Two years after Futuresonic's ground breaking Mobile Connections exhibition, we return to the theme to consider how evolving mobile, locative and mapping technologies, often created by independent developers working collaboratively with open source tools, are opening up new cultural possibilities across the world.

Lose yourself in the glitches as you glide over the deserts and canyons of Arizona, collaborate to remix the sounds of your city, take a feral robot dog out for a walk to sample pollution in the air. Throw away your Ordinance Surveys and get lost in Manchester for the weekend!

Off The Map is an exhibition by PLAN - The Pervasive and Locative Arts Network. It follows on the heels of successful events in 2005 at ICA, London and Mixed Reality Lab, Nottingham. PLAN was established in the wake of Futuresonic's Mobile Connections exhibition in 2004. Curated by Drew Hemment.

Exhibitions Free

Collaborative, user-led mapping is coming of age. It is now possible to attempt open source, digital mapping projects on a huge scale using the same principles as wikipedia. This is about creating the essential infrastructure for the 21st Century city: without a free digital map, the mobile revolution is going to be inhibited - free mapping data is vital as blogs and web content become spatially referenced.

Mapping also remains one the most basic human instincts - the desire to position oneself and others within a schema of location and relationships. Driven by unprecedented access to technology, and a society increasingly unwilling to accept at face value knowledge systems handed down from on high, mapping is one of the most vibrant strands in today's digital culture.

Manchester : Peripheral; Alastair Dant, Tom Davis & David Gunn (UK/USA)


The sounds of Manchester, for you to remix. Manchester : Peripheral is an interactive SoundMap that uses physical workshops and virtual interfaces to allow individuals to create their own "folk songs". It creates a constantly evolving audio portrait of the area and an intimate guide to the urban landscape. Sounds and musics contributed by local people are remixed via an online SoundMap, with a physical installation in development for 2007. Visitors to the website are encouraged to save and share their mixes and to submit their own sounds for inclusion on the site, creating an ongoing relationship of collaborative creativity with the wider community. Looking beyond the city centre, Manchester : Peripheral delves deep into the musical culture of four wards across the Manchester's metropolitan borough, celebrating a far more diverse and complex image of Manchester. A new project commissioned by Futuresonic, Manchester International Festival and Museum of Science and Industry.
http://www.manchesterperipheral.com (launched 21 July)

 


Satellite Jockey: think locally, act globally by Rick Silva (USA)


A UK first presentation of this stunning project. Lose yourself in the glitches as you glide over a desert landscape or urban metropolis. Brazilian Rick Silva VJs with Google Earth, just as a DJ uses turntables and a VJ a video mixer. Running in playback mode, Silva's VJ installation presents a mix of Google Earth's satellite imagery of pixellated landscapes and glitchy flyovers to his own minimal electronica soundtrack. Satellite Jockey transforms the novelty of gliding over distant landscapes into a sublime experience of ever shifting glitches and textures. Silva makes art and music with various colllectives and identites including the djrabbi crew, abe linkoln, cuechamp, and going off. Silva's artworks have shown at media festivals and museums in 5 continents, he has performed his recent projects live in Tokyo, London, Houston and Phoenix.
satellitejockey.net

Everybody Is A Satellite Jockey - VJ Installation by Future Everything (UK) with Google Earth (USA) and Rick Silva (USA)


In a VJ Installation by Future Everything, Rick Silva aka Satellite Jockey hands over the controls, on this occasion playing the musician and allowing you to be the VJ. Silva was invited by Future Everything to supply a soundtrack for aspiring Google Earth jockeys to mix to. Visitors to the exhibition are able to mix impromptu VJ sets to Silva's music using Google Earth. A world first project for Futuresonic 2006.

Google Earth

Since its inception in 1998, Google has developed (and acquired) increasingly sophisticated information retrieval and search systems. One of its more recent acquisitions, Google Earth offers free access to a wide range of aerial image and topographic maps across the world, so detailed you can zoom in upon cars in west London, or move between 3D representation of Lower Manhattan. Google Earth has given locative media an unprecedented exposure in general society, and the source data of Google Earth has been recontextualised and remixed in innumerable ways - from documenting the growth of avian flu to revealing secret MoD locations. The widespread criticism of its search parameters (most obviously, accusations of US-centricity) clearly highlight the challenges of achieving consensus in any representation of global cultures and systems.
http://earth.google.com/


Satellite Jockey - Low Pressure (Sound) System Mix (2006)

18 min / 20 mb

1. vladmir ussachevsky - wireless fantasy
2. kaffe matthews - she could
3. kid 606 - site specific sound installation
4. alva noto - 06-f117.tiff
5. fennesz - before i leave
6. agf - loading

Mapchester (UK)


Mapchester is a collaborative 'wikimap' project, generated and maintained by users in the same way as Wikipedia. Driven by OpenStreetMap.org, Mapchester offers a new type of Manchester map - produced by collective, community effort and completely free of traditional copyright restrictions on usage. The inaugural Mapping Weekend brought together a wide array of different people, transforming them into map hackers and citizen cartographers: people who walked / cycled / drove / bussed / trained / skated the city streets recording GPS tracks and road names. These tracks were then uploaded to the OpenStreetMap database and edited into coherent map features. From this data, an editable Manchester map has been created for Futuresonic 2006 - presented as a world-first test-case for producing a usable, functioning city map and festival guide via this open source, collaborative approach.

