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Stanza wins SHARE PRIZE 2012 in Torino for Capacities. A piece of work using real time data of the city.

November 1st, 2012
Stanza  wins SHARE PRIZE 2012 in Torino for Capacities. A piece of work using real time data of the city.This artwork captures the changes over time in the environment (city) and represents the changing life and complexity of space as an emergent artwork. Its an artwork about the internet of things, smart cities and connecting spaces.

Jury Statement

What is the role of art today, in this moment of social transition towards the city of the future? It was from this perspective that the artists interpreted the theme Open Your City, exploring the key concepts word by word. The short-list of the Jury reflects the reappearing artistic interpretation of the modern urban landscape as system, where the solid element is replaced by the message, the information and the database, a real, but dematerialized city. Artists have been short-listed by an international jury, consisting of Simona Lodi, Carlo Ratti, Bruce Sterling and Mirjam Struppek, on the basis of the artistic value of their work and its relevance to the Share Prize theme.

Capacities: Real Time Complex – Connected Cities by British artist Stanza is an installation dedicated to the complexity of life in an environment. Changes in each of the spaces are monitored in real time, as they give rise to constant tensions, highlighting the behaviour of complex systems and the emergent properties that appear. In this case the organism is the city and not the single individual; it is the entire urban habitat as a whole, revealing its nature as a multifaceted system. The installation is the real-time mirror image of everything that changes, gathering huge amounts of data that are transformed aesthetically into a physical copy of the city, made up of cables, lights and sensors that represent shifts in environmental parameters measured numerically. The obsessive focus is on the observation of environmental data by gathering measurement on temperature, light, atmospheric pressure, noise and the sounds of the city outside the museum. Gathering digital data on the environment has become an art, and art has become a data set rather than a collection of molecules. The short-list of the Jury reflects the reappearing artistic interpretation of the modern urban landscape as system, where the solid element is replaced by the message, theinformation and the database, a real, but dematerialized city.

Le parole OPEN YOUR CITY sono la traccia tematica che ha guidato la mostra di Share Prize. Il premio ha come obiettivo scoprire, promuovere e sostenere le arti in epoca digitale. La selezione delle opere finaliste della mostra è dedicata agli artisti che interpretano l’innovazione come linguaggio di espressione artistica, in ogni modo e forma. Una giuria internazionale composta da Simona Lodi, Carlo Ratti, Bruce Sterling e Mirjam Struppek hanno scelto gli artisti in base all’aderenza al tema e al valore estetico dell’opera.

Image: Stanza Capacities Installation. 2010.

Image: Stanza Capacities Installation. 2010.

Dichiarazione della giuria

Quale è il ruolo dell’arte, in questo momento di transizione sociale verso la città del futuro? In quest’ottica gli artisti hanno interpretato il tema Open Your City, sviscerando le parole chiave. La short-list della giuria riflette l’interpretazione del riapparire artistico del paesaggio urbano moderno come sistema, dove l’elemento solido è sostituito dal messaggio, dalle informazioni e dai database, una città reale ma smaterializzata.

Capacities: Real Time Complex – Connected Cities dell’artista inglese Stanza dedica la sua installazione alla complessità della vita in determinato ambiente. Ogni ambiente è sottoposto a cambiamenti continui che sono monitorati in tempo reale. I cambiamenti portano continua tensione e stressano il concetto di linearità ed evidenziano le emergenze che compaiono. In questo caso l’organismo è la città e non il singolo cittadino ma l’intero complesso urbano, tracciandone il profilo come sistema multiforme. L’installazione è lo specchio in real-time di ciò che si modifica, raccogliendo grosse quantità di dati trasformati esteticamente in una copia della città ma fatta di cavi, luci e sensori che esprimono il passaggio degli elementi ambientali raccolti in forma numerica. L’attenzione insistente è osservare i dati ambientali raccogliendo la temperatura, la luce, la pressione atmosferica, il rumore, e il suono della città fuori dal museo. Raccogliere elementi numerici che riguardano l’ambiente è diventata un’arte e l’arte e’ diventata un insieme di dati piuttosto che un insieme di molecole.

http://www.stanza.co.uk/capacities/index.html

 

 

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Posted in architecture, artworks, cctv, city, code, data, display, emergent city, hardware, installation, surveillance, technology

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STANZA’s art explores questions raised by modern society – about privacy, surveillance culture

September 23rd, 2012

STANZA’s art explores questions raised by modern society – about privacy, surveillance culture, and who owns the data that is regularly collected about all of us – often using modern technologies to create his pieces. Since he first started exhibiting his works in 1984, STANZA has strived to create cutting edge art that deals with current issues. In the process he has won several impressive awards, including an AHRC arts fellowship, and has seen his work featured in over 50 different exhibitions globally.

Ahead of a installation of one of his works “Capacities” in Gent, Belgium in September, Solomon Radley met with him, in front on a computer monitor at his studio in South London, to talk in depth about what he does over coffee.

Hey, how’s it going? Would you begin by telling me a bit about what you do?

STANZA: The things that I’m interested in are ‘surveillance space’, which is the idea of the city as having become a panopticon – this idea that we’re in a prison and we can be observed at all times, from all perspectives, all at once, and particularly in real time.

I use various technologies to do that, like CCTV and wireless sensor networks. Over the years, firstly I’ve developed a strong understanding of what these technologies can do in terms of learning about them, but also I’m having to develop for them, so I’ve learned how to develop hardware and software. You may think I’m a technologist – I see myself as a creative technologist, and I also see that artists are engineers, so they have to understand the technologies that they use, and the mediums that they use in order to get output.

To bring that into perspective, we can look at some artworks…

Sure thing. Would you expand on your thought that the city is a sort of prison?

STANZA: Urban Generation is a piece I did in relation to this idea of the city being a panopticon. Let’s say, in modernist terms, an artist would go out and collect assets – he might use a recording device or a camera – it would be a still, linear asset, and it would never change. It’s possible to actually conceive of the city as a moving physical entity, moving forward in time all the time. How is it possible to use new technologies to actually gain a representation of this, and use it in a culturally meaningful way?

Urban Generation: The generative artworks can be exhibited using projectors, or displayed on a network of plasma monitors (as above)

Multiple CCTV cameras are accessed randomly in real time to make this urban tapestry, creating an evolving, generative artwork. These images are of Madrid. (Available on canvas 160cm by 120cm)

Urban Generation attempts to imagine the world from everyone else’s perspective all at once. If I’m giving a talk, what I try and do is – to illustrate the conceptual shift – I say: “I’d like you to close your eyes, and I’d like you to imagine yourself in a place in London. I’m going to do the same and I’m going to take a single mental snapshot, and I’d like you all in the room to take your single snapshot. Now, I’d like you to imagine the view of the people sitting next to you to your left and to your right, so you have three images multiplied together. There’s 300 people in the room; I’d like you to merge all of these 300 images together. And now not like a film, (because if we used a film we’d be recording the same images) what I’d like you to do is to move these images forward in real time.”

This is the idea I’m trying to capture with this piece of work.

A lot of your work is concerned with the question of who owns the information that is regularly collected about people, and with re-claiming that information. Tell me about this idea.

STANZA: I make artworks that arise from my research into these themes – the themes being ‘control space’ and ‘surveillance space’ and issues with privacy. What I’m doing, which is sort of new ground, is that I’m hacking access to a network and re-appropriating the data and information, and I’m re-contextualizing to give it a wider meaning. I want to show that you can do something positive with this data.

Other works where I’m interested in the control and ownership of data include this website called GenoMixer, where I fully sequenced my blood. In a sense this looks like artist self-portraiture, but I was interested in thedomain space – the public domain space – that’s inside our bodies.

