A tool to prototype european cities
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‘Euro Metropolitan Views’ is an extension of the art project ‘Dunkirk Views’. The project is build upon the idea of creating a city-portrait, starting from a subjective city-analysis, where audiovisual, personal documents and city-archives would be brought together. Using satellite-navigation and video, Larbitslab started some experiments about the relations between the individual, society, city-surroundings and image-building. These experiments moved fast to an image-building of the city starting from geolocalisation in stead of pure audiovisual data. In this system, the digital fixation of city routes – or digital tracks – with mobile phone is replacing the eye of the camera as the observation-platform. In this way, one creates possibilities for the daily or frequent routes of the individual citizen, including his daily travels in the city.
The collection of these different digital tracks creates new, alternative city-maps, on which a hidden or undiscovered organic city-pattern emerges. In this way, the geographical city-map gets a subjective frame which gives a meaning or a view on the city-fabric. The intention of this project is trying to elaborate the contemporary understanding of the city from an artistic view and to question these realities with the input of mobile applications.
Description
Euro Metropolitan Views (EMV) has the intention to develop a mobile application that – by recording data stored on smartphones or other datacarriers – records a number of movement patterns (digital tracks). Specific, the project aims to capture – in a playful, but critical way – the virtual structure of the European city, using data collected with a smartphone, provided with customized software for navigation and sensors for the measurement of speed, light, temperature, sound and heart rate. In this vision the smartphone is transformed into a measurement-tool. The mathematical reflection of the relationships and interactions that are registrated during the process of user registration, forms the starting point for narrative storylines for a system of self-publishing.
The intention of the project is to confront the user, in situ – from his daily experience – with a changing situation of the urban experience and its possible implications for the behaviour, but also to scan this environment for values and norms: involving him as a participant in the phenomenon.
Method
The application is based on a client server architecture and a wireless network.
Smartphone = measurement-tool
By activating the app, the user changes the smartphone in a measurement-tool. This gives the device the ability to track all numerical records that the user during his travels deliberately or unconscious leaves behind. This data are the raw content and will subsequently being used for processing and analysis.
Server: CMS + self publishing system
A content management system equipped with an indexing system will process the collected data. The tracks are dissected in different layers. Each layer visualizes a particular aspect of the process. Together they form the hub of the self-publishing software: they are cut up and re-compiled from a number of correlations found.
Smartphone = visualization and/or projection tool
The standard touchscreen smartphone will initially serve as an interface. The intention is to develop a customized display for visualization and use of data in urban contexts. Further research will look for the projection capabilities of a smartphone with built-in pico projector, combined with gesture recognition for interaction. The aim is to design a user interface, which is using from the outset the public space as a platform for communication and visualization. Ongoing.
