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Smart phones are becoming a standard across creative and consumer communities and their locative properties are beginning to change the way that we navigate physical and social spaces. Platforms such as the Apple iPhone and Google Android that contain GPS (Global Positioning Systems) technology are becoming a powerful research platform for Architecture, Landscape and Geography.
However, existing GPS applications focus predominantly on single users needs such as navigation or local services. The ability to see the position of other users is beginning to emerge, but what is missing is the ability to use this information for collaboration and tools for developers and researchers to create and explore new collaborative mapping applications.
A small research team including CIRCLE members, have initiated a research project that seeks to develop a technical solution for mapping other phone users simultaneously. The team have received small grant funding from eca to develop a prototype piece of software to test the principle within a collaborative research project with the Schools of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at eca (Dr. Chris Speed and Chris Lowry), and the Schools of Infomatics (Dr. Mark Wright) , GeoSciences (Dr. William A. Mackaness) and Arts, Culture and Environment (Dermott McMeel) at the UoE. In addition the technical platform supports an arts based collaboration with Jen Southern (an established UK artist working with GPS technologies). The academic team envisages a substantial application for research funding from the Natural Environment Research Council, following the prototyping of this technology.
An experimental geo-spatial iPhone application called CoMob has been developed, now downloadable for free from the iTunes App Store. This application allows users to log in and have their GPS data transferred live to a webserver that then uses that data along with the data of all the other users logged in to create geo-spatial drawings. The drawing applet is accessible at the CoMob website.
3D Camera Obscura using "tangible projection"
We can create a link between an art gallery and a remote city space. Cameras can be set up around a city space or land mark. Examples could be the outside Art Institutions; The Galleries on the Mound in Edinburgh, Tate Modern, The Louvre, MOma New York, Guggenhiem Bilbao etc. The video is piped into a gallery anywhere in the world and projected onto physical models of the buildings in these places. Think about lego land sized white models with live video textures projected onto them.
World Bloomsday
Participants in at least two cities in a pilot but all around the world eventually contribute to "World Bloomsday". Many people in each location and the participating cities walk around those cities simulaneously. As they do they are tracked by GPS. The people can take images or record text messages of their journey. This media is geo-referenced and can then be displayed in one or more galleries around the world, city screens and on the web. GPS data from such tracks could then be used to trawl for other georeferenced content either in realtime or later.
It shapes the world around you.
Simon Biggs
An artwork where the power of people's love (and their GPS enabled mobile technologies) allows them to overcome the laws of time and space.
gpsLove employs live Global Positioning System data to visualise the relationships between people. A registered user creates a list of buddies. When they are logged onto the system they and their buddies coordinates are shared with one another. The gpsLove application takes this data and uses it to render an image of the world, distorted by the gps data. The distortion is created by the software seeking to re-map the world such that no matter where the user and their buddies are in the visualisation they all appear to be together, in the same place. This inevitably involves the world around them being distorted into an unfamilar shape in order to ensure their co-locatedness.
The visual mapping technique employed in gpsLove is based on Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion mapping system. Based on a series of interlocking triangular sections the Dymaxion system lends itself to being distorted in a manner similar to origami. The world can be folded in upon itself, or outward, into new shapes and forms, enabling people on different parts of the planet to always occupy the same triangular section. The gpsLove application employs iterative triangular sub-division such that the user can zoom into whatever level of detail they wish.
The Dymaxion model allows for a non-Cartesian visualisation of the world. In gpsLove this non-Cartesian vision is augmented such that the world can take numerous shapes, depending on the relative movements of the buddy's or who is listed on the user's buddy list. The individual shapes the world to suit them rather than the other way around. Typical mappings of the world are supplanted with novel models that lead us to question our conventional understandings of geography and all that flows from them.