Open Street Map (UK)


Of course, open source mapping isn't just about Manchester. Following this festival, the Mapchester data will be added to the wider OpenStreetMap project. OpenStreetMap is the leading project in open-source mapping, covering over 25,000 kilometres of roads in the UK, including all motorways. It is hoped that an intensive effort to build a map of an entire city in one weekend will inspire others to participate in OpenStreetMap's ongoing 'citizen cartography'. Existing in clear opposition to restrictive copyright tradition, by 'opening' up mapmaking it aims to empower people to use and re-use cartographic resources in novel, creative ways.
http://www.openstreetmap.org

Amsterdam RealTime, Esther Polak (NL)


An early, seminal locative-media piece, participants roamed the streets of Amsterdam equipped with networked GPS devices, and traces of their movements were relayed to a projection screen in an exhibition space. At the outset the screen is blank, but as the journeys are recorded, individual meanderings fuse into a composite representation of how people occupy and use the city - density and concentration are recorded in the luminescence of overlapping lines, spaces unvisited remain dark.
amsterdamrealtime

 


Distance Made Good, Hamilton and Southern, 2002 (UK/CA)


These lacis embroideries are part of a larger installation exhibited at the Gallery in Stratford Upon Avon in 2002. They are hand-made renderings of GPS tracks taken by the artists and by local residents living in Stratford Ontario, Canada and Stratford-Upon Avon, UK. While not explicitly nor critically a locative artwork, it plays with different aspects of physicality, drawing parallels between the movement of the hand and thread (in stitching), and the walker as their route is traced by the electronic thread of the GPS.
http://www.theportable.tv/dmg

 


re:draw:III 2006, Rob Lycett (UK)


Re:draw:III is the latest in an ongoing series of digital artworks that explores the graphic potential of GPS noise. Inverting the conventional use of GPS devices, a geographically fixed GPS device no longer records a physical journey, but the noise in the system - the changing signal strengths reflecting the position of the orbiting satellites, interference caused by local atmospheric conditions, a flock of birds flying overhead ... This recorded data describes imaginary journeys, events and impossible geographies. A series of texts are written by the artist, as a personal response to the location, becoming part of the material to be re-enacted in the gallery.
www.re-draw.org

Biomapping, Christian Nold (UK)



Surveillance remains an ongoing concern of modern society - the fear of always being watched and monitored. In response, Biomapping empowers the individual to monitor, interpret and use "surveillance data" of their own physiological responses. Using a customized device similar to the lie-detector, Biomapping combines galvanic skin response with GPS data to record anxiety and stress levels of participants as they move through the city. Where projects such as Amsterdam Real Time trace the use (and non-use) of urban space, Biomapping explores the emotional effect of the urban space upon the individual, dramatically inscribing satellite images of cities and towns with the physiological states of its inhabitants.
biomapping.net

 


Thousand Points Of Light, Visible Collective/JT Nimoy, Naeem Mohaiemen, Anandaroop Roy (USA)


Echoing 'critical cartography' projects that seek to map and expose power relations such as Josh On's They Rule, the ongoing DISAPPEARED IN AMERICA project maps instances of people in the USA who have 'disappeared' during the Bush Administration's 'War On Terror'. Using film, installations, & lectures, Visible Collective traces the paths of immigrants and other repressed groups through the American consciousness, exploring migration impulses, hyphenated identities and the effects of post-9/11 security panic.
http://www.disappearedinamerica.org

 


The Catalogue, Chris Oakley (UK)


The development of digital mapping technologies has a dark side, creating an unprecedented capacity for surveillance. Chris Oakley presents a nightmarish vision, where consumers are monitored and categorised in real time. Crystallising a vision of "us" seen by "them", The Catalogue explores the codification of humanity on behalf of corporate entities. Through the manipulation of footage captured from life in the retail environment, it places the viewer into the position of a remote and dispassionate agency, observing humanity as a series of units whose value is defined by their spending capacity and future needs.
www.chrisoakley.com

As locative and wireless technologies become more widespread, many are not simply "mapping" territories, but seeking to shape and augment them. Images and other digital content are stamped with location and can then be accessed in that same place through a mobile device. It becomes possible to treat urban space and the surface of the Earth as a digital canvas, and digital media changes from something placeless into a kind of digital graffiti. You guide the "cursor" by walking instead of with a mouse, navigating digital media located in the world. In such a context, we can no longer simply say that the territory precedes the map, nor even that the map precedes the territory. In the tense play of forces between real and virtual worlds, the lines of distinction become increasingly blurred, creating an ecology of mutual influence where our sense of space and place is multiple, hybrid and continually changing.

