Tag: GPS

Earthly/Geo/Astro · Performativity · Sculpt/Install · Sonic/Musical

Listen to the Surface of the Earth Transposed on Vinyl Record – by Art of Failure

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FLAT EARTH SOCIETY proposes a transposition of the earth elevation at the scale of a microgroove record. This engraving of elevation’s data on the surface of the disk generates in consequence a subtle image of the earth. When played on a turntable, the chain of elevation data crossed by the needle can be heard.

“Can we hear the Earth? Not the sounds occurring upon it but the Earth on a geophysical scale? […]
The hill-and-dale technique was used in Edison’s phonograph, recording sound with a stylus that vertically cut a minute landscape into the grooves of the cylinder. […] Flat earth society takes readings from the stylus of topographic radar, cuts them into vinyl and then plays them back with a stylus. Phonographic hills-and-dales grow into the Alps, Andes, Himalayas, Grand Canyon, Great Steppe, Great Rift Valley, Great Outback and the Lesser Antilles. Where Enrico Caruso and Nellie Melba once sang one hears the Baja Peninsula, Antarctic Peninsula, and the bathymetric pauses of the Red Sea and Baffin Bay. […] Peaks and valleys, spikes and wells, spires and troughs, aspirations and depressions, all have their gradations in mythical and actual landscapes.” – Douglas Kahn

Learn more about this project HERE

Art/Aesthetics · Digital Media · Projects · Public Space · Technology

The OpenPositioningSystem: an approach of building an open navigation system run by people like you

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At the moment, we are bound to the americans military GPS and network companies. As we are using digital maps empowered with GPS, which are curated and therefor have impact on our navigation and experience of our environment, we also have to think about the given technology. The technology is closed at the moment and can be curated or shut down at any time.

This navigation system is open. Which means it is not run by companies nor control. The goal is to gather interested people on the web platform openps.org to develop the necessary software, hardware and testing processes. Anybody who is interested, from beginner to professionals can participate and contribute their knowledge to the community and this system.

To use given things in cities and reuse them for the projects needs is one aim of this project.

The idea is to use seismic frequencies, produced by generators in power plants, turbines in pumping stations or other large machines running in factories. These generators, machines etc. are producing seismic activity, distributed over the ground.

The sensor prototype can detect seismic waves on the ground, walls or anything with enough contact to the ground. At the current stage of this project the sensor can detect and collect different frequencies.

To calculate the noise in a city out of the received signals from the ground, the sensor has to be tuned into a specific frequency. To get a specific frequency from one machine, turbine etc. the sensor has to be as close as possible to the seismic source to receive a clean and strong signal at least once.

When at least three signals and their positions on a map are known, one can calculate the position within these three signals.

In this early stage, the project will still rely on GPS and maps. With the process of expanding the new network of seismic sources, it can be possible to build an own positioning system.

Text and Images via http://openps.info/

Digital Media · Social/Politics · Technology · Theory

“Context is Everything” by Genevieve Bell

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Digital Media · Paint/Illust./Mix-Media · Performativity · Public Space · Technology · Videos

The Tokyo Zoo Project

Sebastian Alvarez3 Comments

CHALLENGE:
The “nav-u” U35 is a personal navigation device you can put on a bicycle.
We wanted to demonstrate the device by using the attractions of Tokyo, a city whose roads developed in irregular and complex ways.

IDEA:
Using the running log function of the bicycle navigation system, we started the project by drawing gigantic animal geoglyphs over Tokyo. People tweet what animals they want us to draw. From their requests, our staffers draw animals over the map.
The bike group rides all over Tokyo, logs the routes and uploads the drawing to the website immediately. Progress status with drawing and running footage are posted on Twitter in real time every day.
Fifteen animals are completed in 40 days.

RESULT:
The project was featured in TV news shows, newspapers, magazine articles, and over 80 online news articles. In addition, it was mentioned innumerable times on blogs and tweets. Moreover, it was also reported in other countries, and we received lots of positive feedback, support and messages of encouragement.
Before the campaign, Sony held third place in the market for navigation systems, but it rose to the first just two weeks after the start of the campaign.
A promotion for a bicycle navigation system also became a promotion for the city of Tokyo.

The Tokyo Zoo Project
Via Popupcity

Book-Text-Read-Zines · Social/Politics

What We’ve Lost With the Demise of Print Encyclopedias

Sebastian Alvarez1 Comment

As the paperless future approaches, certain sorts of publications have inevitably moved into the all-digital realm faster than others. Most of us still prefer paper when it comes to beach novels, for instance, or the cherished volumes of our personal libraries. At the other extreme, scientific journals effectively went all-digital years ago, and thanks to GPS, maps and road atlases are quickly following. Last week saw another milestone: the symbolic funeral of paper encyclopedias, with the inevitable announcement that the Encyclopedia Britannica is ceasing print publication.

Encyclopedias, along with other reference works, would seem particularly obvious candidates for digitization. Paper encyclopedias are large, heavy, and expensive ($1,395 for the final print edition of Britannica). They are nowhere near as easily and thoroughly searchable as their digital counterparts. They cannot be easily updated, still less constantly updated. And they are far more limited in size. The 2002 Britannica contained 65,000 articles and 44 million words. Wikipedia currently contains close to four million articles and over two billion words (this information comes, of course, from Wikipedia).

