SKYRIDE A New Journey Through Manchester

On Sunday 2 August 2009 get your bike and enjoy a cycle through a traffic free Manchester! Sky in partnership with British Cycling and Manchester City Council created a 11.5K city centre route through the city.

Explore places such as:

• Chinatown
• Albert Square
  
• Sportcity
  
• the Velodrome
  

Rider Spoke: Urban explorations

"Rider Spoke is a work for cyclists combining theatre with game play and state of the art technology."

Rider Spoke is an artwork by Blast Theory investigating how games and emergent communication technologies can bring together new social encounters both on and offline.

The work invites people to cycle through the city in search of interesting, secluded places and to record a short message there. Equipped with a handheld mobile phone people leave messages but also cycle in search of other peoples hidden messages.

Mobile Sound :: Sonic City

Sonic City is a project that presents the city as a musical instrument. The project imagines the city in terms of a sound and music space, giving the people in those urban spaces the ability to create sound and experience musical compositions. The city becomes an interactive musical interface.


Sonic City enabled people to create music by walking through a city. By using wearable mobile computer technology - the perception of place, time and the activity applied to exploration the urban sapces turns into personal audio creation.

"We explore the use of public space and everyday behaviours for creative purposes, in particular the city as an interface and mobility as an interaction model for electronic music making."

The city becomes an interactive and physical interface. The architecture and urban surrounding provide a built infrastructure to use creatively. The everyday activity of walking or cycling through the urban space can be translated into movement and choreography and captured by the city interface. Through the use of mobile and wireless tools this movement can be translated into narrative and creative feedback.

Sonic City was created by Ramia Mazé, Play Studio, Lars Erik Holmquist, Future Applications Lab and Lalya Gaye, Future Applications Lab, Viktoria Institute.

Walking & Drawing: Mapping your journey

Jeremy Wood is an artist who uses GPS navigational technologies to map out his journeys as a drawing. The line drawings become a personal document of the playful; walks he creates. Part of this physical map making, Jeremy designed the biggest IF and other fun words.
Snapshot of walks created by Jeremy:

Mobile exploration of location & place - NW

The artwork of Jen Hamilton, Jen Southern & St Amand investigate social and tactile approaches to technology and work with audiences to explore location and sense of place. Their projects explore how new technologies influence the way we inhabit an environment and collaborate with industry on the development of new tools for creating collaborative maps.

Distance Made Good: Flow Lines (2004), Hamilton and Southern worked with local people to make a new map of Lancaster and Morecambe, UK, by using the Landlines system based on the lives of the people living and working there, and of the places.

The walkers (a group of local residence) were invited to make journeys that in some way represent who they are in conjunction with being a landmark for the city they live in (e.g. A participant in Morecambe took us for a walk along the seafront, as for him the seafront represented Morecambe, and it was a route he regularly took when walking his dog).

Thirty four walks were recorded using a GPS device, and were represented together in the gallery on two map like screens folded into the space.

In their project: Running Stitch (2006) the artists gave exhibition visitors a GPS-enabled mobile phone to track their journeys through the city centre. These walks created GPS line drawings of the walker's movements projected live in the gallery to disclose hidden aspects of the city. Each line drawing was sewn in real time into a large 5m x5m hanging fabric to show an evolving tapestry that revealed a sense of place and interconnection between the walkers and the city. (re:blogged from their respective websites)