[In Dutch] Maandag 14 december om 20:00 in De Balie is er een kenniscafé over “Hogere kaartenkunde”. Ik zit in het panel en zal het hebben over de invloed van locatieve media op cartografische representaties. We maken al eeuwenlang kaarten, om landsgrenzen vast te leggen of veilige routes aan te geven. Een kaart is een model van de werkelijkheid, en het terrein van een fascinerende tak van wetenschap: Cartografie. Kaarten vormen de weerslag van sociale en politieke keuzes, die vervolgens hun eigen waarheid gaan vormen. Zo is de Perzische Golf niet overal in de wereld de Perzische Golf, ziet de […] Read More
The second issue of the RMIT journal Second Nature is about “Games, Locative & Mobile Media”. I wrote a short article about urban games and their importance for the issues we address with The Mobile City. In this article I discern five possible ‘levels’ to understand urban games: (1) the city is often used as a model to construct an architecture of computer and video games; (2) the city itself has historically been understood in multiple ways as a game or playground; (3) pervasive games take digital games out to the streets and bridge the digital-physical distinction; (4) (serious) games […] Read More
The Mobile City, the project I do together with Martijn de Waal, will organize four events during the upcoming ‘connectivity’ week at the International Architectural Biennale (IABR). The overarching theme of the biennale is ‘Open City: designing coexistence”. This is what we’re doing: November 5th 20:00-22:00 Keynote with Mark Shepard location: NAi Auditorium Rotterdam November 6th 12:00-17:00 Sentient Rotterdam Workshop with Mark Shepard & The Mobile City. Participation is restricted to registered participants. Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to register. location: IABR Forum, NAi Rotterdam November 6th 17:00-19:00 Opening of the Exhibition The Sentient City Survival Kit. The opening […] Read More
I posted the first PICNIC ’09 report about augmented reality at The Mobile City weblog: http://www.themobilecity.nl/2009/10/02/picnic-09-report-1-augmented-reality/
I’ve written a review of Stephen Graham’s “The Cybercities Reader” (2004) at The Mobile City. Go there >>
Not really in the field of ‘mobile media’ but here’s an observation Nicolas Nova-style. While being on holiday in France recently I saw these entrance ports in French warehouse chain Auchan. I wonder why Auchan made these anti-theft ports transparant? Possibly the visibility of the technology behind this form of surveillance makes people even less inclined to steal stuff..? (“It looks serious so it will surely work well, I’d better watch out..”). Anyhow, transparency is one possible way to visualize the omnipresence of informational devices in urban spaces. Rather than faced with an opaque ‘black box’, we now get a […] Read More
Mobile Monday #11 themed “Visions on Mobile” took place on June 1 2009 and had some great speakers: Alan More, Jamais Cascio, Andrew Grill, Joe Pine, Howard Rheingold, and Robert Rice. As MoMo is a kind of trend-watching event, the main emphasis of this MoMo#11 was on the emerging field of augmented reality. Of course this vision has been around for a long time. Yet prototypes have mostly been very clunky head-mounted displays, or relied on some flat surface to project things on. As our mobile devices have by now arguably become the most ubiquitous technology humans ever carried with […] Read More
Below the draft version of the last section of chapter 4 of my dissertation-in-progress about mobile media and identity. Not completely finished yet but readable.. 090526_chapter4_section-nomadism-draft.pdf (PDF, 136 KB)
Today I did a guest lecture for the course “Digital Art and Culture” at the Radboud University Nijmegen. I talked about mobile and locative media, and their implications for urban space, social relations, and identity. [I guess I should try a new front image next time, it’s getting routine…] download presentation (PDF 1.4 MB)
As part of a new effort of The Mobile City to compile an ever-expanding overview of literature relevant to our themes, I have written up a review of this oldie-goldie published in 1960. Read review at www.themobilecity.nl >>
One of the oldest terms to think about the influence of both transport and communication technologies on the experience of time and space is “time-space compression”. This notion expresses the sense that the experience of time passing by is accelerated while the importance of distance diminished. Geographer David Harvey made the term famous, although it has been in use much longer. Sociologist John Urry quotes an anonymous English commentator who in 1839 says that the new railway system were “having the effect of ‘compressing’ time and space” and that “distances were thus annihilated” (Urry 2007: 96). This latter expression is […] Read More
Dutch broadcaster VARA’s digital television channel ConsumentenTV has an item (in Dutch) about future visions of the telephone. I am one of the people interviewed for this program. From their announcement: De mobiele telefoon is niet meer weg te denken uit ons dagelijks leven. We bellen en sms-en ons een ongeluk, veel mensen gebruiken daarnaast internet op hun mobiel, luisteren muziek en kijken films via het apparaatje. Dat wij allemaal een eigen, of zelf meerdere telefoons in ons bezit zouden hebben, had men honderd jaar geleden niet durven dromen: Toekomstvisies over telefonie. Watch the program on demand >>
Yesterday I did a presentation at the Filmacademie in Amsterdam about media technologies and mobility. Below the slides: 090319_filmacademie-S.pdf (PDF 1MB).
(Also posted on The Mobile City blog) Found via Textually.org > Engadget Mobile > Make (nice trail): Artist Jorge Colombo (Portugal) made a couple of cityscapes by drawing with his fingers in an application called Brushes on an iPhone. He also posted a short movie showing in speed-up how he created his drawings. You can see all of the drawings on his website. Not only do these drawing look really nice, they also come quite close ‘the urban experience’ of neon lights, big structures, and a blurry sense of movements and speed. The medium indeed perfectly fits the subjects depicted. […] Read More
Just wrote a post about a story in the NY Times called “The Cellphone, Navigating Our Lives“. In this story, it is argued that the map is becoming a new metaphor for organizing information via mobile devices. Read the post over here >>
Yesterday I gave a short presentation at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam about the possibilities to use mobile media for a food awareness campaign by FairFood. Students have to design and develop a campaign involving the mobile phone for the ‘Green Dot’ award (a sustainable alternative to the Golden Dot award by the HvA’s Instituut voor Interactieve Media). I focussed on the location-based possibilities of mobile phone. Below the files (mostly in Dutch): 090210_hva_mdelange01.pdf – Some slides about campaigning + technical aspects of the mobile phone 090210_hva_mdelange02.pdf – Some slides about locative media
Dutch digital channel Uitzendinggemist has a number of ‘Micromovies‘ especially for the mobile screen. You can watch them via the application made for mobile phones. Many of the movies are made by mobile phones and address some aspect of mobile phones. In the movie Death Valley the theme of solitude is displayed. This desert is one of the few places where there is no cellular signal. Or the movie ‘Over en Uit’ about being called in a public place, and hearing some very disturbing news… It is nice to see some more attention for mobile phone movies as an emerging […] Read More
Just saw this very rudimentary urban screen (no interactivity it seems) at the Haarlemmerplein. Apparently with old photos from the neighborhood. The chill and wet snow prevented me from being more inquisitive…
I put a review online of a great chapter by Mimi Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Ken Anderson called “Portable Objects in Three Global Cities: The Personalization of Urban Places”. Read it at The Mobile City weblog >>.
‘Funsmith’ Bernie DeKoven wrote a post on his site Deepfun about the differences between game communities and play communities. The post consists of the usual little snippets of well-worn wisdom about play and game (play is informal and open-ended, games are formal and rule-based; game are competitive, play is more about spontaneity and shared fun). As also noted on another blog, this largely coincides with James P. Carse’s distinction between finite and infinite games (1986). Or even the paidia vs ludus distinction which we find with Roger Caillois (1958), and which has been extended and adapted by many contemporary game […] Read More