Urban Tapestries
November 3, 2008 by Giles Lane · Leave a Comment
Urban Tapestries (2002-04) was a ground-breaking project that investigated how the combination of geographic information systems (GIS) and mobile technologies (including ad-hoc WiFi) could enable people to map and share their knowledge and experience, stories and information – public authoring. The transdisciplinary team developing it wove together an action research process bridging programming, ethnography, visual arts, filmmaking, animation, product design, information architecture, concept design, rapid & paper prototyping and creative writing.
The project resulted in numerous events, publications, technologies as well as two public trials of the Urban Tapestries mobile platform for public authoring in December 2003 and June-July 2004.
Team: Alice Angus, Daniel Angus, John Paul Bichard, Katrina Jungnickel, Giles Lane, Rachel Murphy, Roger Silverstone, Zoe Sujon and Nick West.
Partners & Collaborators: London School of Economics, Hewlett-Packard Research Laboratories, Orange, Ordnance Survey, France Telecom R&D UK.
Funded by Department of Trade & Industry, Arts Council England, Fondation Daniel Langlois
Private Reveries, Public Spaces
November 3, 2008 by Giles Lane · 1 Comment
In July 2001 Proboscis commissioned fourteen proposals from leading artists and designers addressing the theme of converging media technologies (internet, radio, interactive television, wireless & mobile communications etc.) and their social and cultural impact on the shifting relationship between private and public spaces. Private Reveries, Public Spaces was an intervention in the development of new media networks and services introducing innovative and experimental work into the public sphere to challenge as well as to inspire companies, regulatory agencies and researchers involved in the design and building of the new media ecology.
Participants:
Rachel Baker, Julie Freeman, Nat Goodden, Karen Guthrie & Nina Pope, Ben Hooker & Shona Kitchen and Natalie Jeremijenko, Liquid idea, James Loizeau & James Auger, Christian Moller, Simon Poulter, David Rokeby, Sand14, Petra Trefzger & Felix Goetz and Louise K Wilson.
Three ‘conceptual prototypes’ were commissioned from:
Rachel Baker, Ben Hooker & Shona Kitchen and Natalie Jeremijenko.
The proposals and prototypes were presented at the London School of Economics in June 2002.
Team: Alice Angus & Giles Lane
Advisory Group: Professor Roger Silverstone, Fiona Raby, Gary Stewart, Hannah Redler, Charlie Gere and David Sinden.
Funded by Fondation Daniel Langlois and Arts Council England New Media Projects Fund
Snout
November 3, 2008 by Giles Lane · 1 Comment
Snout investigates how data can be collected from environmental sensors as part of popular social and cultural activities. Proboscis collaborated with inIVA and researchers from Birkbeck College’s Pervasive Computing Lab to design and build two carnival costumes (Mr Punch and the Plague Doctor) that were instrumented with environmental sensors and LED displays. A website was created (using free social software tools) to show the sensor data mapped against other local knowledge (drawn in via RSS feeds) and contextual data (about local health, poverty, education etc) scraped from the Office of National Statistics.
In April 2007 we staged a mock carnival in Shoreditch to collect pollution data and stimulate conversations. The procession started out from the new inIVA building on Rivington Street and weaved a route up Charlotte Road to Hoxton Square, down Hoxton Street and round Shoreditch High Street to finish up with an afternoon public forum at Cargo.
Team: Demetrios Airantzis, Alice Angus, Giles Lane, Karen Martin, George Roussos, Jenson Taylor & Orlagh Woods.
Performers: Bill Aitchison & Jordan Mackenzie
Partners: Iniva; Birkbeck College (University of London)
Commissioned by Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts)
Funded by Arts Council England and Esmee Fairbairn Charitable Foundation.
Perception Peterborough – Impressions
September 15, 2008 by Giles Lane · Comments Off on Perception Peterborough – Impressions
As part of our research for the project, we conducted an anarchaeology of the city and its people and created a series of Impressions to inspire different perspectives on the key themes for workshop participants and project stakeholders.
The Impressions, initially created as a means of conveying a local sense of place to national and international participants, were inspired by the series of ‘Wanderings’ that Proboscis undertook with local people in Peterborough as a means of conveying a local sense of place.
We were inspired by the people of Peterborough and the seeds of the future they showed us that Peterborough already has; the diversity, talent, river, and green spaces, fens and waterways, the history and folklore and the great generous friendliness of people who never turned us away. Our Impressions therefore were about the seeds of Peterborough; visible and invisible, from past and future, for hopes
and concerns. They are about what could be seeded, nurtured and grown and what seeds exist here already to help everyone do that.
The wanderings involved conversations and encounters with over 20 local people of different ages and backgrounds. Proboscis journeyed through townships, villages and city by taxi, train, bus, bike, kayak and on foot to investigate and explore the city and its surrounding landscapes. We gained a richer understanding, through local and grassroots perspectives, of people’s perspectives of what it is like to live in Peterborough and their aspirations for the future. The resulting series of Impressions include short films, audio collage, eBooks, StoryCubes and drawings that can be shared physically and digitally and combined with existing policy material to add new perspective to the visioning process.
