Urban Fiction

A locative playground & installation by Petra Gemeinboeck with Rob Saunders

Introduction

Urban space is a densely woven fabric: a multi-layered tapestry of intertwined threads from different people, institutions, cultures, and times. Living in a contemporary city means to co-inhabit a multiplicity of real and virtual spaces. Even though communication technologies are often seen as connecting or even opening up these spaces, our routine of traversing real and virtual spaces is much older than that. We have always layered places with memories, desires and fictions. Doubtless, ubiquitous technology, similar to the industrial advancement of transportation, changes the nature of inhabiting and accessing this multitude of spaces.

Urban Fiction explores how these technologies can allow for new ways of experiencing the multi-layered fabric of our everyday life. It uses mobile phones as 'lenses' that looks at the city as a dynamic topology, similar to a social ad-hoc network. Seen through this lens, the abstract social topology becomes a tangible landscape, woven and constantly rewoven of hundreds of threads. The mobile phones use Global Positioning to track the participants, whereby their location data serves as hyperlink between the physical and a second virtual landscape. The virtual landscape of Urban Fiction, seen through the mobile phone 'lens' and an indoor gallery installation, transforms urban everyday spaces.

Project Description

We imagined the city's social fabric to be fluidly transformed, constantly rewoven, embroidered, torn apart and stitched together again. It is the city's inhabitants, who continuously add threads and pull them across its multiple layers, actuating these fluid transformations. Conventional representations of the city are blind to our everyday social encounters and the resulting changing spaces and relations. Rather, they display the fixed regulations that constrain this dynamic play. This project's objective was to make the interplay between the livedand the mapped visible and tangible. This objective was envisioned as a cartographic performance.

Urban Fiction is a locative media artwork that was first exhibited in August 2007, in and around the Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney. Inside the gallery, translucent silicone sheets expressed layers of skin, as if they were cut from the urban fabric. Closer inspection revealed that the fabrics were still in the making, and tiny movements produced threads, whorls and stitches, similar to the embroidering pulses of a heart rate monitor. But where did these stitching signals come from, and what did they monitor? Exploring these questions required the visitors to step outside the gallery and engage with a playground much more indeterminable. The work used customised mobile phones to trace the participants' encounters, and to see in them a filigree of imaginary spaces spun by our everyday lives. Looking at their mobile phone display, walking through the city-scape suddenly felt like wading through a thick layer of foam bubbles. Running through this foam, the bubbly shapes got more irregular, messy even, and almost appeared to splatter against the screen. Sometimes, something else seemed to enter the foamy surrounding and displace the foam on the screen. It was in fact someone, another participant, who has come close enough to be seen through the phone's lens. If the participant got even closer (within 3 meters), an increased amount of bubbly displacement occurred, and the system registered an 'encounter'. Back inside the gallery, these captured imaginary spaces and real encounters drove the fabrication of an urban fiction, a fabric that blurred the boundary between map and landscape.

The performance unfolded between the participants' movements, GIS maps of census data, and a generative computational system. We used mobile phones and GPS sensors to trace participants as they moved through urban space. The movements were translated into virtual turbulences that fluidly transformed a digital representation overlaying the physical terrain like a blanket. Demographics of the terrain determined the varying degrees of fluidity of this digital scape. We used particle systems and forces for the fabric and a Voronoi system for the foam to express the feedback loops between the participants (living city), the demographic data (fixed city), and how they mutually affect and interact with each other. This resulted in a multi-authored 'living map' that appeared to be spun, woven, or ripped and stitched (see images below).

Technical Realization

The technical infrastructure includes:
    [a] Nokia N80 mobile phones augmented with GPS sensors
    [b] mobile social network for based on the Jabber protocol
    [c] client-side (J2ME) application running on the mobile phones
    [d] server-side (J2SE) application running on the central server
    [e] visualizations of the running on the client and server

We used the Nokia N80 series as the mobile phone platform. We used the phone's support for the 3G to transfer data over the Internet to a central server. We used Bluetooth to detect when the mobile phones were in close proximity. In addition, we attached Geographical Positioning System (GPS) sensors to the mobile phones to turn them into traceable extensions of the participants' body.

The software layers were implemented as a client-server application using standard web technologies including XML, JavaScript, and a Java. The visualization of the digital landscape required the development of data mining and visualization processes on the central server as well as data fusion and real-time rendering processes on the mobile phones. As the participants navigated through the city, the mobile phones automatically sent streams of location data to the central server. A custom application on the central server interpreted and contextualized this location data with other information, such as data coming from other participants and geo-indexed information about the location. The contextual data was then returned to the mobile phones, where the data streams were fused to produce a unique visualization for each participant displayed on the screen.

In the gallery, the central server analyzed and interpreted the participants' paths to produce the dynamic behaviors of the digital scape. These computational methods included (a) database applications to retrieve data according to geographic location, (b) audio-visual processing methods to integrate data streams from phones and databases, and (c) generative systems for computationally modeling social dynamics as transformative expressions.