We have this huge line of code – 3.3 billion letters – and it basically has an economic value. The proposal here is to IPO (Initial Public Offering) the project on the stock market, and to give everyone a share of the derivable intellectual royalties. For example, if somebody else wanted to investigate your DNA in a medical program they’d have to pay you. If some other company discovered the cancer gene because you were on the police forensic database you could say “No it’s copyrighted – it’s on the GenoMixer database”.

It just so happens that I also made a series of self-portraits with them…

One of the most obvious types of information that is commonly collected about the general public is video images gathered by CCTV, and this is something you often look at. What are your thoughts about CCTV?

STANZA: Let’s look at “Urban Generation – trying to imagine the world from everyone else’s perspective, all at once“. What we’ve got here is: each square on this four-by-four grid is making calls to over 100 cameras in London in real time. This is a parallel reality, using live network data to re-appropriate it over the network and use it for something else. For example, this could be used as an extension on landscape painting.

Why this has become quite interesting, and the reason I mention these modernist aspects that are fixed, is that this work is never the same. You could look at it even now, on a different monitor, and it would be different: It’s not the Mona Lisa – where every time you look at the work you experience the same thing – there’s an added problem here.

Another interesting question here is: Is what we’re looking at the artwork? On July 7th in 2005 they switched this entire network off because of the terrorist attacks. Well my system still worked, it’s just that the output – which is what connects a viewer to the system – is shifted.

This [Public Domain Responsive Architecture Facade] is the same concept using CCTV, observing the whole of the city but making it transparent. Why would you want to make your movements open and transparent? Why would you want to let CCTV be seen by everybody? This is a building with its outer surfaces displaying images that are embedded in the city – all the stuff on the outside of the building is shifting in terms of the real time properties of that city. In a sense, you (as the observed individual) become part of the building and part of the city, and this opens up the idea of transparent architecture and transparent space.

Public Domain Responsive Architecture Facade: This interactive responsive architecture is within the city of Trondheim, Norway. The facade presents the emotional real time state of the city by using live data and CCTV images to represent the building as a living breathing entity

Public Domain is another work along the same theme, where I gave CCTV cameras away to members of the public, to open up this idea of CCTV networks. People sometimes say that they’ve got nothing to hide, and to nothing to fear…I think that’s a problematic statement. I’m not coming down on a particular side of the fence here, but it seems to me that we’ve opened Pandora’s box, and there’s a whole series of legislative and ethical issues that aren’t being addressed.

Hopefully what I’m doing in these artworks is to draw attention to the fact that there’s a whole series of potential problems that we’re walking in to.

Public Domain: Live real-time CCTV simulation of gallery space on a large globe

You also play with collected data, which you use to create interactive works or installations where real-time changes are caused by environmental factors…

STANZA: We’ve already looked at my CCTV system. There’s another one, which uses wireless sensors/wireless nodes. You scatter them across the city, and they talk to each other in a network grid.

This research started in 2004 as a result of an AHRC grant that I was awarded, and I was trying to find a system I could use as open source hardware and software, that would monitor the whole city space. I’ve scattered these sensors around a city to generate visualisations and sonifications in various cities. For my first project [Sensity] they were output onto a visual globe.

‘Sensity’ on a round globe display, tested at County Hall London in 2006

So, now what I was interested in doing is looking at this real time data, that’s now everywhere, and seeing if I could do something else with it – if I could make art with it.

Equally, in Sonicity I deliberately put a whole load of speakers on the floor and connected them all up to make it look like a map, and somewhere else (in another part of the world) that data is being collected from my network and being spat out onto the internet via an XML stream. In arty terms, maybe I’m “painting with data” – the data has become the medium. With this data I’m painting a sonification of the real time landscape.

The speakers used in ‘Sonicity’, arranged to resemble a map

The second thing I was trying to think about, as part of this thinking process, was all the stuff that’s being collected about us – not just my data, but tax data and medical records – which could be used because of the way it changes and shifts from one thing to the next to power other events:

With CapacitiesI made…let’s call it a sculpture…a sculpture of computer parts that looks like a city, and would be powered by events changing somewhere else in real time. In this version of Capacities, all the lights and fans, and all the parts that change, do so because of other things happening in the world in real time.

Capacities: The electronic city, resting on an evolving city floor

The reason I’m trying to do that is that there seem to be other values that people are missing in terms of the things that are happening to us, and the world, in real time. We’ve become bodies residing in a ‘data space’. Everything around us is the data space and by default we interact with it – even small movements displace millions of atoms.

I conceive of this post-modern world in which movements are just moving a series of 0s and 1s. I can measure the 0s and 1s that I’m displacing by moving around. This interactive process is embedded in the work by default.

Visitors to a Gallery… is quite an important work, in that it opens up the gallery space as an artwork. For example, these two people that are pictured aren’t actually in this room – they’re in another room in another part of the gallery, so they’re embedded in the artwork that you’re viewing. Everybody in the architectural space becomes part of the artwork, and this happens in real time – it’s not recorded, and it’s not a film. So I utilize the technology in the space (the CCTV system).

Secondly, what’s happening here is that there are a series of proximity sensors that affect this as an algorithm – as you walk around this space all of these images oscillate/vibrate slightly.

So when you’re in the room, viewing this artwork, you’re at the same time generating an artwork for someone else in another room?

STANZA: And you’re in the work you’re viewing yourself, through your interaction with the sensors.

That’s also happening in Seeing Through Walls, where there are little cameras and monitors, so you become embedded in the same artwork as it’s being broadcast live, or in this piece where you can see through to people on the other side of the wall.

Visitors To A Gallery: Two visitors who have been embedded in the work by the surveillance system that takes those who view the installation, and simultaneously makes them part of the artwork

I was actually in a Greek club where they had something like that – the mirrors in the toilet let you see yourself, but also the women doing their makeup in the adjacent toilets…

STANZA: Ha! No wonder their ecomony’s gone down the pan…

Moving on from that, my work splits into this idea of using real time networks and investigating different ways of interacting with public space.

Here’s a strange project called The Binary Graffiti Club, where I got a load of people to dress up in hoodies with 0s and 1s on their backs, and they go round the city making binary graffiti – painting little coded messages onto the city.

The Binary Graffiti Club: Coded messages are left in binary, encouraging young people to see the city as a canvas

Anything in particular?

STANZA: Well…no. I don’t want to be too specific about this, because… Well here’s a piece going back to the DNA project (the open source bit). If you sit in the gallery for…this has been online for seven years: If it was exhibited in a gallery you could get my open source DNA, and you could go off and replicate me, but it changes a letter once every second so you’d have to sit there for 104 years with a pen and paper. The same is true of the binary graffiti club – if you want to know what the message is, you have to sit there and transcribe it and translate it.

One letter from STANZA’s DNA code – the letters are shown in order, one per second for the 104 year project

This led from another piece of work – A City of Bits – as well as this performance that was laid down in the form of this sushi: I invited 12 people, after the disciples, and asked them to come and eat this coded sushi message. So, this is a coded message that they eat, and then they all put their own message back into a jar which I’ve now destroyed. I’ve transcribed those messages here…

A City of Bits: A binary message in sushi which was ceremonially eaten. It reads, “There but for the grace of God, go I”

You have a performance coming up in Texas soon – tell me a bit about what you’ll be doing.

STANZA: In Soundcities, using a recording device, I’ve been to all these different cities, recording sounds which are attached to Google Maps, and you can visit lots of cities in the world…

The key to this is the database; you can see the sounds, arranged in different categories, and you can create a performance by picking a selection of them and building up rhythms. This is what I do with my performances, except I have the same thing on a couple of machines, and I might mix it with sounds from churches, etc. It’s basically a live world tour of city sounds as music: the machines are connected to a mixing desk, images are coming from the website projects.

During the eight years I’ve been doing these performances, they’ve been heavily focused on the sounds of cities, the database live and soundmaps.

So this database can be used in performances, but the key here is that the database is open source, and other people can contribute to this community of sounds. There’s lots of other projects that have come from this, but the most important bit is this. This XML feed shows the sound, and its longitude/latitude, and although this is just a line of code it basically means that anyone else can use this to write their own apps.