- Lines of Mobility Diffusion eBook
- Blocks of Change Diffusion eBook
- Bus Adventures Diffusion eBook
- Underused Assets StoryCubes
- Monsters and Mermaids (8 panel french fold booklet PDF)
- Flows Film
- Perspectives Film
- Voices audio piece
- Briefing Pack Book (PDF)
- Briefing Pack StoryCubes (illustrated by Matt Huynh).
Perception Peterborough – Voices
September 1, 2008 by Giles Lane · Comments Off on Perception Peterborough – Voices
Voices records hopes, aspirations and feelings about the city of local people we encountered during our anarchaeological research for Perception Peterborough. One of a series of 8 “Impressions” of the city of Peterborough in England. Part of the Perception Peterborough project which involves artists and consultants in working with local, national and international people to develop a compelling and exciting vision for the future of the city.
CREATOR Pilot – Sensory Threads
August 5, 2008 by Giles Lane · Comments Off on CREATOR Pilot – Sensory Threads
Proboscis is leading a pilot project, Sensory Threads, funded by the CREATOR Research Cluster. The project builds upon our previous collaborations with Birkbeck College’s Pervasive Computing Lab on the Feral Robots and Snout environmental sensing projects and takes wearable sensing into new areas with new collaborations with the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary, University of London, the Mixed Reality Lab at University of Nottingham and Southampton University’s School of Management.
Sensory Threads is a work-in-progress to develop an instrument enabling a group of people to create a soundscape reflecting their collaborative experiences in the environment. For this interactive sensory experience, we are designing sensors for detecting environmental phenomena at the periphery of human perception as well as the movement and proximity of the wearers themselves. Possible targets for the sensors may be electro-magnetic radiation, hi/lo sound frequencies, heart rate etc). The sensors’ datastreams will feed into generative audio software, creating a multi-layered and multi-dimensional soundscape feeding back the players’ journey through their environment. Variations in the soundscape reflect changes in the wearers interactions with each other and the environment around them. We aim to premiere the work in 2009.
Team: Alice Angus, Giles Lane, Karen Martin and Orlagh Woods (Proboscis); Demetrios Airantzis, Dr George Roussos and Jenson Taylor (Birkbeck); Joe Marshall (MRL); Dr Nick Bryan-Kinns and Robin Fencott (Queen Mary) and Dr Lorraine Warren (Southampton).
Funded through the CREATOR Research Cluster, part of the EPSRC’s Digital Economy programme.
Shared Encounters Workshop
April 30, 2007 by karenmartin · Comments Off on Shared Encounters Workshop
‘Shared Encounters’ was a workshop which took place at CHI 07 in San Jose, California. CHI is the annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems and this one-day workshop brought together researchers from academia and industry to explore how mobile technologies might support shared encounters in urban environments. Karen Martin and Giles Lane submitted a position paper describing Proboscis’ Conversations and Connections project and the challenges and opportunities faced by projects which make use of, and develop, new technologies but have primarily social goals.
You can read our paper here: Making Glue (PDF 150Kb)
This is the workshop abstract:
Our everyday lives are characterised by encounters, some are fleeting and ephemeral and others are more enduring and meaningful exchanges. Shared encounters are the glue of social networks and have a socializing effect in terms of mutual understanding, empathy, respect and thus tolerance towards others. The quality and characteristics of such encounters are affected by the setting, or situation in which they occur. In a world shaped by communication technologies, non-place-based networks often coexist alongside to the traditional local face-to-face social networks. As these multiple and distinct on and off-line communities tend to carry out their activities in more and more distinct and sophisticated spaces, a lack of coherency and fragmentation emerges in the sense of a shared space of community. Open public space with its streets, parks and squares plays an important role in providing space for shared encounters among and between these coexisting networks. Mobile and ubiquitous technologies enable social encounters located in public space, albeit not confined to fixed settings, whilst also offering sharing of experiences from non-place based networks. We will look at how to create or support the conditions for meaningful and persisting shared encounters. In particular we propose to explore how technologies can be appropriated for shared interactions that can occur spontaneously and playfully and in doing so re-inhabit and connect place-based social networks.
http://www.mediacityproject.com/shared-encounters/description.php
Urban Tapestries: Public Authoring, Place & Mobility
October 15, 2006 by Giles Lane · 1 Comment
Urban Tapestries: Public Authoring, Place & Mobility (October 2006)
Private Reveries and Public Spaces
January 15, 2003 by Giles Lane · Comments Off on Private Reveries and Public Spaces
Cultural Snapshots No.4 January 2003
Private Reveries and Public Spaces: some thoughts on the relation between art and social science in an age of media and technology by Roger Silverstone
Fears are easily rationalised in the attic
June 15, 2002 by Giles Lane · Comments Off on Fears are easily rationalised in the attic
Cultural Snapshot No.2 June 2002
Fears are easily rationalised in the attic by Caroline Smith