Geotracing Futuresonic, Waag Society (NL)


Waag Society is an Amsterdam-based knowledge institute who use locative media to explore the personal relations people have with urban environments. One of their recent works, parQ, focussed upon the Vondelpark, a public space in central Amsterdam. The application aims to trigger and enhance social interaction in a playful way within and between sub-communities in the Vondelpark by letting visitors create, drop, view and share media. At Futuresonic, Waag Society will not only present the Vondelpark prototype software but will also complete a locative report of the festival using Geotracing. The report will show live media trails to give online viewers a locative impression of the Futuresonic 2006 experience.
www.waag.org/Futuresonic

 


BUMP, Jaygo Bloom (UK)


In this new commission for Futuresonic 2006 by Folly, Jaygo Bloom translates online keystrokes into real time, physical events across the city of Manchester. Online users control events in the streets and festival venues, triggering screens and the quick shot, rapid-fire, 8bit sounds emanating out of location-based sound modules located in the streets of the Northern Quarter and throughout the Futuresonic 2006 venues. So watch your back...
http://www.folly.co.uk

 


Tactical Sound Garden [ TSG ] Toolkit, Mark Shepard (USA)


Inspired by the tradition of urban community gardening, this project aims to provoke new collaborative interactions, creating an open source software platform for cultivating virtual "sound gardens" in contemporary cities. Still a work-in-progress rather than the finished article, the Tactical Sound Garden is a parasitical platform that feeds off wireless (WiFi) access points in dense urban environments, raising important questions to do with access to this new domain. Using a WiFi enabled mobile device (PDA, laptop, mobile phone), participants within wireless (WiFi) "hot zones" can listen, create, replant or even prune virtual "sound garden" for public use.
http://www.tacticalsoundgarden.net

 


Urban Tapestries, Robotic Feral Public Authoring (UK)


Proboscis presents the collision of hobbyist robotics and the Urban Tapestries knowledge mapping and sharing platform. In this work, low cost robots that are sold as consumer toys are reconfigured into vehicles of social and cultural activism. These feral robots then explore the local environment with electronic sensors to detect all kinds of phenomena: carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, solvent vapours, electro-magnetic emissions (mobile phone masts, electricity generators etc), light and noise pollution. Adding the sensor readings to Urban Tapestries online mapping tools suddenly brings the relationships between environment and home vividly to life.
Plus documentation of other experiments using the Urban Tapestries public authoring platform. http://socialtapestries.net/feralrobots
Robotic Feral Public Authoring demo - 3.00pm, Friday 21 July, 1830 Warehouse courtyard. Off The Map live schedule

 


Phone Flora (Aspergillus Flavus & Corynebacterium Group G); Anna Dumitriu (UK)


Where many locative media projects focus on public authoring, Anna Dumitriu turns this idea on its head, and focuses instead on the traces we unknowingly leave behind on the device we use. Taking swabs from her mobile phone, she has cultured the bacteria and moulds found on the keypad. These cultures were then used to develop downloadable phone wallpapers and ringtones. In doing so, Dumitriu work raises questions about the nature of hygiene, contemporary medicine and the relationship between "viral" growth of these flora and the "viral" networks of digital society.
www.normalflora.co.uk

As digital content migrates away from the desktop and into the world around us, it is increasingly encountered by users as they walk or move about. From the chance encounters of Debord's derive and Baudelaire's flaneur to the geometrical interrogations of topography practiced by artists like Richard Long. The "art of walking" has a long and established presence within the creative experience. Whether used primarily as preparatory technique (the gathering of objects and ideas for further study) or a finished end in itself, walking practices create an intimate relationship between location and work. As GPS technologies evolve, a new generation of artists are now re-assessing and reinventing walking practices with fresh vigour.