What I’m doing that’s unique here is: it’s like an artist of the past allowing someone into their studio to work in parallel with them.

The Central City: This installation, on display for Vida Retrospective in Madrid until November, is made up of 15 touch screens built into towers blocks as a large scale interactive installation

www.stanza.co.uk

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Posted in architecture, artworks, cctv, code, data, installation, networks, realtime, surveillance, technology

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Complex-cities. Art, mapping, within the new digitised city space.

September 3rd, 2012

Complex-cities. Under the new digitised city space from artists walks to virtual cities.

Around the 1900 century the city became the focal point for an intense debate about the dynamics of technological civilization and its effects on the quality of human life. The Futurist manifesto of 1909 identified the city as the pre eminent theme of modern poetry and painting.

Ezra Pound pointed out in his comments on Eliot’s The Waste Land: “ the life of the village is narrative…..In a city the visual impressions succeed one another, overlap, overcross, they are cinematographic”.

The city ceases to be pictured as a social environment and it is transposed on to an existential plane. The metropolis ultimately becomes a metaphor – a dynamic configuration of the confiding hopes and fears of the twentieth century.

Writing played a huge part in the metaphorical and poetic interpretation of world cities. But it is through cinema that we can appreciate the scale, pace movement and patterns that where emerging in the modernist city.

The imagined city is constructed in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926). It is an imagined city, a city of the future a city that is seen time and time again in modern science fiction films like The Fifth Element.

Lang referred to The Tower of Babel, the massive control tower in Metropolis is called “The New Tower Of Babel. The comparison to Babylon within the city has become common in metaphorical language of the city ever since cities really became too large for easy assimilation. Lang’s city thus becomes a city of “idea”.

 

The flanuer.

While Baudelaire characterized the flâneur as a “gentleman stroller of city streets”, he saw the flâneur as having a key role in understanding, participating in and portraying the city. A flâneur thus played a double role in city life and in theory, that is, while remaining a detached observer.

This stance, simultaneously part of and apart from, combines sociological, anthropological, literary and historical notions of the relationship between the individual and the greater populace.

This term refers to a person who plays a sensor role in understanding the urban environment.

Any pedestrian environment that accommodates leisurely exploration of city streets. Walter Benjamin adopted the concept of the urban observer both as an analytical tool and as a lifestyle….. making social and aesthetic observations during long walks.

The wrap it seems, is the collections of observations about the cityspace. These can be made into histories and documented, sights and sounds, experiences of the city.

The flaneur is a suitable metaphoric vehicle for the ‘witnessing’ of this space because ‘the flaneur moves through space and among the people with a viscosity that both enables and priviledges vision.’

Being a product of modernity, he was a spectator of modern life in the urban sprawl; now a product of post-modernity, the cyborg-flaneur is an androgynous spectator of virtual spaces.

A person’s whose aim is to disappear in the spaces of the city – ‘a prince who is everywhere in possession of his incognito’ – is the person who has the best view of the basic nature of cyberspace, a space where anonymonity is maintained by a process of vaporisation upon departure.

The flaneur is also an ‘image of movement through the social space of modernity’ – an explorer who finds their identity among the realizations of the city. The cyber-flaneur’s exploration of virtual spaces is achieved through their natural propensity for movement; they wander anonymously within the boundaries of virtual space, developing a virtual identity while connected.”

The Situationist City.

A precursor of flash mobs, CCTV performances, interactions with GPS and networked performance the Situationists existed to politicize the urban domain.

The networked internet and virtual city space allows the movement of sources and codes that can be re mashed, played with to be “re-routed”.

By cutting up maps of the city Guy Debord and Asger Jorn where re coding city space, creating new patterns and urban forms. Or see Constant’s, “North New Babylon”, watercolour on collage. It is a single continuous organic structure spreading to the edges across the landscape. Unit blocks are repeating in an organic web like structure. The most famous of these images was “The Naked City”, criticises traditional mapping and at the same time investigates the relationship between various urban elements by re- assembling the map of Paris.

“Situationists promised that their architecture would one day revolutionise everyday life and release the ordinary citizen into a world of experiment, anarchy and play.” Simon Sadler.

The HP media platform for mobile computing the city based games using GPS tracking all continue this theme of playing in city space.

Simon Sadler, draws a comparison between Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm (1950) an  (p87  The Situationsit City) abstract expressionist painting, and the webs traced by both Paris metro and London railways maps. Debord insisted that interest was because of the content however the aesthetic comparison cannot be ignored.

Future Cities

Future cities will be merged into real time connected up data cities connection of networks of real time information flows.

The internet presents of a myriad ways to create ephemeral art across cross networks using all sorts of data information and media. The internet provides gateways and access for all, the editing process, mash-ups, authors as editors, as choice makers, as decision makers.

The key to a multi/plicities project is the nature and openess of the gateways so that its acts without borders.

One has to experiment with the technology and understand how to get under the bonnet, and then new  outcomes will shed light on how data flows overlap in live streams demonstrating what are the possibilities for novel artistic experiences and outputs as well as new business models which will benefit from sonifications, visualizations, and sculptural objects; as well as apps, and feedback into other networks and intergrated systems.

By researching current systems, software, and artworks one can  come to an understanding about the social and ethical implications of such technologies both in artworks as well as public domain space and to speculate where these technologies could lead us in the future.

 

Future cities / spaces will be merged into real time connected up data cities.  A connection of networks of real time information flows. The results created lead to mashed up cities and real time performative city experiences.

There fore can one build an open ended platform  where the content too can be mashed up , intergrated into  non linear streams, re- assembled, used by other artists, curators, via tag  or XML streams.

(NB: I don’t like the term open source or but my work endeavours to collapse the borders created by networks so there is a free flow and exchange through the system both for input and outputs of ideas and latterly resources which I call assets (the data and the information.)

The examples below are experiments around the world in this field of location based devices maps and artworks that all have varying objectives. They mostly I believe have developed without speculating on future content delivery  scenarios.

From a recent essay with my work (Issues In Science And Technology, Spring 2012.) … “the more people online contributing ideas,  the more valuable the network becomes to all the other users”…Hillary Rodman Clinton

So the objective is to  maker a platform that  makes it easy to  contribubute from the first instancee whose structure or front might be re/ assembled depending on the flow / need/ content narrative)

Interesting links.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-19267930

“It’s a good way to tell the story of a person. And we all have a story. Both the farmer, the director, they all have a story. And also it makes a visit to the graveyard much more interesting.”

http://www.notours.org/audioguides

***

NoTours proposes an augmented aurality experience. In other words, you can add a new layer of reality to your place. You can leave messages, tell stories, create geolocated concerts or just share your thoughts. The team of noTours.org is looking forward to know your ideas and your possible uses. In fact we are artists and developers. Take a look at some of the sound walks we have made in the world. Some companies and individuals have already asked us about creating their own customized walks. They offer you the possibility of having your own app with your logos
http://code.google.com/p/timemap/

Timemap.js is a Javascript library to help use online maps, including Google, OpenLayers, and Bing, with a SIMILE timeline. The library allows you to load one or more datasets in JSON, KML, or GeoRSS onto both a map and a timeline simultaneously. By default, only items in the visible range of the timeline are displayed on the map.

http://www.soundcities.com/

***

Stanza sound maps, softwares, performances and installations around the of many cities, big investigation around the city soundscape. he interesting thing now is the project is opened up for others allowing a re mixing or mash up. It allows these “others” to do with the “material” other things for example concerts and art installations. Using the XML feed other applications are created ie phone apps merged with you PS position or visualisation of noise across a space…all sorts of things are possible.

