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)