Maria N. Stukoff :: mobile_play

EPM Game-play

This new artwork is an investigation into the use of emergent communication technologies and wireless networking protocols such as Bluetooth to offer a playful and meaningful pubic art experience. Every Passing Moment creates a space in which any discoverable Bluetooth device, will automatically seed a flower in a virtual garden environment projected onto an urban screen.

As people walk across the Clayton Square in front of the Liverpool BBC big screen (UK), anyone with an active Bluetooth device automatically seeds a flower in the virtual landscape.  Depending on the public’s path, a red, blue or yellow flower is generated in one of three virtual garden patches.  The colour of a flower depends on their proximity to gardeners (i.e. three performers carrying the blu_box system) wearing corresponding colour T-shirts.  If the MAC ID (which every Bluetooth active device emits) responsible for seeding a flower is recorded by blu_box only once, the flower will slowly start to fade away. Alternatively, any passerby who directly approaches a gardener and becomes the gardener’s team member, will generate a larger flower assigned to the colour code of the chosen gardener. This project emerges from my PhD research into mobile and wireless networks as public art.

"The majority of submissions I receive for interactive and pervasive media proposals throw up walls of specialist and obtuse 'game-play,' suited almost exclusively to gadget-addicts and bequiffed culture junkies. Instead, Every Passing Moment makes a crucial deviation. Here, the user-facing interface is a real person in the form of 'urban gardeners' who must compete, entice and persuade the passing public to participate. In doing so they present both context and instructions in a form accessible to all - using speech, eye contact, laughter - instead of relying upon the limited specialism of a few without thought to the many."

Bren O'Callaghan, BBC Big Screen Manager Liverpool

The project was developed in collaboration with ONTECA, Liverpool.
Environmental sound scapes by Jonathan Fisher.
Funded by Arts Council England NW.
Supported by BBC Big Screen, Liverpool

Making big screen art with mobile phone

Every Passing Moment

Liverpool's Daily Post:: Student Maria Stukoff launched a digital 'garden' she devised with Liverpool firm ONTECA, for the BBC Big Screen in Clayton Square.

Audio/ Sample/ Cut up/ Share/ Mix

Check out: ccmixter
ccMixter is a community music site featuring a mixed bad of samples, mash-up, samples ands remixes. some nice stuff in there!

Also see: freesound
Great variety of field recordings and blips and beats for anything in the mix!

Best of all: hippocamp
Netlabel that releases free music and a community and to help artists get a little more exposure!!

1st test on BBC big screen

On Wed 7th May 2008 - we finally tested the first flash graphics to be triggered by blu_box interface.
Aspects of flower size, colour of landscape, response to day light and visibility to public were considered.
Then back to the lab for more tweaking and design work! See 'Every Passing Moment' photo site for more visuals.

Bluetooth Signal & Social Connections

Generative Social Networking, is a mobile Bluetooth project by Andrew Schneider and Christian Croft exploring the susceptibility of discoverable Bluetooth devices in public places.

Setting about to connect the unsuspecting public via their mobile phones and some clever open source programming -  the more sinister possibilities of social networking are made visible. For further explanation watch the video!

Link found via We Make Money Not Art! Thanks.

The Workbook Project

Their goal is to "create a free resource for content creators that will become a user contributed repository of information. The concept is part of an “open source social experiment” called the workbook project."

Mashups!

Check out: Mashupfeed
Functioning as a portal to massive content links.

Beware, your imagination leaves digital traces

Beware, your imagination leaves digital traces
by Bruno Latour, Sciences-Po, Paris

The digital footprint, the "increasing traceability" of ourselves, the data we leave behind whilst clicking our way through a myriad of electronic platforms, is what I was discussing with my online art piece: "ID-PROFILER" (an Internet-based artwork commissioned by FOLLY, 2001).  It was able to trace a users individual online searching habits and assigned the user a (fake) "visual persona" to see who you might look like based on the search data you leave behind - in the histry file of an Internet browser for example.

Latour writes: "The stunning innovation is that every click of every move of every avatar in every game may be gathered in a data bank and submitted to a second-degree data-mining operation".

The issues around profiling, tracking, creating ad-hoc data is indeed a topic working with Bluetooth technology and what makes the likes of A.C.R.O.N a futuristic nightmare. Imagine blood tagging to profile race as recently suggested by the BBC thriller/drama: The Last Enemy! Fun yet with some interesting and serious undertones.... 

WIFI for Bluetooth transfer

oh yes... something we are already investigating!
Check out Engadget for article on Bluetooth to WIFI transfer.

Re:Blog: Posted Feb 10th 2008 4:35PM by Darren Murph

Cory Arcangel and his Glockenspiel

As seen at the Greenroon, 8th Feb 2008.

Every Passing Moment (EMP)

EMP is often used as an abreviation for an Electromagnetic Pulse and one of its descriptions is as a broadband, high-intensity, short-duration burst of electromagnetic energy. I like the association of Every Passing Moment (blu_box system) creating a magnetic field whereby the mobile phones and nodes are searching for Bluetooth node to connect to each other. A digital attraction via telecommunications...

Just ideas!

Performers as mobile nodes

'Every Passing Moment' is further developing into a live performance drawing on my past practice working with performance art, rota scoping techniques and the moving image. In this work, life performers are tending to a digitally responsive "community garden" projected onto the BBC Big Screen. The garden is a direct map that of the public space in front of the screen. The performers become the garden wardens or park rangers inviting the passing public (named as the player) to care and involve themselves in nurturing the plants and wildlife in the garden. The longer the pubic stay with the performers, the more beautiful the garden grows.

Each mobile node is given a generative action for tending the garden, which will respond to only Bluetooth active mobile phones through a players proximity to the performers, time spent in front of the BBC Big Screen as well as if there are any repeat visits.

The overall experience is to create a 'shared experience' between members of the public who would normally ignore each other although they are standing in the same space - looking at the same moving images on the urban screen. It questions the way we engage, use and confront a public area where strangers gather regularly yet without a sense of community. The work aims to explore how such playful interactive interfaces can be situated as a art in open spaces, and the capacity to build temporary local networks of people (ad-hoc communities) in a virtual and physical environment that makes comment on public art, mobile technologies, wireless networks technologies and urban space.