using Nottingham’s Broadway Cinema and Digital Media Centre as the base of operations however we welcome submissions that engage with the public and spaces in and around the city.

Submissions should include:

**Images/documentation/video (DVD/CD/VHS in standard format) OR URL to online documentation.

**A4 Proposal/Description of work

**CV/Biog

**A completed submission form

Download a submission form here http://www.trampoline.org.uk/files/TerritorialPlay_SubmissionForm.doc

Tracing Mobility is a Radiator Festival event supported by funds from the Legacy Trust UK, European Regional Development Fund, European Cultural Foundation, Adam Mickiewicz Institute**, the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham and Capital Cultural Fund Berlin. In partnership with: Nottingham Contemporary, Broadway Cinema and The Level Centre. **POLSKA! YEAR, developed by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, is a joint initiative of the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. With the cooperation of British partners, Polska! Year aims to bring the communities of Poland and Great Britain closer by establishing new connections between Polish and British artistic institutions, artists and cultural practitioners.

http://www.trampoline.org.uk

http://www.radiator-festival.org.uk

In Cumbria last week I found several references to GPS in cards and local news – all with varying levels of frustration with different aspects of GPS as inaccurate, unreliable, misleading, gendered and un-necessary or ineffectual, in some ways reflecting what I’ve found in field work elsewhere.

Frifi is an iphone app that allows you to see where friends are and to SMS style chat with them, and find directions to them. We have been working towards adding sms or twitter style chat to our comob application, to allow for co-mobile discussion as well as location tracking within groups. I still think that our linking lines make the group a different thing. Just knowing where someone is with Frifi feels like watching them, but with a connecting line we are together in a kind of social agreement.  I haven’t used this app live with other people, although we could have done with something similar yesterday as 4 of us tried to meet up in central London, but didn’t know where to suggest as a meeting point because we weren’t sure what each other had been doing before.

http://www.frifi.net/

“The one and only phone to phone GPS contact location and free SMS Style chat app you need for the iPhone. See where your contacts are using the FriFi maps, zoom into their location and get directions to where they are. Share your location with your friends and keep up to date with places of interest they have pointed out. Drop your own pins and mark places for your friends to see, along with your own notes for them to read.Priceless for hiking, nights out, keeping tabs on the kids, sudden change of meeting place, work colleagues, festivals… you name it!”

An astronaut is tweeting from space, taking photographs of the earth and posting them live.

http://twitter.com/Astro_Soichi

The captions on photos initially suggested that he is trying to replicate the clear vision of google  “the first time London was not covered with cloud”, and there is always a tension between this clarity and his individual perspective from space, laced with clouds and at angles we don’t recognise from maps and images that adhere to north as top of image.   There is a dialogue between him and other twitter users ordinary things. The comments the images get are often mundane, ‘amazing photo’ ‘please photograph my city’ ‘awesome’, however occasionally an image will provoke speculation on pollution in a river, suggesting that seeing things from above can reveal wider social or environmental conditions.

Soichi also describes his tasks on board the space station. Comments like  ‘time for dinner at last’ put these images and their scale into perspective with everyday life and the ordinary. The liveness of these posts make them more compelling than google, and in a way brings the scale of the achievement closer where it becomes perhaps less amazing. Knowing that a single person took this photograph and posted it to twitter is powerful. And he’s responding to people’s requests, so that it has become a conversation between individuals, between earth and space.

I bought some slides taken in space from Skylab 3, from ebay a few months ago. They are faded and pink, appearing dated and nostalgic. One image I find particularly interesting is of a tornado over the Atlantic, the swirl of cloud obscures the earth as it spreads over its surface. The lack of clarity opens up space for a different interpretation, of more seperation from the lense. Where Soichi tweeting from space connects us directly, these slides and their partial views that are hard to read make the feat of being in space all the more mysterious and amazing, perhaps even something to be in awe of.

I just came across Foursquare http://foursquare.com

Its another social group software that lets users find where their friends are and leave recommendations and play games with each other. Harvard have just started using it with their new students.

here’s how Foursquare describe themselves:

“Check in

People use foursquare to “check-in”, which is a way of telling us your whereabouts. When you check-in
someplace, we’ll tell your friends where they can find you and recommend places to go & things to do
nearby. People check-in at all kind of places – cafes, bars, restaurants, parks, homes, offices.
You’ll find that as your friends use foursquare to check-in, you’ll start learning more about the places
they frequent. Not only is it a great way to meet up with nearby friends, but you’ll also start to learn
about their favorite spots and the new places they discover.

Share your experiences with friends
Think of foursquare as an “urban mix tape.” We’ll help you make lists of your favorite things to do and
let you share them with friends. Think beyond your standard review – we’re looking less for “The food
here is top notch” and more for “Go to Dumont Burger and try the most amazing Mac and Cheese ever.”
Foursquare will keep track of the things you’ve done, help you create To-Do lists and even suggest new
experiences to seek out.
As you check-in around the city, you’ll start finding tips that other users have left behind. After
checking-in at a restaurant, it’s not uncommon to unlock a tip suggesting the best thing on the menu.
Checking-in at a bar will often offer advice on what your next stop should be. Every tip you create is
discoverable by other users just by checking-in.

foursquare badges
Earn points and unlock badges!
Every foursquare checkin earns you points. Find a new place in your neighborhood? +5 points. Making
multiple stops in a night? +2 points. Dragging friends along with you? +1.
And as you start checking-in to more interesting places with different people, you’ll start unlocking
badges. There are badges for discovering new places and for traveling to far away places. Spending too
much time singing karaoke or been hitting the gym consistently? Yes, there are badges for those too :)

foursquare specials
Become the mayor! Unlock some freebies!
We all have our local hangouts and foursquare keeps tabs on who’s the most loyal of all the regulars.
If you’ve been to a place more than anyone else, you’ll become “the mayor”… until someone else comes
along and steals your title.
It may sound a little silly until you see the list of places that are offering
freebies to our mayors – free coffees, free ice-cream, free hotel stays – it pays to be a foursquare
loyalist and check-in whenever you go!