Regeneration squares

http://www.stanza.co.uk/stanza_regeneration/index.html

Re-animating and remapping the city. This project involves making new public squares in the city to make a regeneration of the city. Here area selection of these new squares in Liverpool. In addition I invite the public to find these squares and present situations to intervene and to regenerate these new public spaces.

http://www.huellasolar.com/

Solar-imprint cities (Huellasolar ciudades) is a project for mapping urban solar exposure. This mapping is dynamically configurable by the user to study the incidence of the sun at any time of year in various cities in Spain.

http://www.sonicwonders.org/

This a travel guide to our Sound World – listing places where what you hear is an important part of the experience. Increasingly, people are going to capture the World’s sonic wonders, whether deliberately by recording what they hear on a mobile phone, or almost by accident, as the soundtrack on a video recording. A sort of travel the world listening to  sounds guide.

http://voiceofkibera.org/

Voice of Kibera aims to give collective global voice to Kibera residents by aggregating local citizen reports, Kibera community media and other relevant news and information.

http://birdmap.5dvision.ee/index.php?lang=en#

At this url you can  track on a “migration map” some birds travelling between Europe and Africa.

http://www.equator.ac.uk/index.php/articles/c61

As mobile phones and computers become more complex, the range of media that affect our experiences of cities has expanded. What makes a city meaningful to us is not just its bricks and mortar, but the texts we read, people we talk to and experiences we have. Maps, conversations and images of a city all influences our activity and enjoyment. City focuses on bridging or blurring the boundaries between these different media. The systems we build mix local interactions and remote collaboration, using ubicomp technology, digital maps, virtual environments and hypermedia.

http://www.beatrizdacosta.net/pigeonblog.php

Art project Pigeonblog was a collaborative endeavour between homing pigeons, artists, engineers and pigeon fanciers engaged in a grassroots scientific data gathering initiative designed …. How could animals help us in raising awareness to social injustice?

http://www.christinakubisch.de/english/install_induktion.htm

“Electrical walks”, is an invitation to a very special kind of stroll in cities (or elsewhere) With a special magnetic headphone and a map of the environs, upon which the possible routes and especially interesting electrical fields are marked, the visitor can set off on his own or in a group. The perception of everyday reality changes when one listens to the electrical fields; what is accustomed appears in a different context. Nothing looks the way it sounds. And nothing sounds the way it looks.

 

http://www.conormcgarrigle.com/writing_the_city.htm

Writing the city was a GPS drawing walk intervention which took place in Dublin in collaboration with Tactic. The walk with a handheld GPS to a preplanned route used the tracklog to write a giant word in a single movement onto Dublin.

http://www.walkingthroughtime.co.uk/

***

Walking Through Time is a mobile application that allows smart phone users with built-in GPS to not only find themselves in the present, but find themselves in the past. By making available historical UK maps, users will be able to scroll through time and navigate places using maps that are hundreds of years old. This new iPhone app brings this imagination to reality. Just head out for a walk, set the app to play, and let the story of the birth of the solar system and the evolution of life unfold under your feet.

http://www.urban-atmospheres.net/Jabberwocky/info.htm

Jabberwocky captures a unique, synergistic moment – expanding urban populations, rapid adoption of Bluetooth mobile devices, and widespread influence of wireless technology across our urban landscapes. The United Nations has recently reported that 48 percent of the world’s population current live in urban areas and that this number is expected to exceed the 50 percent mark by 2007,

http://www.storymashup.org/

Manhattan Story Mashup is an urban game, taking place on September 23rd 2006 in Manhattan, New York City. During the event, approximately 250 players will move around Manhattan, taking photos which match a given target.

http://www.savetheelephants.org/tracking.html

Save the Elephants uses Google Earth to visualize our elephant tracking data from across Africa. Google Earth is the rich mapping application that will allow you to fly through a global database of Earth imagery and detailed mapping information.
http://www.atmosphereindustries.com/gentrification/

A transmedia game, which uses mobile technology to facilitate and augment offline gameplay. It has been presented at game and culture festivals around the world to critical acclaim. Small teams compete to collect real-world properties, “convert” them, and transform the neighbourhood. As developers, they’ll build swanky lofts, erect coffee shops, and raise property values

http://realtime.waag.org/

GPS trace maps built into flash all online.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/keir.clarke/web/thereandthen.htm

*** Check This

Historical movies on Google Streetview  (Looks Like a screenshot of streeview)

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF&msa=0&msid=209536004200975525899.0004af02bf59e643ac521

Geolocate the painted tags in the mountains of Lima:

http://www.google.com/mars/  Google Mars is a great tool but when shall we geolocate our own information on Mars and the other planets in our solar system ?…that is the question.
Streetmuseum™ Londinium directs you to locations across the capital where you can immerse yourself in the sights and sounds of Roman London. As you’re guided around the city you’ll unearth exquisite artefacts as if discovering them for the first time and reveal the stories of life in Londinium (OFFLINE)

http://www.boxofficequant.com/100-years-of-set-locations/full_screen.htm

This map, showing 2100 movies locations is a great resource for people who want to geolocate the scenes of the movies in a “Walking Cinema” spirit. It could be a great starting point fo a mobile phone app.
http://www.paintyourstreet.com/

On the website “Paint Your Street” Google Maps mashup you can write words over the Street Maps view ! Nice idea ( full of script errors)

http://glowapp.com/

***Glow is the mobile app that tells people how you are doing and where you are doing it. Download Glow and discover how people around the world are feeling right now! (Use the map view to reveal areas near you where people are feeling good. We use color to show you how people are feeling as a group. Blue is “awesome” and red is, well…”not so awesome”.)

http://www.markermusic.com/

Interesting use of Google Maps for mixing locative audio recordings. “you can click and hold on the map to move it around, and use the YouTube volume controls to change the mix” :

http://sounds.bl.uk/uksoundmap/fusionmap.aspx

UK Sound Map is a online “soundscape” project from the British Library Board and the “Noise Futures” network. Welcome to our interactive map showing 1675 soundscape recordings contributed so far by members of the public: (now closed)

http://whatwasthere.com/ What Was There is A great project with Google Maps to travel in time…visit the site and test the iphone app !

http://urbansonar.com/

Urban Sonar is a personal space monitoring system that senses an individual’s experience as they move through the urban environment and records that information for review at a later time. Turning the gaze both outward and inward, negative

space surrounding the individual and their heart rate are used to visualize a lived experience through quantitative data.The visualization program was writting in Processing.
http://pixelsix.net/wanderer-gps-game/

Keep Walking! from Jonas Hansen. The object of the GPS game Wanderer is to be in continuous motion and to follow auditive commands given by the game system. Because the game is not mapped onto the coordinates of the physical space, it can be played in any location. The player is continuously con fronted with the objects in public space functioning as game obstacles. In this way the game trans­forms the meaning of the

http://www.thehiddenpark.com/

It seems to be a geolocated game for children but it is really more than this. This app and the editing tool is full of great ideas, mixind reality with animations. Let’s hack The Hidden Park for some activists purposes ;-)

http://imapflickr.com/default.aspx

Create custom Google Maps from your geotagged Flickr Photos to embed in your website or blog, or for sending to Facebook, Twitter or your favourite website.

 

Walking.

http://walkart.wordpress.com/

A virtual tour of Stuttgart and London

August 6, 2012 by Ana Laura

A walk with Amy’ functions as an urban drift, in which each participant is simultaneously a spectator and traveling companion, tourist and tour operator. The intimacy of an unknown voice can lead to unexpected insights and connections, noticing details we might have overseen, as we share cities across a remote landscape. ‘A walk with Amy’ asks what is worthy of attention – without road names or landmarks, what will function as signposts and how will we make our choices?

New Artworks involved with walking

http://walkart.wordpress.com/artworks/

Misc

http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/London-Wall/Whats-on/Exhibitions-Displays/LomoWall.htm

The Museum of London has collaborated with Lomography – the vibrant community dedicated to analogue photography – to create an eye-catching LomoWall display.

