Ongoing discussion regarding "Taggin' Tallinn" · 25 October 06 by Ray Crowley
Our MSc group are currently working on a concept design for a project that would incorporate the following elements: establishing a target community, developing the front, back and soft infrastructure for image capture of the cityspace using mobile phones. (i.e. user takes image from cityspace via mobile and uploads to web via mms with metadata including locative data and descriptive tags). The idea of promoting the project to the “tourist community” was muted. Here are my thoughts on targeting tourists as the primary contributors and audience and an alternative suggestion:
I believe the project concept and the consequences of its execution should undergo further analysis and debate.
Elements to consider;
*Are we developing a framework for social surveillance which is at once privatized, distributed and unaccountable?
*Might the project serve to reinforce socio-cultural exclusion (both cost and access barriers etc) Who can participate? Would the project users creators or network consumers (vanity publishers if you like)?
*Might it be essentially voyeuristic – couldn’t a potential visitor develop his/her own relationship with the cityspace by the physical act of walking (c.f Baudelaire’s ‘Le Flaneur’) instead of peeking at the ‘juicy bits’?
*Will the project contribute to the spectaclization of the city (c.f Guy Debord – Society of Spectacle)?
*Would content be moderated? If so what criteria might apply? Might images of people be acceptable? Whose representation of the cityspace might it be?
*Will the project have a legacy? And in colder economic terms; what is the return on investment, is it self-sustaining?
Are there other possibilities?
For example; going out to a community on the outer suburbs of Tallinn, hold a meeting with community leaders, assemble 30 people from all ages and backgrounds to become core contributors, create a webpresence and show some people how to upload and edit, distribute some digital cameras and allow these people to document their lives, hopes, memories, fears and fun over the course of three months in text, sound and image.
The legacy of a project like this could be far reaching indeed with respect to the social, educational and entrepreneurial aspects.
Taggin’ in the graffiti sense of the word is about place, identity, ownership even.
Should we really be empowering weekend tourists to ‘Tag’ Tallinn?
Update 01/12/2006
Rob Shields in conversation with Andres Kurg on Tallinn as an Urban Space:
“I’m fearful about the fate of the people of Tallinn. And there are many Tallinns, the world over. The city is beautiful and more splendidly renovated every day. It is a good case study which should be researched because it raises so many questions. Is it possible to avoid commodifying the urban quality of life when a city such as Tallinn is transformed into a tourist magnet? This would mean a type of Disneyfication of the life of citizens. Should the city centre heritage area be dedicated entirely to tourists and a “real city” be built in the suburbs for citizens? Or is it possible to strike a balance between citizens and tourists’ interests? For other cultures, Tallinn will be understood in a different way than local inhabitants understand and live it. Research shows that this usually implies a struggle as, for example, entrepreneurs adapt and “redecorate” the city to match up to the expectations of foreign tourists. To balance this development equation it is essential to transcend tourism by developing another cultural industry or even another sector. Ideally this would complement the tourist spatialization (and temporalization) of Tallinn as an “ancient walled city” (to cite the stereotype) by creating new representations and respatializing Tallinn as, for example, a Baltic centre for cultural production (Multimedia? Drama? Film? Music?) drawing on but not fixated by its past or its beauty. The complexity of this can be seen when one considers that this task must be undertaken in relation to the spatialization of surrounding places – Helsinki, St. Petersburg, Estonia and the Baltic as a whole). A collaborative effort is in order.
“Should one be happy? The tourists are, workers in Disneyland may be, but will citizens in Tallinn be inspired, enthused and energized by the city in which they live? That is the question: will their city be a good urban place for now and for the future, not just a historical city for tourism?”
Rob Shields: Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University, Ottawa where he is also cross-appointed in Geography and Environmental Studies. His intellectual project on social spaces has been developed in a number of books including The Virtual, Places on the Margin, Lefebvre – Love and Struggle, and extended through founding the journal Space and Culture.
Andres Kurg: born 1975, is an architectural historian. Graduated in 1998 from the Estonian Academy of Arts; 2000 – 2001 MSc at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London. He has written architectural criticism and curated exhibitions and currently works in the Estonian Academy of Arts.
tags: mobile, project, space, tallinn, urban
T*Int (Textspace In Not Txtspace) or The Death of the Author · 25 October 06 by Ray Crowley
here is the preface to my most recent assignment paper which utilizes TagCrowd The deliverable envisioned is part interactive audio-visual installation, part Beckett performance with a bit of deconstructionism thrown in for fun.
To Dr. Tapio Takala, Helsinki University of Technology
The subtitle is in homage to Roland Barthes who was commissioned by the artist and writer Patrick Ireland (formerly known as Brian O’Doherty) to write his hugely influential post-structuralist essay “Death of the Author” for ‘Aspen Magazine 5+6’ (1967).
This edition of the magazine also included original contributions by Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, Michel Butor, Morton Feldman, Dan Graham, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Hans Richter, Robert Rauschenberg, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Susan Sontag.
I engaged many times with the texts, images and sounds of ‘Aspen Magazine 5+6’ over the course of the hot summer of 2006 as there was a retrospective of the work of Patrick Ireland at The Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. I lived a stones throw away from the gallery and had quit my corporate job.
This paper is dedicated to my dear friend, Gearóid Ó Colmáin. Go raibh maith agat mo chara.
TagCloud The Unnamable · 24 October 06 by Ray Crowley
Recently I came across a great project called TagCrowd by Standford Researcher Daniel Steinbock . I like tags, I like lexical analysis so I love this. Enter up to 100kb of text for lexical frequency analysis and hey presto there you go a beautiful TagCloud (published under a Creative Commons License).
Below are the results of the application applied to Samuel Beckett’s novel The Unnamable
T*int · 17 October 06 by Ray Crowley
I am currently working on the design of an augmented reality project. ‘Textspace’ seems to have been used for a couple of things so I am calling this project T*int (Textspace Is Not Textspace).
Essentially this will be toolset which could be deployed for no other purpose than the following artistic goal: to blur to boundaries between the discrete linguistic acts of reading|writing listening|speaking. This defamiliarization of our core linguistic competencies may lead to greater self awareness in the actants.
Here are some early design scribbles:
??The graphic environment would be purely vector text based.3d audio
processing and transmission is critical to the immersive experience. The complex element in this environment is a linguistic processor required to recognize wordstress, intonation, tone (such as sarcasm etc), class etc. Scenarios: two users in an room with 3d sound system (not collocated). Users wear head mounted displays.
This has lead me to carry out an overview of speech recognition parsing engines. Seems my original concept was a slightly ambitious :)
So now the immersive experience will be based on pre-parsed texts (extracts from Beckett, Joyce, a poem by Ginsberg, a newspaper article). Accordingly it will be primary a passive experience with the potential for basic user commands rather than half-duplex near real-time dialogue between two human users. The work continues..
this has provided a good spring board into the depths of langauge processing:
tags: beckett, hci, linguistics, project, vr