walkingtools

From Globo News:

redeglobo.globo.com/globouniversidade/noticia/2011/08/especialistas-discutem-futuro-da-narrativa-e-revolucao-transmidia.html

Noah Wardrip-Fruin was introduced by Cicero Silva of walkingtools

Brett Stalbaum (walkingtools) and Marta Pinheiro (UFJF)

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Between Jun 20th to 24th the Centro Multimedia hosted an walkingtools workshop for artists and residents in Mexico. The experience with the software allowed artists to produce their own content and also develop some artistical experiences. One of the places that we visit to develop the project was the site of Teotihuacan. The images of the seminar are here:

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Mobile: Reflexión y experimentación en torno a los medios locativos en el arte contemporáneo en México

Proyecto. Walking tools workshop: locative media art
Semblanza. Investigador y profesor de new media art y comunicación digital. Cicero coordina el Grupo de Estudios de software en Brasil. Actualmente el se encuentra en la Facultad de Artes y en el Departamento de Posgrado de Comunicaciones en la Universidad Juiz de Fora (UFJF). Fue profesor invitado en la Brown University (2005), e investigador invitado en la Universidad de California, San Diego (USCD), del 2006 al 2010. Es autor del libro Los Exploradores: Open Source y Software libre en Brasil (con Jane Almeida). Cicero fue el curador del Foro de Cultura Digital de Brasil, y obtuvo la mención honorifica de Comunidades Digitales del Prix Ars Electronica 2010. Junto con Brett Stalbaum desarrollo el proyecto WalkingTools.net. Sus últimos proyectos en el área los medios locativos, dialogan con procesos de geolocalización (www.GPSart.net), comunidades virtuales y redes sociales vía GPS (www.GPSface.net).
Fecha. 20 al 24 de Junio.

www.imagen-movimiento.org/mobile/participantes.html

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www.leoalmanac.org/index.php/lea/entry/isea2011_workshop_walkingtools_concepts/

ISEA2011 WORKSHOP

Walkingtools Concepts: Locative Media Art

Workshop Leader: Prof. Cicero Inacio da Silva
2nd Leader: Brett Stalbaum

Spatialized location is not new – it is a fundamental aspect of human wayfinding cognition. From ancient and early historical practices such as song lines, Polynesian maritime navigation and religious pilgrimage routes that link one shrine to the next holy site, networks of nodes and scattered cues assisting navigation seem to be beyond culture. Researchers in the field of human cognition would generally agree: although it is a coarse statement in light of the finer granularity of knowledge of human spatial cognition, our species is fundamentally a navigator of networks of spatial nodes, or cognitive maps. Maybe for the first time in the history of knowledge, in the beginning of the hypertext era (what we can also call the Internet) the idea of having multiple points of information that could share many parts of the same text, image or video provided, came into use as tools to organize all human content in terms of information. The hypertext is a means of questioning the idea of the total point of view, i.e. it is impossible to find or know the complete version of some fact, artifact, or experience. In this sense, when we transport this idea to the world through geospatial hypertext, we invite others to share a highly subjective point of view with us, through open means of sharing knowledge about our geographical location or place of residence to invent a new subjective relation between the space and the information. The Walkingtools and the HiperGps Projects (2009, Silva and Stalbaum) are aimed at providing desktop production tools that enable creative people to produce mediated routes for others to play back or follow using their own mobile phones. It allows creators to produce searchable and easily sharable walks. In the history of locative media, early innovators such as Teri Rueb (1999) invented their own systems that enabled them to create mediated walking experiences. Geo-annotative projects such as Handheld Histories as Hyper-Monuments (2007) by Carmin Karasic, Rolf van Gelder and Rob Coshow furthermore allowed users to add their own thoughts and interpretations to an artist-designed, hot spot triggered, mediated geospace. Open source platforms for the production and sharing of such mediated walks have yet to emerge. HiperGps addresses the production tool of such hybrid, peripatetic media. In conceptual terms, this type of media is actually very simple. Imagine a device that can guide you through the world by pointing you in the right direction. In fact, these Global Positioning System devices are now rather ubiquitous and well understood for the purposes of automotive navigation. Now imagine that that media (audio, for example,) can be triggered at points along the way (waypoints). And then imagine that the prerogative to create this kind of triggered content was egalitarian in nature, that everyone with a computer and Internet connection can produce and share such content, and that others can find this content using only their internet connected mobile phones.

