On cities, mapping, psychogeography and the experience of places.

mappiness is a research project created by George MacKerron and Susana Mourato of the Department of Geography & Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), designed to gain a better understanding of how people’s feelings are affected by features of their current environment—things like air pollution, noise, and green spaces.

To that end, a free iPhone app has been developed, regularly pinging its users to ask them how they’re feeling, as well as a few other things: who they are with, where they are, what they are doing. The anonymous data gets sent back to a server, along with the user’s approximate location from the iPhone’s GPS, and a noise-level measure.

The project being in its early stages, the map displayed on the website doesn’t really give an acurate picture of the spread of happiness in the country – a huge proportion of respondants being in situated in London! – though interestingly the real-time hedonimeter shows that London people are slightly happier than the rest of the UK. I’m pretty sure this could easily be challenged, but I’ll leave that to the academic paper that will come out of the survey…

http://www.mappiness.org.uk/

This map shows all trains (yellow pins) on the London Underground network in approximately real time.

Fetching live departure data from the TfL API, and placing it onto a Google map, this live map project was realised in only a short amount of time at Science Hackday on 19/20th June 2010. A small number of stations are misplaced or missing; occasional trains behave oddly…; some H&C and Circle stations are missing in the TfL feed.

The author of the project is Matthew Somerville (with helpful hinderances from Frances Berriman and James Aylett). Station icon by Tim Diggins. Source code.

http://traintimes.org.uk:81/map/tube/

Today sees the public release of Mapumental, a ground-breaking map-generator tool that helps you to work out the optimal place to live or work in order to have an easy commute and an affordable home.

Through a highly intuitive interface, you can highlight parts of a map that match your ideal criteria of averaged commuting time, house prices and ’scenicness’ (whatever that might mean!).

After I generated my own little map and customised it, I came to three conclusions:

• Public transport in London is a nightmare
• You can’t be too demanding about where you want to live, according to that ’scenicness’ index…
• You have to be bloody rich!

Mapumental is a project by Channel 4 and mySociety.

http://mapumental.channel4.com/

Exposition & Conférences / Exhibition & Conferences

Vernissage ce Jeudi 12 à 18h00 avec conférences de Geert Lovink et Florian Schneider dès 19h00
Opening on Thursday 12, 18:00 with Geert Lovink and Florian Schneider’s lectures at 19:00

Stock Overflow est une opération proposée par RYBN pour recontextualiser la crise et les stratégies politiques et médiatiques qui l’accompagnent, autour des thèmes de la catastrophe, de l’instabilité structurelle et des mythologies des marchés.

Stock Overflow is an operation proposed by RYBN to recontextualize the crisis, its mediatic and politic strategies, on the topics of disaster, structural instability and financial markets mythologies.

WITH / AVEC
RYBN, Geert Lovink (net activist and theoretician), Florian Schneider (writer, filmmaker, net activist), Brian Holmes (art critic), Late S. Horace Lawson-Hetchely (information systems consulting), Société Réaliste (artists), Bertrand Charles (journalist specialized in business intelligence).

EXHIBITION / EXPOSITION

ANTIDATAMINING, RYBN 2006-2009

http://www.antidatamining.net

Antidatamining est une série de représentations visuelles des données financières qui transitent sur internet. L’économie contemporaine y est incarnée par ses principaux acteurs – entreprises, place boursières, banques et fonds d’investissement, grands groupes – et par leurs interactions : liens capitalistiques entre les acteurs économiques, déploiements géographiques, articulation autour des places de marchés. Au-delà de la crise actuelle, de sa médiatisation et des leviers politiques qu’elle génère, Antidatamining est un dispositif de veille permanente qui tente de mettre en évidence la structure de l’économie mondiale, envisagée comme un système dynamique complexe.

Antidatamining is a series of visualizations of financial data extracted from the web. Economy is represented by its main agents – companies, groups and holdings, stock exchanges, banks and investment funds – and their interactions : capital relationships, geographic deployments, structuralization on market places. Beyond the current crisis, its mediatic and polictic levers, Antidatamining is a permanent monitoring device, which aims to highlight the structure of the contemporary economy, seen as a complex dynamic system.