 

Books

http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?BookId=ATC+5

The convergence of mobile technologies and ubiquitous computing is creating a world where information-rich environments may be mapped directly onto urban topologies. This book tracks the history and genesis of locative and wearable media and the ground-breaking work of pioneer artists in the field. It examines changing concepts of space and place for a wide range of traditional disciplines ranging from Anthropology, Sociology, Fine Art and Architecture to Cultural and Media Studies, Fashion and Graphic design.

 

Cities. Visualisation Environment

http://flowingcity.com/

http://villevivante.ch/

The City of Geneva decided to take the challenge to visualize these digital traces created by our mobile phones. The objective of this installation is to make this data visible and allow you to explore these streams of connected people around the city, in their everyday life. A particle flow-field inspired map provides a view of the ‘liveliness’ of the people using their cell phone as they move about, as the activities and directions are embodied by the density of lines shown on the map.

http://stamen.com/clients/mysociety

Interactive maps of travel time and housing prices in London. an NGO which builds websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives, came to Stamen with a remit to explore two fascinating datasets: median prices of homes throughout London, and the time it takes to travel from one place to another throughout the city.

http://www.emotionmap.net/map.htm

The Bio Mapping device was invented by the artist Christian Nold. It combines a finger cuff sensor, which records the wearer’s Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) – an index of emotional response – in conjunction with a Global Positioning System (GPS) which locates the wearer’s position on earth. The finger cuff sensor was derived from the Polygraph, where it is used by law enforcement agencies to identify the physiological symptoms of stress induced by lying. Bio Mapping uses this technology very differently.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/urbancomputing/

Urban Computing With the rapid progress of urbanization and civilization on earth, urban computing is emerging as a concept where every sensor, device, person, vehicle, building, and street in the urban areas can be used as a component to probe city dynamics to further enable city-wide computing for serving people and their cities. Urban computing aims to enhance both human life and urban environment smartly through a recurrent process of sensing, mining, understanding, and improving.

http://casualdata.com/senseofpatterns/

Sense of Patterns is an on-going project, a series of printed data visualizations aiming to depict the behaviors of masses in different public spaces. The visualizations have a focus on the patterns of moving entities in public like commuters, cars and public transportation vehicles as well as the interaction between these entities and physical structures like roads, sidewalks, buildings and parks. The project intends to provide strong visuals on what we all experience in our daily lives in different cities.

http://www.techcitymap.com/index.html#/

Tech City Map is a constantly-evolving compendium of East London’s vibrant technology and creative ecosystem. In addition to showing where businesses are located Tech City Map uses advanced technology from Trampoline Systems to reveal the web of connections linking them together and calculate each company’s influence in the community.

https://geoloqi.com/blog/2012/03/data-portraits-powered-by-3-5-years-of-data-and-2-5-million-gps-points/

These are images of map generated entirely from GPS logs gathered by various versions of the Geoloqi sample application for iPhone and Android for the past 3.5 years. Once gathered, the data was run through a custom script that projects the GPS logs onto a 2D image plane. There is a little bit of logic to smooth out the lines and remove some (but not all) GPS noise.

Other

mobilebristol (now offline)

Founded by Hewlett Packard Laboratories, the University of Bristol and the Appliance Studio, Mobile Bristol’s programme of research ran from 2002-2005. It investigated how pervasive technology could be used to enhance how residents and visitors experience and interact with their physical environment and each other in urban and public spaces.

Cityware with Imperial

Sensity by Stanza

Sensible cities MIT

London AA

Dog attention Over 115,000,000 views

 

Stanza 2012

 

 

 

 

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The Internet of Things. PART III The Third Space.

June 11th, 2012

The Internet of Things. PART  III The Third Space.

Future Avatar Cities.

I proposed in a recent interview for The Internet of Things Council  (http://tinyurl.com/3trotzq) that future cities will be merged into real time connected up data cities. Not just one space, but a connection of networks and of real time information flows. The results created will lead to mashed-up cities and real time performative city experiences.

Stanza Generative software map maker.

I am now interested in how this shared dataspace can overlap,  creating a new space in between, which only two nodes share, a future avatar city.  The aim here is to give tangible form to this new space, the space where the cities overlap, presenting an alternative urban virtual environment. In the prototype the audience sees the data  and will be able to mix data from cities; they can even mix the data to make music with it.  This novel approach allows a critical reflection on the real time city.

The Third Space speculates that social sensing might lead to a new social space and eventually a new business enterprises which can be exploited.  What is possible is that significant breakthroughs in knowledge about the shared data experience can be achieved through user-based interfaces online, on mobiles , media facades and other platform (multi distrubution will spawn micro businness.

In the last few years several systems have been deployed to monitor city environments. Mostly they exist as isolated networks.  My plan is to ask them to link up. This takes a step towards the “City of Bits” that Bill Mitchell talks about.

Future cities will be merged into real time connected up data cities.  A connection of networks of real time information flows as demonstrated in trials for Stanza’s earlier AHRC funded project (Sensity). The Third Space works impacts on how data flows overlap in live streams, demonstrating the possibilities for novel artistic experiences and technical outputs, including sonifications, visualizations, and sculptural objects.

Dewayne Hendricks says: “We’ve connected more people, but we haven’t connected more things yet;  we’re getting a convergence now, but what’s missing are the people that are advocates of this intelligent device stuff.”  The Third Space joins the dots and offers this vision thereby creating the potential for maximum impact.

The Third Space creates outputs that directly show how networks can be connected and data harvested for creative uses. In the last few years several cities have started to use motes sensors to create data spaces as test beds including Newcastle and soon Santander. The Third Space also impacts on Connected Environments, Smart Places, Smart Cities, Wireless Sensor Networks.

By using the standardized XML data streams that were developed  previously  to make the data / city available in the public domain. The aim is to improve this availability and connect up multiple data spaces (cities) to show the impact on our experience of the city, and thus create an ecosystem prototype. The data environment becomes a virtual data map of the real events.  What is demonstrated is that the collected data can be re-made reconstituted to be real again enabling physical objects to interpret the virtualised city data. The analogue is made digital and the digital can be re-formed into a variety of output devices.

One has to experiment with the technology and understand how to get under the bonnet, and then new  outcomes will shed light on how data flows overlap in live streams demonstrating what are the possibilities for novel artistic experiences and outputs as well as new business models which will benefit from sonifications, visualizations, and sculptural objects; as well as apps, and feedback into other networks and intergrated systems.

Image: Stanza. These are Our Children.

Problems inside the Emergent City

Can we use new technologies to imagine a world where we are liberated and empowered, where finally all of the technology becomes more than gimmick and starts to actually work for us or are these technologies going to control up, separate us, divide us, create more borders. Will the securitization of city space create digital borders that monitor our movement and charge us for our own micro movements inside the system?

The result will be used to test the main hypothysis which is I believe there is a new social space that exists in between these independent networks. What happens when future cities are merged into real time connected up data cities. The results created will lead mashed up cities and real time performative city experiences.  For example how can we  merge collected data from various real time cities to visualise this new space, the space where the cities overlap. This could allude to a new architectural and urban virtual space.

This might also allow for a greater community of interpreters and beneficiaries to see, and to come to their own understandings arising from this data about our socially-networked environment.  (as the data in this projects is open source via XML.

Will the securitization of city space create digital borders that monitor our movement and charge us for our own micro movements inside the system? Imagine walking out the door, and knowing every single action, movement, sound, micro movement, pulse, and thread of information is being tracked, monitored, stored, analyzed, interpreted and logged.

The conceptual ambition of the project is to answer this question.

The Mother Of Big Brother

Can we use new technologies to imagine a world where we are liberated and empowered, where finally all of the technology becomes more than gimmick and starts to actually work for us or are these technologies going to control up, separate us, divide us, create more borders. The world we will live in seems to be a much bigger brother than the Orwellian vision, it’s the mother of big brother.

Social Spaces.