Bio of the Presenters

Cicero Inacio da Silva is researcher and professor of new media art and digital communication. Cicero coordinates the Software Studies Group in Brazil. Currently he is on the Faculty of the Arts Institute and Graduate studies in Communication department at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (UFJF), Brazil. He was a visiting scholar at Brown University (2005) and a visiting researcher at University of California, San Diego (UCSD) from 2006 to 2010. He is author of the book The Explorers: Open Source and Free Software in Brazil (with Jane de Almeida, forthcoming from the MIT Press). Cicero was Digital Art curator for the Brazilian Forum of Digital Culture, Digital Communities honorary mention at the Prix Ars Electronica in 2010.

Brett Stalbaum (UC, San Diego) is coordinator of the ICAM major at the Visual Arts Department. A serial collaborator, he was a founding member of the information theory/art corporation C5 in 1997, and the Electronic Disturbance Theater in 1998. With EDT he co-developed electronic civil disobedience software called FloodNet, which has been used on behalf of the Zapatista movement against the websites of the Presidents of Mexico and the United States, as well as the Pentagon. Stalbaum has been part of many other individual and collaborative projects including www.paintersflat.net/ and is recognized for his work in location aware media. Current collaborative projects include www.walkingtools.net/ which provides an umbrella for XML, APIs, Applications and Projects for and by walking artists, and with the CALIT2 B.A.N.G. Lab/EDT where he is the primary software developer for the Transborder Immigrant Tool project.

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The walkingtools.net project has acquired the C5 Landscape Database APIs utilized in the seminal The Other Path project (2001-2004) from the code archives of the now hibernating and possibly defunct art and theory company. The C5LSDB – among other features – encodes GIS  landscape data (digital elevation model files and more) into a relational database model that allows topography to be retrieved and searched in novel ways. One of its major applications is enabling the API’s artificial intelligence “virtual hikers”, algorithms that pre-walk the data landscape producing GPS tracklogs that can be used to follow the virtual hikers through the real world. (For examples of work using these APIs, see www.paintersflat.net.)

This code will be folded into the walkingtoolsgpx reference APIs, and released under the GNU AGPL license. (See the walkingtools.net APIs page for more information.) Our goal over the next year or so is to unite the data representation classes (by creating interfaces and wrappers) in order to make these two technically unrelated but in some ways similar APIs fully interoperable. The walkingtools reference APIs contain powerful API level tools for facilitating location based services, web services, narrative practices, and experimental locative media projects.  The C5LSDB brings GIS dataset access and analysis and artificial intelligence walking algorithms into the walkingtools reference APIs. The first naive import of the C5LSDB packages can be found in revision 50, with updated versions and new work to follow soon. (walkingtoolsgpx.sourceforge.net)

Walkingtools.net looks forward to an intense year of emerging new edge art practices at the intersection of computation and the arts. The acquisition of the C5LSDB APIs both recognizes C5′s early locative media innovations, their influence on the paintersflat.net and walkingtools.net projects, and seeks to carry the same spirit of innovation forward.

Filed under: APIs, GPX by Brett Stalbaum
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CONFERENCE: Mapping Place: GIS and the Spatial Humanities
Friday-Saturday, February 25-26, 2011
Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, UC Santa Barbara
Web: www.ihc.ucsb.edu/mappingplace/

This conference will examine the intersection between Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the spatial turn in the humanities. Participants have been asked to describe their mapping projects in relation to traditional humanities methodologies, research objects, and concerns. In particular, the conference will examine the contributions that GIS make to the humanities’ interest in place, and how GIS may both support and challenge traditional humanistic ideas of place.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment, the IHC’s Geographies of Place series, and the UCSB Center for Spatial Studies.

