Sound Garden + Networked Public Spaces

The Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] toolkit is an open source software platform for cultivating public "sound gardens" in the city. It can be used to create social public spaces for people to participate in an digital environment to build a technologically mediated garden.

Working with mobile audio devices like the iPod, the toolkit enables anyone with access to wireless (WiFi) "hot zones" to install a "sound garden" for public use. Using a WiFi enabled mobile device (PDA, laptop, mobile phone), participants "plant" sounds within a positional audio environment.

These plantings are mapped onto the coordinates of a physical location by a 3D audio engine common to gaming environments - overlaying a publicly created soundscape onto a specific urban space. Wearing headphones connected to a WiFi enabled device, participants drift though virtual sound gardens as they move throughout the city.

Blitz-light :: RFID tags and City Games

More Lights to Dark City Spaces!
Welcome to Blitz Play Hero!

Blitz-Light use interactive tags, circuit-bent electronics (in the shape of small trees) and Nintendo DS Light game consoles to create a live street concert of sound and light. The wireless network becomes activated by players (or cyclists) carrying small sound-amplifiers on their belts or which can be fitting to a bicycle.

The trees start of light up with bright coloured LED lights when in contact with the RFID tag.


Based on the sequence of the RFID tag (which works like a bar code) various sounds are generated on the DS light console. The numbers and sounds are then transferred to an online map which charts the players throughout the city. Great way to see your journey through the city!


There are 3 main game levels:

In LEVEL 1 players use the DS to “sniff” out open and closed WIFI hotspots. These are marked as playclouds (areas in the city where RFID tags can be placed). Players or cyclists chalk the symbol of a DS d-pad knob to indicate that a playcloud has been created. The location of the playclouds are stored on the DS as text file and is up-loaded to a Google map to store the data. This game data is overlayed on a map of the city with black and white polygons to represent players location.

The playclouds are assigned a base sound, used later in the concert, and at this point a player can view the map and begin to create a score of music, or simply use it to locate their nearest open WIFI spot.

LEVEL 2 invites players to find the playclouds and place RFID tags at their location. The system automatically assigns them a sound. This again is stored on the DS and transferred to the online map - updated with each tag.

LEVEL 3 is the live concert.
Players return to playclouds, scanning their own and other player’s tags, to play the sound on the DS. Each player becomes an instrument in the orchestra of RFID readers.

Throughout the levels players are awarded points for finding clouds, placing tags, and generating music, and thus the Blitz Play Hero is declared.

Mapping Fylde Coast, Morecambe and Lancashire

To help in the design of a new cycling path or public path - one which is interactive and responsive to the way people use and navigate their journey - a new trail would need a form of WAYFINDING nodes to help guide riders along as well as to pin-point where along the journey the path becomes interactive....

New mapping applications (digital) and identification markers (physical) may need to be considered to help people use and navigate the environment with GPS devices such as the mobile phone.

The Mobile City

The Mobile City is about Mobile Media // Urban Culture // Locality
Mobile media has become an interface between virtual spaces and the city! Merging the digital world with the physical world, people can upload and share real world experiences back to the digital world with other people.

The Mobile City project describes the use of location aware technologies and mobile devices to understand how those technologies can transform our experiences of urban culture.

• working with interfaces referencing space/map/places; for instance Google Earth-mash ups or TomTom devices.
  
  
• creating interactive, responsive geographic places for teh design of maps, to build on local meaning and chart new territories.
  
  
• trace objects and people on the move using locative media and to coordinate realspace social networking.
  
  
• using of locative media as a ‘space making devices’, altering the experience of a certain space through mobile phones SMS for example.

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:

Landlines: Mobile GPS drawing tool

Landlines software was developed by artists Jen Hamilton & Jen Southern in conjunction with ONTECA Ltd to gather live GPS data. The unique tools becomes an interactive vehicles for people to learn and talk about the nature of a place, and its meaning to local people. These projects can be seen at portable TV.

>> your journey outlined on google maps <<

Landlines is a multi-user drawing tool for mobile phone and bluetooth GPS, that allows users to draw by moving in real space. As you walk through the city with Landlines your latitude and longitude is periodically sent via mobile phone to a database. A website then displays your live tracks.

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)

Mapping & Community Engagement - Liverpool

Liverpool-based artist Alan Dunn worked in collaboration with Re-Dock throughout 2009 to develop a series of creative consultations, inviting communities from North Liverpool to put forward imaginative ideas for the future of Leeds-Liverpool canal.

Cultural mapping projects and working in situ with communities is becoming a strong methodology for creating interactive and participatory projects involving mobile and wireless technologies. Through the use of location aware media mobile technolgies (these include GPS location devices) audiences are given tools to author or input their own information about where they are or what they find important in their surroundings at any given moment.

Mobile technolgies are tools that can inspire >> real world << interventions as well as allow people to network between each other sending and sharing creative content including photos and videos.