Getting To The Point (For Beginners And Experts)


With Michelle Teran, Jen Southern and Pete Gomes (UK/CA)
Tour Guide: Simon Pope (UK)

Tag along on a series of city walks through the festival weekend, each one featuring a different artist who works in some way with location and geographical positioning technologies. During the short walks the artists will discuss and demonstrate the relationships between walking and positioning technologies such as GPS in their work, followed by a workshop/presentation at the main festival venue. Getting To The Point is convened by Simon Pope, and features Michelle Teran, Jen Southern and Pete Gomes.
http://www.ambulantscience.org

 


Virtual Hiker, C5 (USA)


The Rush Creek Wilderness Trail is possibly the world's first computationally derived, unofficial public wilderness trail. The trail was first "discovered" by a computer algorithm called a "virtual hiker" that traversed the backcountry of California. The results produced a tracklog that can be uploaded to a GPS device and then followed by a real hiker through the actual landscape, offering the hiker a provocative comparison of the wayfinding abilities of a computer algorithm and the individual's own skills and intuition. Virtual Hikers are a feature of the C5 Landscape Database 2.0, which C5 is now releasing as open source in association with Futuresonic 2006.
www.paintersflat.net

With the invention of the phonograph in the late 19th century, it became possible for the first time to capture sound – to preserve this transient phenomena and to play it back independent from its geographic and temporal context. As devices become smaller and more mobile, and digital data effortlessly multiplies and flows across space and time, this separation of sound and source has become more and more acute. Now, a new generation of artists, coders and technicians probe the implications and possibilities of this situation – some seeking to further dissociate sound and source, whilst others use technology to reinvest sound and music with a renewed sense of immediacy and performance. The Mobile Music strand at Futuresonic 2006 emerged from the Mobile Music Technology Workshop organised by Lalya Gaye, Frauke Behrendt and Drew Hemment.
http://www.viktoria.se/fal/events/mobilemusic

Atau Tanaka (JP)


Atau Tanaka is a researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratories (CSL) Paris, known for his work with sensor instruments and network music installations, in artistic exhibition and scientific publications. His current work is focused on using mobile devices as a tool for collective musical composition. Using custom-built music generation engines and locative devices, these work use social dynamics and movements as creative inputs in the creation of constantly evolving music. Atau Tanaka will be giving a keynote speech at Futuresonic 2006.
http://www.csl.sony.fr/atau http://www.xmira.com/atau

 


IMPROVe, Richard Widerberg (SE) and Zeenath Hasan (IN) with MANTIS (UK)


Are phones only for speaking? IMPROVe is a design and research project that explores the potential of the mobile phone, pushing beyond its currently dominant role as a transmitter of the spoken and written word. Instead, the device is used to record and playback "soundobjects", becoming a medium for the exchange of everyday sounds within and across communities, and an instrument for creative, collaborative performance. At Futuresonic 2006, IMPROVe will feature collaboration with Tullis Rennie and other sound artists from MANTIS. mlab.uiah.fi/IMPROVe
IMPROVe performance - 12.30pm, Friday 21 July, 1830 Warehouse courtyard.
Off The Map live schedule

 


Magnetic Migration Music, Zoe Irvine (UK)


Magnetic Migration Music (MMM) seeks out an older form of mobile media that has been left behind by the digital music revolution. MMM features remote collaboration to collect an archive of forgotten and discarded to fragments of audiocassette tape found in the environment. For Futuresonic 2006 MMM invites you to listen to a selection from the archive of found tape and send in any fragments of audio tape you find using the MMM collection envelope (to Magnetic Migration Music, School of Media Arts and Imaging, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, 13 Perth Road, Dundee DD1 4HT).
http://www.magneticmigration.net

Sometimes, girls (and boys) just want to have fun. But, as many theorists have noted, games and play are not simply about enjoyment. Experimentation, the testing of limits, the twisting and inverting of meaning are all inherent in the actions of play. Social gaming offers a looser, more informal approach to technology - giving users themselves the opportunity to experiment and play. Social games give users the opportunity to challenge and reinvent the traditional roles and usage of technology.

 


Speckled Jewellery, Sarah Kettley (UK)


Fashioned in a jeweller's workshop, these "networked neckpieces" combine ProSpeckz 2K prototypes (from the Speckled Computing Consortium's research program) with silver and mixed materials in a playful combination of traditional aesthetics and wireless technology. Wearing these pieces, participants engage in collaborative and competitive games. Sardines, Kiss Chase, running races - the necklaces create a flexible context where participants collectively improvise, finding ways to appropriate and adapt to the new social context and technology that surrounds them. http://www.dcs.napier.ac.uk/~cs179
Join Sarah Kettley for a game of sardines with Speckled Jewelry. Meet by gallery exhibit at 3.00pm on Saturday 22 July. Off The Map live schedule

 


RFID Snakes and Ladders, Blink (UK)


Bridging the very old and the very new, Andrew Wilson uses Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) to breathe new life into the classic game of snakes and ladders. Transformed from board game to "building game", spaces throughout a building become part of the game board. Players take a turn every three hours (unless they throw a six or land on a snake or a ladder, when they have to act quickly). In this way the game becomes part of the normal working day. Blink see RFID Snakes and Ladders as a way of connecting people and hope to test the game in places where people are in danger of feeling cut off or lonely such as sheltered housing or the children's ward of a hospital.
http://www.rfidsnakesandladders.org/