Keynote Addresses:

John A. Agnew, Department of Geography, UCLA, Place and Mapping Electoral Politics

David Rumsey, creator of the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection Database, and President of Cartography Associates, Reading Close, Distant, and Dynamic: Unlocking Historical Maps with Our Eyes and GIS

Talks & Panels:

Dan Edelstein, Department of French and Italian, Director of Mapping the Republic of Letters, Spatial History Project, Stanford University, Social Networking in the Enlightenment

Diane Favro, Department of Architecture, Director, Experiential Technologies Center, UCLA, Mapping Lost Places: GIS and Moving Through Ancient Worlds

Zephyr Frank, Department of History; Director, Spatial History Project, Stanford University, Visualizing Rio: Movement, Intensity and Social Space in Nineteenth-Century Brazil

Ruth Mostern, Developer of the Digital Gazetteer of the Song Dynasty (DGSD) and affiliate of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, Program in History, UC Merced, Modeling Place: Names, Events, Texts, and the Future of the Digital Gazetteer

Diana Sinton, Director of Spatial Curriculum and Research, University of Redlands, Maps, Metaphors, Analogies and the Next Generation of GIS & Humanities Questions

Brett Stalbaum, Visual Arts Department, UC San Diego, Transborder Immigrant Tool: Current State of Affairs

Elaine Sullivan, Experiential Technologies Center, UCLA, Creating a New Breed of ‘Neo-geographers’: Teaching Mapping to Humanists

Timothy Tangherlini, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and Department of Scandinavian Languages, Creator of the Danish Folklore Data Nexus, UCLA, Mapping Folklore: Challenges from the Evald Tang Kristensen Collection

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Looking back at the SOTA conference (taking some time to look at this excellent documentation, thank you UCIRA and Daniel Tucker), I just wanted to give a shout out to Grant who gave this inspiring keynote talk.

SOTA Blog: “From November 19-21st at UC San Diego the conference “Future Tense” was hosted by UCIRA in collaboration with the Dean of Arts and Humanities at UCSD. Over the next few weeks we will be posting videos from the conference on SOTA and the recently launched UCIRA Youtube channel. The first video (presented here in 4 parts) includes an introduction to the theme of the conference by UCSD Arts and Humanities Dean Seth Lerer and a Keynote outlining some of the conceptual and historical issues related to the conference.”

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The walkingtools.net supported Transborder Immigrant Tool project by Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0, B.A.N.G Lab with the similarly situated *particle group* in
The Collective Show in Los Angeles 2011. Location: 995, 997 North Hill Street Los Angeles CA 90012, Friday through Sunday, January 21-23, 2011, 12-6 pm & Thursday through Sunday, January 27-30, 2011, 12-6 pm

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“Ambient Happening in C Octatonic” using the Walkingtools.net reference APIs. Location triggered audio (GPS) during UCIRA’s 2010 “Future Tense” conference at UC San Diego on November 19th.

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A Modular Framework / Un Marco Modular

CURATED BY EDUARDO NAVAS
NOVEMBER 9 TO DECEMBER 17, 2010

CENTRO CULTURAL DE ESPAÑA
EL SALVADOR
Calle La Reforma #166,
Col. San Benito
San Salvador, EL SALVADOR

Electronic Disturbance Theater and b.a.n.g. lab are proud to participate in A Modular Framework, an exhibition that brings together artists from Latin America, or artists who have ties to Latin America, and have been producing new media work since at least the mid-nineties, when new media and digital art began to take shape. Most of the works included in this exhibition are recent, and were chosen as examples of diverse and rigorous art practices. The artists, themselves, while they crossover to art practice at large, are pioneers in digital and new media art in their own countries and for this reason they were invited to participate in A Modular Framework.

This exhibition is the first of its kind in the Central American Region, and as such its purpose is to better acquaint the local culture with new media and digital art practice. At the same time, the exhibit is designed as a marking point, a fragmentary modular assessment of the rich production of new media art by a specific set of artists who share similarities in their approach to the medium of digital art as a proper practice. The works included comment in one way or another on interconnectivity and possibilities of communication by exploring diverse interests from politics to aesthetics.

(Detail) Transborder Immigrant Tool Demo, photo by Eduardo Navas

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