Underpinning this research, are a whole series of potential problems about observation, surveillance, and the ethics of the control space.  By researching current surveillance systems, tracking software, and pattern recognition software one can  come to an understanding about the social and ethical implications of such technologies both in artworks as well as public domain space and to speculate where these technologies could lead us in the future.

By building my own art systems and tools using custom made software, I try to raise further questions about the ethics of the control space and surveillance space

Alongside this technology research I have focused on the aesthetic development of the systems outputs by investigating different ways to represent the data and different ways to question the meaning of the system.  

Cultural Contexts.

How we understand and value information is of great importance. It seems reasonable to suggest that visual metaphors might simplify our understanding of data in space. I want to make my work eternally current. It will allow a real time multiple perspective of an identified space.

Stanza 2010

 

 

 

 

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The Art of Environmental Data.

June 11th, 2012

The Art of Environmental Data.

An interview with Stanza via email for Jack Stewart studying at the Manchester School of Architecture operating under the umbrella of the Remap Unit, which focus upon mapping and data collection to expose the latent and invisible qualities of the city.

Stanza Sensors On Google Maps

The Art of Environmental Data.

1. The Sensity Projects aim to record data in the emerging city environment; how do you feel the use of such data could be useful for architects and designers in informing their designs?

This is an area seems to be springing into the mainstream, led I believe by the notion of “the internet of things” and the business spin off potential. It is surprising that urban designers and architects haven’t embraced this work more quickly or recognised that at the very least there is opportunity here to integrate the space around us using these novel ad hoc sensor technologies. Some engineering firms have and are looking into this like ARUP and obviously wireless sensing tech is now big business.  I have been trying for some time to get on board with an architect with the idea of doing something like Façade (see below)

Sensity and its sister projects have gone along way to not only illuminating possible uses but and to demonstrate multiple scenarios.

Anyway to be specific, other scenarios that could be questioned from the data sets include, noise monitoring across spatial environments and how this is affected by a real time input. More specifically focused sensors could give data that can lead to conclusions about what types of material are best suited for a site, or even a “consciousness” of the space, as well as all the bio chemical possibilities.

Most of these types of systems themselves can also be “building management systems”. The data can not only be adapted for security and monitoring the social welfare of the space can be nurtured; it could feed back into a system designed to self regulate depending on the variables and properties imposed.

 

2. How do you feel that Sensity and Soundcities re-innovate and enrich the urban systems we currently operate in?

This has to be taken as two questions because of the underlying structure and objectives of these two separate projects.

Sensity for sure allows us to see or at least make more tangible the invisible in the world around us. Sensity supports this premise by producing new information that is changing real time. This information is being also affected by out default interactions with the space and the environment. The Sensity project allows us to speculate on the city itself as a living breathing space with its own DNA that evolves and mutates. This metaphorical approach allows a freedom to speculate that the spaces we design are in fact emergent entities and that various properties and variables can be monitored; ie the stresses of the space and “emotional” conditions are what make a space enjoyable habitable or even dangerous. Sensity can up pick on this.

Soundcities, because it works in a different way addresses issues that I describe as being more of the modernist age. However as noise and sound involve field recording (we are also presenting the art of environmental monitoring). However now we are taking about the sound we literally hear as we walk out of the door. Not just as noise (data) or as noise pollution but also as an appreciation of sound and how this not only affects the space but is the space.

The noise is the city, the noise is the music, the city is the orchestra and we are just conductors whose interactive actions compose this music as we walk around. What Soundcities does is create an open source archive, a resource where better speculative questions could be addressed. The unique XML feed system also allows other to make user interactions both software and hardware that can control the sounds or to make spatialisation and sonfications of the environment based on the analogue recorded sounds.

Image (c) Stanza Datacity art. Data from across the city.

3. Why do you feel the recording of emergent or changing data of the city is important?

It was my research as an artist that has led me here from fixed object and linear works about the city and urban design (i.e. paintings drawing) I then made interactive systems and closed generative systems.

I concluded that the next model was to adopt and create a real time system. My feeling for this is primarily based on my inquiry into how to work with “time” itself. These works are not archived. In Sensity the data is not recording; the works, the experience, ever exists in the present. It’s that moment that I am interested in making more of. I want to somehow get inside the idea of present time.

This present tense we all share with one another in a very equal way does not discriminate. The present second as it shifts to the next is the moment that I want to understand. So the question is slightly skewed as there is no “recording” in the Sensity process (I have yet to build in an archival set of data results as I haven’t been funded to take this further and this would be most useful i.e. to study a space over a longer time.

This is why the research is needed. To answer the why question?

4. Soundcities takes similar concepts from your previous work, but provides a platform for anybody with access to the net to add to. Do you feel this has richer content and why?

The soundcities content is different. Instead of being data sets and numbers that relate to the environment in real time the soundcities takes snapshots of the environment as sound that is recorded then placed online. The interesting thing now is the project is opened up for others allowing a re mixing or mash up. It allows these “others” to do with the “material” other things for example concerts and art installations. Using the XML feed other applications are created ie phone apps merged with you PS position or visualisation of noise across a space…all sorts of things are possible.

5. If architects were to inform their designs through data from Soundcities do you think there would be a social exclusion issue for those without access to the internet and why?

I think the sensors in Sensity project would be better for this sort of thing. However the issue becomes about the network, borders of control, and issues to do with sharing and protection. In my view it will get really interesting when dozens of spaces and buildings all link up in virtual space.  To create what I term ”The Third Space”. (This was a funding proposal rejected by the AHRC and The tech Strategy Board.

I suggest there are over lapping areas of the city which can only be found online ie merged cities online Madrid, London Paris can overlap. I will go intio  more details.  below.

6.  How would you consider to further develop your projects

I have many ideas for this but no money as I am not funded.

However is a summary  of The Third Space. The project seeks via practise based research to create novel artistic interfaces using environmental data.  Outputs from the research include sonifications, visualizations, and sculptural objects.

This work focused on data as a medium for artistic creativity and how meaningful and well as poetic experiences of space / environments may result from quantitative analysis of the results. The aim is to speculate on new ways of comparing, conceptualizing and then visualizing environmental data and real space.

I  proposed in a recent interview for The Internet of Things Council  (http://tinyurl.com/3trotzq) that future cities will be merged into real time connected up data cities. Not just one space, but a connection of networks and of real time information flows. I am now interested in developing deeper research over three years to question how this shared dataspace can overlap,  creating a new space in between, which multiple nodes can share.

The methodology involves collecting data from sensor networks, disseminating the computer techniques developed, and making artistic prototypes. The aim here is to give tangible form to this new space, the space where the cities overlap, presenting an alternative urban virtual environment and creating new artworks and installations.

Within “The Third Space”, the initial focus is on the data sets of noise, pollution, light, and temperature. In other words the sensors will initially monitor urban environments.

To achieve this I will connect up multiple spaces (cities / environments) using motes sensors and this will be published online via XML feeds. These new online spaces will in turn lead to newly created online bespoke interfaces. I then aim to demonstrate that there is a new and unique online avatar where the data overlaps creating the Third Space. I will speculate how the flow of the data can be set to affect the behaviour of the output environment.

I would network at least three cities spaces in real time for this project using custom sensing technology. Initial outputs will include a musical system / interface powered by the merged data to create a real time sonification of the Third Space

 

7. What would you say are the challenges we face in further developing and integrating data collection like Sensity into the urban realm?

The questions I  pursue to answer this include:-

- How can this information be meaningfully represented to new audiences?

- How can this data be displayed (visualisation and sonifications) in new and original ways and do the results create new ways of understanding the environment?

- What are wider social implications of opening up real time networks; who owns this space and what are the ethical implications of real time information systems for artworks?

Underpinning this work, are a whole series of potential problems about observation, surveillance, and the ethics of the control space. I research current surveillance systems and wireless sensor networks to  come to an understanding about the social and ethical implications of such technologies both in artworks as well as public domain space.

