Yolande Harris / Taking Soundings: kristina's short notes

some notes from descriptions of installations:
a gps receiver is fixed in space yet the signal keeps changing. reading a satellite is a mobile situation. you are inferring your position from a moving object. the stationary gps device thinks it is moving and it infers the direction it is supposedly moving in. it is traveling through an imaginary space of position error.

using a gps is believing you know where you are and getting lost. this data is changing our relation to the landscape. it gives us a sense of false security. how do we understand where we are? you, as a person, is mobile and the gps data infers that static objects like buildings are also mobile.

what does the word mobile actually mean? is the entire system actually floating?

the history of astronomy is the beginning of navigation: positions is derived through the the comparing of spinning motions. satellites spinning in orbit are part of this navigational system and through gps reflects back on us its data and inaccuracies.

coastal navigation: the sextant and the chronometer allows you to work out where you are. you can determine your height above and below equator. the light house declaring its identity through different flashing sequences.

images of tracing along the coast of brittany. the moving tract of a boat on anchor. the anchor point is somewhere in the center of the trace. google earth taking pictures as events passed. the pull of the wind on a windy day. all this data is translated into sound. the sea disrupts your sense of balance...

asking the strawberry seller for directions.

Isabella van Elferen, Imar de Vries / Floating Fabulousness:

Isabella van Elferen, Imar de Vries / Floating Fabulousness: Representation, Performativity and Identity in Musical Ringtones
Originally uploaded by mobilemusicworkshop.

The Compass - Frauke's notes from the presentation

These notes mainly focus on Atau's previous projects, for more detail regarding the Compass, please refer to the proceedings that will be online soon. Over the last years Atau has been aiming to replace sensors with mobile phones in his work to enable participants to cruise around in urban environment and use the mobile phone as interface for music.

Malleable Mobile Music was presented at the first mobile music workshop edition in 2004. It draws on both social and geographical context awareness: personal geographical context of user and community context of the group. The project was a demo focussing on thinking about music. Listening and playing becomes mixed up and it was key that also non-musican players would enjoy it.

In 2006 he developed a new project in collaboration with Petra Gemeinbroek, called net_derive. This project is using real mobiles and real gps, has been exhibited at a Sony exhibition in 2006, 50 people experienced it, 4 at a time and the project is documented in the NIME 2006 proceedings. The device is a white scarf wearable computing object. The artists needed three mobile phones to make it work, all housed in the scarf. net_derive explores the tension between the urban environment and the gallery space as a dynamic of group walking around in town is connected to the gallery space.

In general, one of the main problems while developing mobile music projects are the highly controlled networks, very different to developing for the Internet.

The Compass is the most recent project by Atau Tanaka, in collaboration with Guillaume Valadon and Christophe Berger. One possible scenario of use is geotaging songs and compass will point you in that direction. This project is using contacts form the address book as oposed to working with strangers in large public space. Compass is building a social network from the address books of various phones and retrieving the geographic location of friends. The compass server can store locations, friends and audio and connect them in various ways. For example, the mobile phone is pointing you in the direction of a friend, once you are in close proximity the playlist of the friend is retrieved via Wifi, and next, a selected song is retrieved via wifi as well.

we-make-money-not-art link: tratti

regine's post on tratti.

frauke's notes: Martin Pichlmair 'TRATTI'

Martin and Laura have been collaborating on the seven mile boots (http://randomseed.org/sevenmileboots/)
He is presenting some background of the use of bull horns as political device and of the musical and artistic use of the devices, starting with the Futurists who used the bullhorn as icon to work against the musical establishment. One other early project worked worked with compressed air and was one of the loudest music devices ever invented until then.It was hooked up to several instruments, like a bass, to amplify the sound of the instrument. In other artistic examples the bull horn is often more important as statement than as amplification device.
More recent examples of using bull horns in art and music include:
- Benoit maubrey pieces
- 'exploded monologues' by troika from London (microphones in gas mask, controler sets direction of speakers)
- 'tool for armchair activists' by troika, (that was done before the introduction of speaking cctv)
- remote controlled car playing he sample with little bull horn
- acoustic space gun by Mark Bain

In Tratti (means funnel in Finnish) the sound of a mobile phone is amplified by horn speaker. Michael classifies the projects as device art, where the picking of the physical material and playfulness are key elements. Depending on the colour the mobile phone camera is picking up the following audio operations are executed: record, silence, faster, reverse.

The authors stress that working with a mobile phone is often fighting against the device for the developer and proprietary hard- software was slowing down the development a lot. Martin talked about some aspects of the mobile phone and mobile phone culture that are addressed in the piece, the talking and the listening: people are talking everywhere and you are frequently forced to overhear conversations of strangers. Tratti makes two key aspects of mobile phone visible: the speakers and camera are enlarged.

Future plans include a collaborative version where different Trattis can exchange sounds by facing each other, to exchange by joining up beelies.

In the discussion, the focus was on children, problems of development and health issues:
- One discussant was asking for more art for kids on media art festivals, as thay are now growing up with technology, e.g. mobile phones. Kristina suggesting to include kids in the process of designing interaction. One idea for evaluating this type of projects is not to tell the testers the rules. often leading to the kids finding interesting grey areas and they know what is fun and what is boring.
- The technical part of the discussion revolved around the various problems of developing for mobile phones. Gum stick is proposed as alternative platform to solve something of the technical problems.
- Another issue arising are the health issues of mobile phones, especially as children are using it. For Tratti the phones are in offline mode, so this is not an issue.
- Finally, Kristina suggests that the mobile phone has become a device with an identity crisis as it is not optimised to do anything in particular anymore, but rather does a lot of things unsatisfactory.