http://code.autistici.org/trac/neighborhoodscience/browser/Birdswithin

En el wiki del Medialabprado hay más información y pronto se tendrá una página de información y colaboración para avanzar el proyecto.

http://wiki.medialab-prado.es/index.php/Birds_within

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For english speakers a small introduction pasted directly from the wiki (Go to previous link for more info): “The project uses a 3D audio architecture which allows different sound loops or tones to be assigned to digital representations of real satellites which orbits and velocities are scaled down to fit the local space of the listener. This kind of soundscape aims to underline the immediacy of outer space activity, its influence in personal and communal spaces, as well as the possibility to enhance the experience of it by juxtaposing analog and digital media resources with social processes of observation and urban wandering. “

As the JOAL library for processing doesn’t work with applets, there is no online version of the application made in processing. Nevertheless, the code is available with a CC license on the workshop’s repository in autistici:

http://code.autistici.org/trac/neighborhoodscience/browser/Birdswithin

Soon a website will be available for more information and hopefully for attracting collaborators to the project

I was looking at this video and some others from Blaise Aguera y Arcas presenting the Projects he leads in digital mapping. Appart from the technical achievements showing off behind these services developed at Bing maps and the interesting aesthetic results of their concept, there are, furthermore, some hints about the coming “internet of things”, where the physical is mapped to the bits and viceversa. Indeed, at some point in the video you get a feeling of place and time dislocation that might be useful to get you out to research on the topic.

What is interesting to remark is that Mapping became the new obsession of IT and Telcos. A major “need” of our new world seems to be that of not allowing ourselves to ever be lost, but also to be able to tag and mark everything we see in its digital representation. GPS, huge user-generated databases around the web and some experiments with generative 3D animation make it now possible to gradually re-create the world inside the digital modell of it and increase its resolution, hence enhancing our experience of the mediated world. It is really base on need? Need for speed? For Information?

I just remembered, that one of the myths that I as an infant enjoyed the most from cyberpunk literature, was the later popularized idea of the matrix, or cyberspace as Gibson first called it. That space within spaces, simulated, perfect architectural illusion mapped to the real world but with different properties, dis-place of information trafficking, entertainment and international crime. In the rules of a classic sci-fi RPG called cyberpunk, different areas of the matrix could have different degrees of resolution going from wireframe (Something like Tron or an Atari shooter game) to life-realistic, this one being something like, well, basically like life itself or the one we know from the matrix films. This degree of renderization was also a fashion-related issue, each site owner defining the degree of realism, look and feel of their matrix presence, and more importantly, was geographically defined. So basically this kind of architectural sites would be mapped to a geographical location in the matrix-map of the world and being at someone’s place in the matrix was the equivalent of actuelly being there, at least in that huge world representation. Somehow each place on that model was holding its own server, not so dislocated as our actual cyberspace is like.

So far, the presence of this imaginary, if we might call it so, can be depicted in cyberspace as we understand it now: Media branding, social networks, web presence… all seem to be a simplified application of that Virtual Architecture. Websites are commonly not geographically related, but real places soon will offer access to many virtual places on top of them… We are seeing, alas the big software corps., that our bidimensional cyberspace surface is also beginning to change massively towards an indeed more realistic set of spatial metaphors intertwined with, and accessible (If ya buy the right tool) in real space. It’s not about the VR googles and the electrode suit, It’s like moving away from VR to enter the world of “we don’t know where we exist”. Dazzling.

Some more links about the internet of things, if you allow me. Just to finish:

http://www.theinternetofthings.eu/what-is-the-internet-of-things
http://www.iot2010.org/
http://www.bing.com/maps/
(Got to be a Windoes guy if you want to check the 3D stuff, it seems. Non-existing help for Mac Users…)

An old Project that’s worth to be presented here: it was developed at the ZKM in Karlsruhe (Germany), where I did an Internship in the mindframes exhibition. The main objective was to give viewers an active role as researchers at the exhibition spaces, by offering them tools to learn about and play with the content of the exhibition in different fashions. For this purpose, a curatorial team designed and built several interfaces for the museum space, but particullarly for the so called “labs”, spaces where users could explore the works of each of the eight artists as well as complementary information.

I designed and developed an application for touchscreen for dynamic playing of videos and also a web site for local consulting of the OASIS database. An overview of the result in this video (in german – better if you rightclick and open in new window).

The experience wih the OASIS archive, which is an EU funded project aiming to compile a digital research and conservation center for the digital arts, motivated the now personal question about this subject. In the exhibition, each of the artists had one dedicated OASIS station where the public could take a deep exploration of their work in form of written documentation and work analysis. This allowed people not just to see the exhibition but to approach the artist’s works with an improved understanding of their context, even going as deep as to explore interactively the tools and techniques used for their production.

This could be done similarly within a media-art-research perspective, where information is rather chaotic and disperse, concentrating around communities or artists themselves. One of the purposes to start this site, is partially to develop a small-scale project that offers sufficient information about projects that interest me or the public in general and set a more or less complete database that allow other creators to learn from the given research.