Description:

Walking the Edit is an innovative system to “walk a movie” : your recorded walk will be translated into a movie through an iPhone app’.

It’s great that videos, pictures and other data can be geolocalized thus creating an ‘augmented space’. But we are left to wonder… how can we turn this abundance of information into a story? Can we build a narrative with all this geolocalized information? How can we make a visit to this augmented space a more coherent and enriching experience?

‘Walking the Edit’ enables you to ‘walk a movie’ based on the shared audiovisual pieces that are virtually existing around us. The concept is simple, you walk through a neighborhood, our iPhone app tracks your progress and translates your itinerary into a story drawing from the multitude of virtual information held in the ‘augmented space’. All this in realtime!

Once your trajectory is translated into a movie you can watch it on the website and see the movies of other people.

Find out more:

read the blog

see some of it:  Walking the Edit “Film demo” from DEDALE on Vimeo.

Description:

6 billion Others is a massive video exhibition (and a web project) done by Yann Arthus-Bertrand (he is the one that did the incredible photos in “Earth  from above” back in 1994 ).

In 2003 Yann Arthus-Bertrand had the idea of doing a ‘portrait of contemporary mankind by asking questions about universal values’.

Arthus-Bertrand and his team wrote a series of questions – on the lines of “What is happiness? What lessons can we learn from life’s difficulties? What is the meaning of life?”- and travelled the world for 5 years visiting 75 countries and interviewing 5,000 people. The massive database of answers was then used to do both an exhibition (from the 10th of January to the 12th of Febrruary 2009 at the Grand Palais in Paris) and a collaborative website where people can view the interviews but also send their own answers to the questions.

The exhibition is meant to travel the world. The interviews are organised by themes, each theme beeing in a room  (or a hut). People can browse around and be immersed in an exhibition where “real” people from all aver the world speak about their own beliefs and fears.

The website is more like a browsable fresco. An overwhelming mosaic of clickable faces allows us to follow people, topics or texts. I highly suggest to see the French part of the website (as the English one is an old version and is not as well designed).

Find out more:

See the French website of 6 milliard d’Autres

See the English website of 6 billion Others

Watch a video of how the exhibition at the Grand Palais was put together

My comments:

I believe this is a fascinating project, not only by scale but by its affective impact. I have not been to the exhibition myself, but I have friends that have spent hours transfixed by the grabs of 6 millions d’Autres. I suspect there is something magic about listening to a world of people that one will probably never meet, especially if what they say is very personal.

The interviews were cleverly shot with a standard portrait framing (by tilting the camera horizontally) which gives a photographic touch to the experience. Also, this type of shot brings a feeling of proximity and presence that is quite powerful.

The website is a stand alone project which obviously uses the same database used for the exhibition. I suspect though that the feeling is very different. The web experience is more about browsing and collaborating, while I assume the exhibition is more immersive.

Although the whole project is a little commercial and simplistic (can we really claim to do a portrait of contemporary manking by selecting 5,000 people?) I believe it is very strong. One cannot but feel whowed by it… so many faces, so many stories, so many different lifes… for one second the multiplicity of our lives seems to be graspable.

Description:

Artist Christian Nold worked with 50 local residents from the Greenwich area (London) to build an emotion map of the area that explores people’s relationship with their local environment.

The project was set up as a series of participatory workshops that invited people to borrow a Bio Mapping device and go for a walk. The device measures the wearer’s Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is an indicator of emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location.

The data collected from all the individual walks is then put together through the visualisation tool that is the map. A map, that is not just geographical any more, but that contains evidences of emotions, comments and memories of people. A map that becomes a political tool (showing the areas that resident do , or do not, like) but also a documentation of people’s feelings in conjunction with the space they inhabit.

Find out more:

More about Greenwich Emotion Map at http://www.softhook.com/emot.htm

To download the map itself: http://www.emotionmap.net/

More about the author, Christian Nold, and other projects…

My comments:

Christian’s projects are always very interesting to me because they are both participative and very tangible. I like them because I see three distinct projects/phases/layers in the Emotion Maps:

The first part is the collaborative effort to define what the map will be about and what residents of one area want to address as issues. This is the collaborative part which involves real consultation with the residents.

The second part is the private experience that residents have while they participate to the project and they walk around their city (or neighbourhood) with their Bio Mapping device on their body. Here they experience the city differently that they normally would, because of the device that they carry – but also because they have to choose their walk, their significant buildings and they can record their memories and feelings about those places. This phase is what I see as a private experience, a kind of awareness journey.

And finally, the third part of the project is what Christian then does with all the data he has collected. By choosing the map as a visualisation tool he changes the use of it and gives is a personal and political edge. He also ends up with a very physical object, something that can be exposed or printed in the “old media” way.

This is a new media project that does not only live in a database. This is a documentation of the city that can be visualised by all – digital or not digital aware- and yet that could not exist without GPS systems and computers.

I think this work is very powerful as it mixes private and social levels of our everyday life in the city. I would also definitively see it as a form of new media documentary: the documentartion of our relationship and emotions towards what structures our movements and our lives- the city.

Description:

34 North, 118 West is a a historic fiction set in downtown LA. Depending on the GPS positioning of the walker, a different part of the story is  informs the participator of the historic past of downtown LA. A portable computer shows the location of the participator on a map, while the the audio content is delivered thought the headphones.

Find out more:

Read about the project 34 North, 118 West.

Watch a video of the project 34 North, 118 West.

More about the artist collective 34 North, 118 West (authors of the project) and their other locative projects..

My comments:

The only thing I have seen about this project is the video that is on their website… but it is difficult to tell what the experience of the GPS narrative was like or to judge whether this project is more a locative fictional narrative or a locative documentary narrative.

Anybody that knows more… please do comment!