By building my own art systems and tools, (which support my research questions); I also aim to raise further questions about the ethics of the control space and surveillance culture.

 

8. How do you feel that artworks such as your own could shape a ‘future city’?

Future cities will be merged into real time connected up data cities. I believe there is a new social space that exists in between independent virtual data networks, a new avatar space. The Third Space and the work I have done before have becomes  a series of  artistic prototypes that offer new insights into networked spaces.

9. All of your projects are open source; what is your reasoning for this decision?

I don’t like the term open source or but my work endeavours to collapse the borders created by networks so there is a free flow and exchange through the system both for input and outputs of ideas and latterly resources which I call assets (the data and the information.

10. How do you feel projects such as your own pave the way for empowering and liberating the city dweller?

The aim in my work is to develop a more socially engaged practise, to embed a deeper context based on critical reflection regarding notions of privacy, surveillance space, control space and meaning of newly created  real time spaces.

11. Your data visualizations are stunning; what do you feel the importance is for translating the data your gather into something people can visualize and understand?

The objectives is both to create new artistic experiences questioning the notion of realtime environments while using of data as a medium and delivering creative outputs.

And also create work that reflects upon issues of privacy, and surveillance space.

I think I would get sidetracked here but maybe I could just say the objective is to create a new way of seeing and the experiencing the space/ environment. work ls around us.

By doing it this was not only do we see how we affect the systems but and most important the use ie users (us the people) are by default embedded in the interactive and responsive process. In other words we become part of the work.

I am interested in making systems where by default the users are the work, the artwork. Its a feedback  loop, every actions we have has a reaction, every reaction causes change, this change happens over time and its reflected back in front of us either as the changing world we experience and now as art.

12.  How do you feel your projects impact the ownership of the spaces they are deployed in?

This question needs an essay in its own right and goes off in another direction that’s interested me for some time. I made called Public Domain where I tackled this question head on. Public Domain uses live CCTV across the city to extend space and invoke impressions of transparency with architectural space. . Public Domain is an experimental approach to ownership in information in networks. Instead of the linear tree like system with the one central viewer, all the cameras and views (resulting data) are given away and all the views can be seen online by all. The data is mixed into an online collage, using specially created software viewable by all.

http://www.stanza.co.uk/public_domain_outside/index.html

http://www.stanza.co.uk/publicdomain/index.html

Another work “Visitors to a Gallery- referential self, embedded” uses the live CCTV system inside an art gallery to create a responsive mediated architecture. This artwork is responsive to the body in the data space. The visitors act as an intervention in the gallery space and become embedded in the artwork.  The idea of using the information inside the space is also to make the space transparent and extend the gallery space outwards. The gallery space is also extended virtually onto the internet as the feeds from the installations images are broadcast live. The visitors to the gallery thus become embedded in the artwork and this permeates the larger system of data and information over the internet.

Stanza 2012

 

 

 

 

 


 

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In Search of a Digital Masterpiece (or Two): Stanza

May 31st, 2012

 

Abstract.

In Search of a Digital Masterpiece (or Two): Stanza

By Maria Chatzichristodoulou [aka Maria X]

This article (5000 WORD ESSAY ABOUT TO BE PUBLISHED) discusses Stanza’s artistic practice in relation to the ever-contested, severely loaded and perpetually evasive concept of the ‘masterpiece’ to ask: Are there any digital artworks that can be said to merit the title of a masterpiece? (Paul, 2011). And, can Stanza’s works be described as such?

Stanza is an internationally recognized, award winning digital artist, pioneer in his use of technology in the arts, who boasts a vast and diverse body of work that spans a range of practices, techniques and media: from prints, video and net art works, to interactive installations, responsive environments, generative art and complex digital ecosystems. The thematic strands, aesthetics, and affective impact of Stanza’s work have remained remarkably consistent over the years, dealing with issues such as urbanism, solitude and surveillance culture. His practice, nonetheless, has undergone significant shifts, moving from the creation of linear, object-based works such as prints and videos, to large-scale compositions of (a)live, open-ended, permeable, and unpredictable systems.

 

 

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Stanza: Can we use new technologies to imagine a world where we are liberated and empowered…

May 3rd, 2012

An interview between Stanza and Rob van Kranenburg of the Internet Of Things

RvK: Stanza, you were among the first internet artists. What would you say is the most important philosophical step (if we can think in terms of ‘progress’, or ‘going somewhere’) that you have taken in this period? “In the last twenty years there has been a significant shift in audio visual artists’ practise from linear expressions, to interactive (user controlled) mediations, to generative (evolving) and then network-based (real time) systems. Online, this space  also expands the whole notion of the artist’s studio.  My focus is on the things that change, the flow, the data that describes our experience of the city as space. Data from all sides in systems that can be mediated by all, with varying visualizations communicated over the internet and represented onto different display systems.

The Art of Gathering Environmental Data. Stanza Artwork. Live sensor data. 2010. Test Set Up and Projection for one hour Nov 2012 FACT Liverpool

There are many theoretical aspects to my work, but primarily I am a practice-based artist……in other words I make stuff.

My work has covered experiments in these areas and traced a shift in practise from modernist approaches of asset gathering (linear construction) to arrangements of datasets in fixed lists or databases (interactivity) to new approaches of mining information across networks in real time.( generative and real time systems)……culling data off CCTV networks, making visualizations of cities from my wireless sensor networks.”

RvK: How do feel about the current actualizations of the ‘in between’ space that you felt, saw or heard coming some time ago?

“I believe there is a new social space that exists in between these independent networks. Future cities will be merged into real time connected up data cities.  A connection of networks of real time information flows. The results created will lead mashed up cities and real time performative city experiences.  This conclusion although led from my earlier trails using wireless sensors in a project called Sensity.

I am interested in how this shared data space can overlap creating a new space in between which only two nodes or spaces share. For example in one of my artistic experiments I have  merged collected data from various real time cities to visualise this new space, the space where the cities overlap and which allude to a new architectural and urban virtual space. Uses of such information might allow rich new interpretative visualisations about the way our world is built, used, and designed.

The resulting artworks represent the real time conditions of the city.  Works like “Sensity”, create real time interpretations of social spaces that inform the world (online), and hopefully create new meaningful experiences allowing critical reflection on the real time city and the social political undercurrent embedded in the search for the real time city.

This might also allow for a greater community of interpreters and beneficiaries to see, and to come to their own understandings arising from this data about our socially-networked environment.  (as the data in these projects is open via XML)

Underpinning these artworks and research, are a whole series of potential problems about observation, surveillance, and the ethics of the control space.  Imagine walking out the door, and knowing every single action, movement, sound, micro movement, pulse, and thread of information is being tracked, monitored, stored, analyzed, interpreted and logged.

The world we will live in seems to be a much bigger brother than the Orwellian vision, it’s the mother of big brother.

Can we use new technologies to imagine a world where we are liberated and empowered, where finally all of the technology becomes more than gimmick and starts to actually work for us or are these technologies going to control up, separate us, divide us, create more borders. Will the securitization of city space create digital borders that monitor our movement and charge us for our own micro movements inside the system?”

RvK: The data is the medium, you state. Can you explain this a little bit?

“Just  that… the data is the medium of the age….”

RVK: Can you find connections to the FB generation? Do you want to?

“It has a useful API as do all these new big sites; however there are restrictions entering the domains and boundaries of others especially when they  try to cross over and get monitised.”

RvK: The key  (or one of the keys) is  the granularity of input for these ‘smart’ systems. How do you see this?

“Yes, small unit blocks, simplified then re built , re-cored re-formed into an understanding that can re-communicate the complexity of the larger system. Strip the city down and re- configure it as a real-time visualization and plug it into other cities.”

The art of gathering data Sesnors in the city

The art of gathering data. Sensors in the city

RvK: Your work is filled with wonder? Do you feel that this wonder is facilitated somehow in what is now termed Internet of Things?