CONFERENCES

GEERT LOVINK & FLORIAN SCHNEIDER
Net activism and tactical medias / Médias tactiques et net-activisme
Thursday 12 march – 19h / jeudi 12 mars – 19:00
(in english)

RYBN & HORACE LATE LAWSON
Financial Information systems / Systèmes d’informations financiers
Friday 20 march – 20h / vendredi 20 mars – 20:00

BRIAN HOLMES
Ecological domination of financial capitalism / Domination écologique du capitalisme financier
Wednesday 25 march – 19h / mercredi 25 mars – 19:00

SOCIETE RÉALISTE & BERTRAND CHARLES
Economics subversion / Détournement économique
Friday 27 march – 20h / vendredi 27 mars – 20:00

conferences streaming on
http://giss.tv:8000/iMAL_live.ogg
http://giss.tv/interface/?mp=iMAL_live.ogg

INFO

Opening Hours: Wednesday -> Sunday 14:00 – 19:00
Heures d’ouverture: Mercredi -> Dimanche 14:00 – 19:0
Vernissage Expo: jeudi 12 mars – 18:00 / Exhibition Opening: Thursday 12 march – 18:00
FEES/TARIFS : EXHIBITION/EXPOSITION 3 Euros, CONFERENCES free/gratuit

Avec le soutien de / With the support of : iMAL, Cimatics and Predict-market.biz leader in the field of financial prediction analysis.

More on/ Plus d’infos sur: http://www.imal.org/StockOverflow

Jeremy Wood, The World's biggest 'IF'

Last week-end saw one the busiest day at the Kinetica Artfair in London, featuring over 150 exhibiting artists working at the cross-roads of sound / light art, computer art and interactive sculpture, and an extensive programme of related talks. One of them was given by Jeremy Wood, whose work I saw for the first time last year in the V&A Mapping the imagination exhibition. Wood had been working with GPS technology for over 8 years, and started from a disconcertingly simple idea: he noticed the aesthetic qualities of the paths formed on a map by geo-tagged photographs taken during a flight from Berlin to London. From there he has pushed the practice of flying, driving, cycling, walking (and even dog-walking) with a GPS attached, expecting some meaningful shape or pattern to emerge.
It’s interesting to note that while some of this ‘always-on’ recording process may be totally random (and pretty similar to Dan Belasco Rogers‘ work), Wood has also taken a keen interest in plotting routes to achieve a specific – and often funny – purpose (e.g. writing the world’s biggest ‘IF’, or drawing a ship sailing on the shoreline by cycling around the streets of Brighton – amusingly dropping its anchor where it had the most space to draw it in all details: in a park).

Jeremy Wood, Brighton Boat

I would describe Wood’s practice as negotiating around the possibilities offered by space to enable a drawing to take place, diverting and using wearable GPS technology as a mark-making tool. Initially a method for the military to record spatial activity, the technology has also become in the hands of Wood an ‘alibi’ to find out what’s going on where – a reminder of Situationist strategies for the Dérive (He has applied psychogeographic principles to a few drawings). In a different strand of works, he also explored the assumed precision level of GPS and has interrogated how accurate and reliable the technology actually is.
His work has obvious parallels with art movements of the last century: GPS drawings by animals echo the surrealists’ use of snails to paint. The special relationship to the territory established through walking as a creative act is also found in the work of many land artists, including Richard Long and the Stalker collective.
I was curious to figure out how much importance real-time feedback takes in this kind of work – I guess a lot of the fun is about experiencing it for yourself. Good, because Wood actually happens to run regular GPS drawing workshops with schools, local authorities and art galleries.

http://gpsdrawing.com/

http://turbulence.org/works/garden

[meme.garden] is an Internet service that blends software art and search tool to visualize participants’ interests in prevalent streams of information, encouraging browsing and interaction between users in real time, through time. Utilizing the WordNet lexical reference system from Princeton University, [meme.garden] introduces concepts of temporality, space, and empathy into a network-oriented search tool. Participants search for words which expand contextually through the use of a lexical database. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into floating synonym “seeds,” each representing one underlying lexical concept. When participants “plant” their interests, each becomes a tree that “grows” over time. Each organism’s leaves are linked to related streaming RSS feeds, and by interacting with their own and other participants’ trees, participants create a contextual timescape in which interests can be seen growing and changing within an environment that endures.

The [meme.garden] software was created by an eclectic team of artists and scientists: Mary Flanagan, Daniel Howe, Chris Egert, Junming Mei, and Kay Chang.

[meme.garden] is a 2005 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from the Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support from the PSC-CUNY research fund.