Mobile City conference
Mais resenhas sobre a Mobile Cit Conference em Rotterdam, ambas no Pasta & Vinegar de Nicolas Viva. A primeira retoma conferências de Malcolm McCullough, Christian Nold, Jeroen van Shaik, Stephen Graham. Abaixo alguns trechos:
“Malcolm McCullough: (…) First, “the city itself is an inscription” and there lots of instances of inscriptions from graffiti to state proclamations to the contentions of branding, and from petroglyphs to banners to lit facades, the architecture of the city has been layered with lasting messages. To him, there’s an tension between “locative media/emergent culture of street level participatory urban computing” AND the “built environment as a new media”, sort of “tagging versus LED display”. In one case, it’s about the fashion of blinking “push media” (displays), in the other, it’s a rather “pull” mode. (…)
Christian Nold: (…) To him, the work of Blast Theory or GPS drawings are nice but are only a limited account of cities and wondered about the presence of people and social relationships in there (or the lack of). He then criticized projects such as Real Time Rome stating that they are interesting but are a techno-fetishistic way to represent Rome: where is the history of Rome? What kind of social relationships are represented behind these atomic explosions? Locative Media, for Nold, is about verbs such as “gather/share/play/visualize/imagine” currently. And he thinks the field should rather focus on “collaborate (people, institutions), archive, educate, challenge (politics), change behavior (although it may sound instrumental) and organise”. That’s why he think Oakland crimespotting (Stamen Design) interesting because they re-interprete publicly available data and make then legible for people. (…)
Jeroen van Shaik: (…) Using examples drawn from Spatial Metro, he showed how activity patterns can represent urban attraction, invisible borders, the structure of the city, the relation between movement and people’s purposes or the relation between time spent in certain places and patterns of movements. To him, tracking have challenges: – re-conceptualizes City-ICT relationships; – tracking tech are space/time adjusting (…): there is a difference between cities (which are about building streets, material stuff), which tracking technologies is not.; – re-conceptualizes the role of urban research, urban design/planning OR merely a new research instrument? (…)
Stephen Graham: (…) Graham proposed 3 starting points: 1) To abandon the notion of a “real” and a “virtual” world. The situation is best understood not as real/virtual binary but rather simply the latest process in a long history of remediation that refashions and extends earlier media (as proposed by Bolter and Grusin in 1999). 2) Cities can be seen to emerge as fluid machines, places which combine “distant proximity” and “proximate distance”. It’s more accurate to follow Deleuze and Guattari when they take the city as a process and not as a shape: with flows of energy, people goods, services, etc. Therefore it’s interesting to see how locative media fit into cities as a process. 3) Like all new technologies, ubicomp and locative media tend to becomes hidden and disappear at precisely the moment they become most important. (…)”. Um post do Smart Mobs resenha também a apresentação de Graham.
O segundo pots reseenha a sua prórpia apresentação. Trechos:
“(…) my point was to focus on issues regarding interaction design and spatial environment (not that I dismiss the privacy issues of locative media or the politics of ubicomp but it’s not my field). My point was to describe one of the limit of current location-based services design: the fact that most of the time space (the material environment) is assumed to be uniform and homogeneous. Based on the work we did in the CatchBob! project (a location-based gamed developed to be played on our campus), as well as some other material, I described how this was not the case.
(Picture courtesy of Patrick Jermann)
The second point concerned the heterogeneity of space. The picture shows the mapping of WiFi antennas or our campus. As one can see, they are not evenly distributed and since we used Wireless signals to compute people’s location in space, it was clear that the accuracy was different depending on the location in space (it was less accurate in the lower part). In addition, the heterogeneity of space is also caused by topographical limits: indoor/outdoor transitions for example.
(Picture courtesy of Fabien Girardin)
And finally, that picture shows three different traces of a passage in space using a GPS. Depending on the level considered, the accuracy of the positioning is way different (from dots to a straight line). Sometimes it’s not even continuous, so how can we design a service based on that?(…)”