geosocial.net

Our pals at Popular Science have a write up of a low cost way to do your own cell phone tracking - “…Jen, is tracking me. Using a $100 kit from Mologogo (with a $6-a-month data plan), I’ve turned a prepaid cellphone into a GPS tracking device. Every few minutes, the phone transmits my location within 100 meters to mologogo.com, which posts it to a Google map that Jen can access from any computer. She can view my most recent spot or my past 100 recorded locations as little pushpins stamped with date and time.” - Link.

Related:
DIY GPS tracking with Mologogo - review - Link.

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GISuser.com has posted the first part of a three-part series on the Google Maps API, specifically on version 2. The first part is an introduction which thankfully doesn’t appear to assume too much prior knowledge; parts two and three will go into further detail and AJAX and geocoding, respectively. Via Anything Geospatial.

See previous entries: Coding the Google Maps API; Google Maps Hacking Roundup.

Categories: Hacks & Mashups | Comment on this entry

My Personal Interests within Interactive Architecture are surrounding Kinetic interaction and adaptive space so I was pleased when Janis Pönisch got in touch about his project Dynamic Terrain. Janis explains below his intentions for the installation and its relatioship with potential future forms of interactive architecture.

“Dynamic Terrain is a dynamic architectonic robotic surface. It demonstrates a possible future of an interactive system that forms our surrounding depending on the action taken by the user. It wants to be a creature that we communicate to and play with. It functions as a skin that holds the human body in a dynamic and creative way. It is an area in which to experience the mix of digital and physical space. It is a surface without a fixed form, its form is virtual, and therefore adjustable and erasable. In a utopia of this prototype we live together with architectural bodies that respond to our actions.” Janis Pönisch

Website

The shape of the surface is controlled by the users through a software interface. A three dimensional wireframe model can be distorted and its topological information is being translated in real time to the physical shape. On the surface are also touch sensors that allow the users to move the control points up and down overruling the software positioning. The surface is made of flexible rubber that is stretched by a metal construction underneath. Eight drilling machines are the powering forces directed by micro controllers that are connected to a computer.

Cabspotting, which went live on Thursday, generates a real-time map of taxi movements by displaying the last four hours of trips by GPS-equipped taxicabs in San Francisco. (For some reason this reminds me of the cell phone map of Graz I posted about last September.) Don’t miss the time-lapse animations. Via Boing Boing and Cartography.

Categories: Cities, Tracerouting | Tags: sanfrancisco | Comment on this entry

From Google’s April fool:

Advisors are ready to answer your question for as little as $2.50 (per minute), usually within 24 hours and conceivably much, much sooner, depending on your levels of personal desperation and financial werewithal and the quality of your GPS signal and mobile plan.

Relation to my thesis: Funny to think that people might need to become aware of the position they provide in order to get good services. Will people with bad positioning systems or living in urban canyons become 2nd class citizens?

an interactive mobile prototype which examines the layering of physical space with the on & off zones of wireless networks. ‘trace’ maps the invisible quality of wireless technology in the urban landscape onto PDAs to produce a series of cartographies visualising nodes, zones, users, and routes. [tracemap.net| via prusikloop.org]

Mapping Religion in America
(via chris glass)
Originally posted by swissmiss from swissmiss

Sonic Scene

“The art itself, from a curatorial and artistic standpoint, offers varied approaches to its historical inheritance to psychogeography, a lineage often claimed by the artists themselves, and not without attendant charges of avoiding the socio-political analyses and practices of the SI that abhor the seductions of spectacle – notably technology. The curatorial hypothesis of the project was to explore exactly this region of how artists who consider themselves practicing variants of psychogeography (or even as psychogeographers) do so in the 21C. Under these conditions locative technology offers a way to address the condition of the connected, the online (the ‘virtual’ in the popular sense) within the matrix of spectacle (and thus artistic détournement). This is an inclusion that simply wasn’t possible during the heyday of Debord, the SI, COBRA et al. and which speaks to not only a virtual condition ‘in general’ but of the Net’s virtuality insofar as it ‘grounds itself’ in locative and increasingly embedded technospheres. Whether this remains exclusive from or applicable to Debord’s analysis of spectacle – in itself a détournement of Marx and Lukács among others – remains to be seen and can only be charted in its actual complexity by mapping the interaction between virtual netspace and the world as it exists in 2005, a cartographic intervention increasingly interwoven through and through by, in Debord’s terms, the machinations of a society of spectacle where, and we must put it all in brackets, ‘even’ the ‘real’ is ‘produced’ as ‘media’.”

Culture is dead, by Jean Degottex, 1968

Perhaps, truly, even claiming that artistic production is more highly implicated now than the ‘60s is already rejecting Debord’s radical negation of the artistic project as-such, and insofar as I was interested in seeking artists who might go so far as to negate their practice in favour of the political force of psychogeography, I have yet to find anyone committed to such a level (or, to détourn-ing détournement as a suitable response – the dialectic en proces). Rather, or at least prima facie, psychogeography in the 21C remains a set of practices to be explored under a rubric of art that sees only minor border skirmishes within its discipline rather than the kind of overarching if not atom-bomb like critique launched by Debord with his black-out of cinema, initiated by the inflammatory showing of Howlings for de Sade at Cannes in 1952, prefaced by his claim that ‘There’s no film. Cinema is dead. There can’t be film any more. If you want, let’s have a discussion’.”

Text from Tobias van Veen’s reflections in Ghosts of Geography and the Montreal Wireless at Reading Montreal. Poster from Icôns de la Révolution / Icons of the Revolution (via)

Via Glass Steel and Stone

[…]Locative Arts has been somewhat on the fringes of the predominantly urban, socially focused arts projects. The natural world is under ever greater stresses, and these technologies, usually employed to buffer nature, can and have been effectively used to raise awareness of the non-human world and give it a voice. The idea of over saturation of technology has been parodied by projects like “Augmented Animals“, though in reality new communication modes are being employed by wildlife researchers to track elephants and reindeer by SMS and GPS. I’ve been gathering various resources on spatial technology and spatial understanding in animals under the moniker “Locative Animals” […]

Nature is not seperate from urban experience, though most city dwellers would not be that aware of the populations living in their midst. Sensing and tracking of wild fuana and flora in urban environments could raise awareness of wildlife in a tangible, positive way.

del.icio.us / mikel_maron / locativeanimals

Via Pasta

city social blog technology tech urban art art urban technology social research research social tech technology city

Nottingham-based technology artists, Active Ingredient (authors of ‘Ere Be Dragons), are to launch an interactive game that will link the people of Leicester, Nottingham and Derby.

Love City will allow people to text each other in a game that awards points for making connections with people from the other cities.

The game uses mobile cell location to track users’ positions in the three cities. When a player moves between mobile phone ‘cells’, s/he (Player 1) receives an SMS that includes an update about Love City and the status of other players in their area or in one of the cities. Players can then connect with each other by sending a text to another person in another place. If Player 2 accepts Player 1’s message of love, a connection is made and these form a “bonded pair”. If a second connection is made from this group to a third player, then a triplet or Ménage à trois is created.

When a triplet is formed, Player 1 is awarded an avatar known as the “offspring” which acts as an agent for them in this particular cell. Subsequent connections with this agent are relayed to the original player who may be far from the cell but can still connect and initiate a process which leads to the creation of more offspring and points for them. Thus their empire grows.

The first test of the game, commissionned by Three Cities, will take place on April 3 – 9 2006.

The full-scale public project is likely to take place at the end of the year when a big-screen projection of the game will be broadcast in the main public spaces of each city.

Via Media Arts Education. Background information from 24hour museum and Three cities.

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