Excerpt from an article written by David A. Bell at The New Republic. Continue HERE

Performativity · Social/Politics · Vital-Edible-Health

The Tactical Ice Cream Unit

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Frosty Treats & Food for Thought!

The ice cream vendor has long been synonymous with a roving oasis – a well-spring of refreshment; a reprieve from the heat; a cool intervention. In this regard, the Tactical Ice Cream Unit (TICU) is no different. The TICU emerges at a time when most channels of distribution, communication, and social interaction are mediated and constrained by the fervor of financial exchange. Incorporating an alternative strategy of utopian potlatch, the Tactical Ice Cream Unit is envisioned primarily as a mobile distribution center for ice cream and information.



The Tactical Ice Cream Unit (TICU) rolls through the city in an act of intervention that replaces cold stares with frosty treats and nourishing knowledge. Combining a number of successful activist strategies (Food-Not-Bombs, Copwatch, Indymedia, infoshops, etc) into one mega-mobile, the TICU is the Voltron-like alter-ego of the cops’ mobile command center. Although the TICU appears to be a mild-mannered vending vehicle, it harbors a host of high-tech surveillance devices including a 12-camera video surveillance system, acoustic amplifiers, GPS, satellite internet, a media transmission studio capable of disseminating live audio/video, and of course, ice cream. With every free ice cream handed out, the sweet-toothed citizenry also receives printed information developed by local progressive groups. Thus, the TICU serves as a mobile nexus for community activities while providing frosty treats and food-for-thought.

The Center for Tactical Magic engages in extensive research, development, and deployment of the pragmatic system known as Tactical Magic. A fusion force summoned from the ways of the artist, the magician, the ninja, and the private investigator, Tactical Magic is an amalgam of disparate arts invoked for the purpose of actively addressing Power on individual, communal, and transnational fronts. At the CTM we are committed to achieving the Great Work of Tactical Magic through community-based projects, daily interdiction, and the activation of latent energies toward positive social transformation.

The Center for Tactical Magic is a not-for-profit organization that survives and thrives on grants, commissions and the generosity of those who believe. If you like what we do, please donate to support a specific project or the entire scope of our operations.

Earthly/Geo/Astro · Human-ities · Social/Politics · Technology

Citizen science goes “Extreme”. Researchers push for wider use of community-generated data in science and policy-making.

Sebastian Alvarez1 Comment

In the Congo Basin, Bayaka pygmies patrol their forests with handheld tracking devices. Using the devices to record instances of poaching, industrial roads and illegal logging, they map their landscape, documenting the course of deforestation and harmful development.

The project is part of an emerging field that its champions describe as the ‘new wave’ of citizen science. With endeavours ranging from air-pollution assessments in Europe to chimpanzee counting in Tanzania, the next generation of citizen science attempts to make communities active stakeholders in research that affects them, and use their work to push forward policy changes. This is one of the main points of focus of the London Citizen Cyberscience Summit being held this week at the Royal Geographical Society and University College London.

Although researchers have been calling on amateurs and enthusiasts for decades to aid in collecting and processing large volumes of data, the latest approaches aim to enlist the public in helping to shape research questions, says Francois Grey, a physicist at Tsinghua University in Beijing and coordinator of the Citizen Cyberscience Centre in Geneva, Switzerland. Grey, an organizer of the summit, maintains that communities can play a valuable part in setting the agenda for scientific investigations.

Written by Katherine Rowland, Nature. Continue HERE

Digital Media · Earthly/Geo/Astro · Games/Play · Sonic/Musical · Technology

OTERP: A Prototype for a Musical Geolocative Game

Sebastian AlvarezLeave a comment

Oterp is a mobile phone game project using a GPS sensor to manipulate music in real time, depending on the player’s position on Earth. It generates new melodies when traveling. The objective of Oterp is to mix the reality of our everyday environment with a video game. This is a new way to imagine our movements in a society increasingly on the move and dependent on mobile interfaces.

Performativity · Technology

Will Smart Contact Lenses Be the Bluetooth Headsets of the Future?

Sebastian Alvarez2 Comments

Stuart Karten: Imagine instant access to the latest market segment information at a meeting, or seeing the fourth quarter earnings for a company in (literally) the blink of an eye.

Although it might sound like something from a science fiction novel, scientists at the University of Washington are working on solar powered contact lenses with transparent LEDs embedded onto the lens. This technology could be applied in countless ways, from health monitoring to text translation right in front of the wearer’s eyes.

In 2006, my team at SKD designed a very similar concept for our “Cautionary Visions” project. Analyzing current trends in technology and popular culture, from emerging demands for constant connection to the increasingly blurred boundaries between natural and artificial, my designers imagined the dark alleys down which these trends could take us.

One of the results was an “Assisted Living Contact Lens” that would project helpful information, such as the calorie count for a chocolate scone, or a GPS map overlay locating the nearest gyms. Continue HERE