May 10 & 11 5pm-9pm
Spring Show 2005
721 Broadway
at Waverly Place
4th Floor
South Elevators
New York, NY 10003
For additional
information email
itp.inquiries@nyu.edu
or call 212.998.1880
| 2mph: submission for Spring show. | ||
|---|---|---|
| Author(s): | Emily Conrad | |
| Instructor: | Barton, Jake | |
| Class: | Final Project Seminar | |
| URL: | http://emilyconrad.com/2mph.html | |
| Keywords: | cellphone, audio installation, space vs place, interactivity, locative media, contingent object, psychogeography, serendipity. | |
| An audio installation of cellphone recordings taken from one route in New York City investigating personal impressions of space. | ||
| Instead of someone talking to someone else on the phone and ignoring everyone around them, in this scenario they are talking to no one and documenting everything around them. In this scenario, the cellphone is used as a wireless broadcasting microphone. On the listener\'s end, she stands in an interactive booth controlling whose narration she listens to. Each narration is in sync, so she is able to toggle between and overlap them. In 2mph, narrative is used to create a verbal infrastructure of the city, particular to the narrator\'s perspective. | ||
| Personal Statement: | I am exploring the use of cell phones as a medium for exploring and documenting urban geography. The recordings are from a series of walks taken by a various cross-section of people, each passing through the same route. The only directions they are given are to stay on a predefined timeline (0:00 Broome/Orchard, 1:03 Orchard/Grand, etc.) timeline and to describe the people and actions around them, or what they are thinking about.
By creating this standard that everyone passes through the exact same locations at the same pace, a wide range of perspectives are developed about place and space. And often the same statues, soccer fields, and stores are brought up, but never in the same manner, and particular to each person’s disposition. I am most curious in this project to demonstrate how ten people can experience the same circumstances, and have completely different thoughts. Also, I am interested in how we survey our geography and what patterns are repeated in these analyses and impressions. | |
| Background: | The background of this project is in the fields of locative media and experiments in social psychology.
Locative media projects have an underlying context of motion. Place, space, and location, along with the semantics of these words, are currently being explored to a high degree through the use of digital media, especially in relation to physical motion. Mobile phone applications that depend on the user parading around space in search of a person, people, or in general, a search to be better informed about one’s surroundings, are rapidly being developed by a new wave of artists, technologists, and researchers. In March 2004, the web site we-make-money-not-art.com defined locative media simply as, “digital media applied to real social interactions and real places.” More comprehensively, though with a different connotation, the Srishti School of Art, Design, and Technology in Bangalore explains in a post written earlier this year, “Locative media may be understood to mean media in which context is crucial, in that the media pertains to specific location and time, the point of spatio-temporal ‘capture’, dissemination or some point in between. The term locative media has also been associated with mobility, collaborative mapping, and emergent forms of social networking.” The term was originally coined by by Karlis Kalnins of gpster.net who claims \"locative is a case, not a place.\" The locative case (pronounced lah-ka-tiv) which designates the place or state of the noun, in space and time. This project also borrows from the histroical tendency to think and walk. The Sophists, Aristotle, Beethoven, Kirkeegard, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein among others have been famously associated with relying on the rhythm of walking to sort the internal through the external. | |
| Audience: | The audience is anyone who has a cell phone and looking for additional uses, as well those interested in personal narrations of space, psychogeography and internal eavesdropping. | |
| User Scenario: | The way it works is that each person participating in the walks starts at 247 Broome street in New York City. She walks down Orchard, onto Grand and eventually ends up on Houston via Crosby. The entire walk takes 19 minutes and 49 seconds, as I am there to keep consistent pace.
The audience is able to listen to these narratives and thought bits in a structure I built for this purpose. This structure stands six and a half feet tall and and made of steel and white plexiglass. Inside this booth are graphics such as a map and images taken of the area, a well as a series of toggle switches. The audience is able to toggle through the narratives and choose which and how many of these urban narratives they listen to. Each of the narratives are in sync, so the geographical place of the walkers are synced in time. | |
| Technical System Description: | 2mph works by connecting a cell phone call to a computer using a recording device. From here the recordings are piped into a custom made sound booth using a computer running Max/MSP and controlled by a series of toggle switches. | |
| Project References, Research and Literature: | Books
Bachelard, Gaston, \"The Poetics of Space\" Buskirk, Martha,\"The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art\" Gould, White \"Mental Maps\" Hall, Edward T., \"The Hidden Dimension\" Knabb, Ken \"Situationist International Anthology\" Lynch, Kevin, \"The Image of the City\" Montfront, Nick \"Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction\" Solnit, Rebecca,\"Walking\" Taun, Yi-Fu, \"Space and Place\" Vidler, Anthony, \"Warped Space\" Virilio, Paul, \"Open Sky\" Web Sites The Pervasive and Locative Arts Network, http://openplan.org Glowlab, http://glowlab.com Locative Network, http://locative.net Probiscus http:/urbantapestries.org http://proboscis.org.uk/sonicgeographies/ Artists Vito Acconci Janet Cardiff Rebecca Horn | |
| Conclusions: | There are a wide range of perspectives that emerge when individuals are exposed to similar circumstances. This project presents these voices. | |