“I have tried to encompass this “wonder” about real time connectivity and networked space  in my  latest three works, they are about the “internet of things”, but equally  they  are about real  time experiences of the environment and the spaces that change around us.”

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Issues In Science And Technology, Spring 2012.

April 13th, 2012

For those of you who know me well, you might find this quite funny. I was recently asked to for twelve images for a US based magazine who said they wanted to do a feature on Stanza. I thought why not, so I prepared the images 300 dpi for the editor as requested and sent them off. A couple of weeks later with a 44 dollar stamp they sent me four copies, very kind. (Most journalists don’t event bother)

Stanza Sensity

Stanza Sensity

Anyway its always nice to see your artworks in print over breakfast and they did look nice. Twelve images of “Sensity”, the live city data art project in the magazine Issues In Science And Technology, Spring 2012. However on first glance I couldn’t believe it they had used my images it seemingly to illustrate a text that wasn’t about me or by me. Off I steamed…. this editor needs an email.

Anyway before I  shot myself in the foot, I thought I better give it a read. The article is  on “Internet Freedom and Human Rights”,  just my thing, I wonder who wrote it……err Dear Hillary Rodman Clinton thanks for using my artworks in your essay…. …

I got another coffee together and gave it a proper read, it’s not bad actually.  “the more people online contributing ideas,  the more valuable the network becomes to all the other users”………

“If we are not careful, governments could upend the current Interent governance in a quest to increase their own control….”…The last point rather timely since the UK are about do just that.

Stanza Sensors On Google Maps

Stanza Sensors On Google Maps

(http://www.stanza.co.uk/sensity/index.html)

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The City Re-imagined. Residency at FACT.

March 11th, 2011

A series of artworks centered in Liverpool by Stanza from a residency at FACT. These artworks are about the city and how we react to the changing space around us. They are focused on our relationship to urban space and how by incorporating live data and CCTV images, different representations of Liverpool and as a living breathing entity can emerge. The works are provocations that relate to our hopes and aspirations for the spaces around us.

In these artworks I set out to explore public domain space in innovative ways following on from my first Ropewalks Square proposal to FACT(http://www.stanza.co.uk/portal/) and to make artworks exploring the use of live data CCTV in public space. The works are located between art, urbanism, and surveillance culture and they focus on the ethics and ownership of public spaces and how they are used.  The work includes ten interventions and artworks which  are all online (see below). I have tried to create narratives that demonstrate innovation and ethics of space and in several projects used an audience or local people to be involved in the works.

Included in the body of artwork are sensors that monitors spaces for environmental change. Another artwork proposes to extend the building at FACT virtually by projecting CCTV into Ropewalks Square and across the city. Another is a spy frog that talks, and a series of new public squares have been made across the city with minimal aesthetic were one can go to contemplate just what is going on.

These projects like are like seeds. They have been planted and now they need watering.

I hope you enjoy the work.

Public Domain: Series III.

Stanza Artwork Live CCTV

Stanza Artwork Live CCTV

Live CCTV across the city. Continuing the series of investigations into the uses of CCTV to extend space and invoke impressions of transparency with architectural space. Here to extend the architecture of the building and extend it into the city. The artwork includes the performative aspect of those being watched as can be displayed inside the work. http://www.stanza.co.uk/CCTV_publicdomain/index.html

We have nothing to hide only to loose.

Stanza Artwork

Stanza Artwork

A performative piece using CCTV systems. The CCTV follows the artist around the building in the depths of the night and the result is projected outside in the city. http://www.stanza.co.uk/CCTV_performance/index.htm

Regeneration Squares.

Stanza Artwork

Stanza Artwork

http://www.stanza.co.uk/stanza_regeneration/index.html

Re-animating and remapping the city. This project involves making new public squares in the city to make a regeneration of the city. Here area selection of these new squares in Liverpool. In addition I invite the public to find these squares and present situations to intervene and to regenerate these new public spaces.

Fortuna.

Stanza Artwork

Stanza Artwork

http://www.stanza.co.uk/sisyphus/index.html

This is an online artwork using images from across the city, representing the struggle for change. The street was known as the Bond Street of the North, it was in the past a toll road. The working classes would go to work under the road in tunnels and enter via back doors of the expensive shops; never to be seen by the rich, thus kept separate. The city has a new “Bond Street” the L1 area. It is a cathedral of commerce separate from the issues that exist everywhere else in the city.

Binary Graffiti Club.

Stanza Artwork

Stanza Artwork 2010

http://www.stanza.co.uk/binary_club/index.html

Inspiring young people to see the city as canvas to create change. This is a selection of images that represents the hopes and aspirations of young people set in various contexts in especially made binary hoodies.

Data data data

stanza Artwork. Live sensor data. 2010

Stanza Artwork. Live sensor data. 2010

http://www.stanza.co.uk/data/index.html

A live projection of environmental changes. Sensors scattered over the building respond to changes in space in real time. They are turned into an event space projected into ropewalks square. This artwork is networked, its real time, and its takes data from a wireless sensor network that is placed in the real space.

Mental Memes.

Stanza Artwork. 2010

Stanza Artwork. 2010

http://www.stanza.co.uk/mental_memes/index.html

The idea is to create a visual regeneration with the mind. I want to use space and time at a football match for an artistic intervention. The idea is to see the mind as a public domain space for this intervention; and to make an artwork using this space.  This project is about giving some time back to a collective entity, a visualisation for a common good to empower the space around us. In this case the city. It might be a simple mind map or it could be a complex linking of all the heartbeats of the audience.

Soundcities

Stanza Artwork. 2010

Stanza Artwork. 2010

http://www.stanza.co.uk/soundcities_liverpool/index.html

From the first UK soundmap project, here are 200 sounds from all over Liverpool, Gathering assets for mediated visualisations across Liverpool. (http://www.soundcities.com/)

an online artwork using images from across the city, representing the struggle for change.

Spy

Stanza Artwork. 2010

Stanza Artwork. 2010

http://www.stanza.co.uk/frogs/index.html

Robotic sculpture frogs see people and tell them what to do. The programmed frogs can talk and as you walk passed them they tell you what they think.

In God We Trust.

Stanza Artwork. 2010

Stanza Artwork. 2010

http://www.stanza.co.uk/ingodwetrust/index.html

The idea was to collect data in the house of god to monitors His presence. Sensing God with environmental monitors. The data is turned into sounds and visuals. ie a sonification of God space and a visualization thus questioning our belief systems.

Portal.

http://www.stanza.co.uk/ropewalks%20square/index.html

A proposal to cover Ropewalks and to create a unique arcade. Moving away from old metaphors of Liverpool’s imperial history, to create a newer global image, digital and creative, a vibrant risk taking culture that is  independent, free thinking and global.

All artwork Stanza. 2010

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Posted in cctv, city, data, display, emergent city, installation, links, realtime, references, technology

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Government defeat on DNA database

November 5th, 2008

The government has been defeated in the House of Lords over the issue of keeping peoples’ DNA and fingerprints on the police national database.

The UK has the largest police DNA database in the world – with more than four million people on file.
“If the government wants a universal DNA database it should say so, not smuggle one in through the backdoor,” Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said.

Ministers believe such guidelines could hinder their plans for a counter-terrorist database as releasing details of material obtained covertly, through surveillance, could be dangerous.

The government says such a database is vital for public protection but opposition MPs have criticised the step as “Orwellian”.

Who runs the database?

A department in the Home Office is responsible for the day-to-day running and its work is overseen by a board composed of the Home Office, the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Association of Police Authorities.

Can children be included?

Yes but there are no legal powers to take a DNA sample from anyone under 10 without the consent of a parent or legal guardian.

Under-18s also make up nearly a quarter of all arrests so the Home Office says a “comparative proportion” of profiles is to be expected.

references

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7532856.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7710310.stm

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