Recent exhibitions, festivals and conferences across the US and in Europe have taken wireless networks, public space, locative media and urban environments as sites of intervention, creativity, and critique. Formulated within the emerging context of networked urbanism and mobile media, City Centered: A Festival of Locative Media and Urban Community will focus upon dynamics of the shifting, locative, cartographic and social space of the city. It is organized by educational, arts, community-based and civic organizations and asks how locative media can act as a platform and venue for community-led expression.From within San Francisco's Tenderloin district, this festival will celebrate the rich possibilities that art and technology offer for urban communication of place and place-based media. City Centered focuses on the use of locative media and wireless technologies for site-specific and neighborhood-based interventions. Artists, designers, architects, community and cultural workers --people, places, and devices -- will meet for four days of street-side celebration, public exhibitions, a symposium, and workshops. The festival seeks new work aligned with the themes of creative mapping, urban storytelling, sentient space, body awareness, local history, contested spaces and gaming.
City Centered: A Festival of Locative Media and Urban Community
June 11- 13 & 19, 2010
Sponsored by the Center for Locative Media, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, KQED, Conceptual Information Arts/Art Dept/San Francisco State University, the City of San Francisco, and the Berkeley Center for New Media
Submission deadline: March 1, 2010
"turning the real world into a game...it's good but a little bit of a disaster"
building a new dodgeball-like thing after dodgeball got closed down -- trying to get people to use it by giving them points
inspirations
- Jane McGonigal
- Nike Plus
- Nick Feltron, personal informatics
...points and scores everywhere
- people and dogs!
- inspired by the collecting of merit badges
mobility as prompted by unlocking and mayorships
using the idioms of foursquare to make political jokes
getting people to do things they wouldn't normally do
track history of movements
"what are you talking about? this is the most interesting dataset in the history of the planet!"
- using it for finding kid playdates, tracking geographic networks of relationships, using data to provide info for games
Q: Tom - how do you incentivize hanging out rather than going places?
"that was the problem with Dodgeball. For too long, it was hipsters drinking beer."
Trying to connect Foursquare to other data sources, such as GoodReads, Amazon, etc
formed a "nerd poker" tracking group around video games 4 years ago to meet on Thursday nights online - share scripts and material that might not be recognized...and often very self-serving - now more than 300 people. And not self-serving!
trying to break down the wall between hollywood and games people
bringing people together at E3 -- publishers, software, film/movie business, designers
- filmmakers coming to understand that there are different ways to create characters and tell stories
- game designers coming to understand that other industries are actually interested in how they work
- showcasing indie games like Flower, Misadventures of PB Winterbottom, etc
...and making relationships (got distracted here...lost thread while dealing with emails)
local design approach
- place
- people
- issues
with Knight Foundation's community-centric gaming initiative
- Detroit and neighborhood abandonment
-- working with local stakeholders
-- real world street-based social game about DIY hacking and bikes and GPS
-- neighborhood hubs as community centers, of sorts
- Biloxi Mississippi - disaster preparedness for teens
- spectacular public game show sport + large-scale community participation --> community media players work to defeat the enemy Hurricane
- participatory entertainment as community catharsis
trying to do something "innovative" with a newspaper -- an ARG!
...but with no money and no idea how to do it.
differences between newspaper and university on ownership of technology, content, design
bringing in local charities
...all the coordination work of marketing and getting sponsors and
things usman doesn't believe in
make data public --> public make data
ie, pachube -- you publish your (sensor) data
more data is useful --> more context is useful
freedom from constraints is the end goal --> constraints provide hints
architecture is about organizing --> architecture is about disorganizing
people need simplicity --> we are complexity processors
making the invisible, visible
Barangaroo (Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners/Arup, 2009)
responsive architecture
"forcefield," London (Arup)
unfolding resource use
Fitzroy Street, London
"people don't really understand what units are"
"nobody tell us what the benchmarks should be"
the desire for only good news
urban-scale information
low2no
making your mobile phone background black based on extent of carbon use
carbon shadows - buildings with large scale installations that show energy use
responsive architecture
kurilpa bridge, brisband (Cox/Arup)
led-based lighting -- not screen-based to avoid giant screens and repurposing for advertisement
adaptive ambient information
HINTeractions
place-states
place-stats
place-status
place-statements
- reflect back to people how they are interacting with spaces
- adaptive ambient information
- green screens (Chiswick Park)
-- screens showing story about how building is trying to be energy efficient
-- trying to create productive competition to reduce energy
Visible output
"The City" Lewis Mumford (1939)
the move from manual labor to wireless work (well, this is only for some people)
wifi in public space
interactive installations
State Library of Queensland (2008)
tag cloud of term extractions in wifi
- moving the display back into the library space
[This sounds remarkably like suggestions I made to the Electronic Resources and Libraries association conference a year or so ago. Hooray for great minds thinking alike.]
responsive architecture
masdar city centre (lava/arup)
lighting/solar collection units
city centre acts as dashboard/central processing unit for wider city
mobility
urban sesnsing - smart light fields
bluetooth - tracing where people are in realtime in transit
persuasive public transit - smart wayfinding
EU future internet
www.ict-sensei.org
...and what to do about "ethically dodgy" work
so visual that it's hard to summarize. ask Molly for a copy of the presentation. sorry!
thinking of cities not just as social technology but as "intelligent" -- ie, artificial intelligence
Marvin Minsky, JC Licklider, etc
"The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly."
JC Licklider, 1960
3 modes of computing and architecture and city
representing and visualizing
defining the problem to solve
generating symbiotic systems
ivan sutherland and sketchpad, 1962
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bA
"Design today has reached the stage where sheer inventiveness can no longer sustain it."
- C. Alexander, 1963
defining design problems as a series of misfits -- as a series of things that you need to design to smooth over
Alexander - systems generating systems
Nicholas Negroponte
"Someday machines wil go to libraries to read and learn and laugh and will drive about cities to experience and to observe the world."