In C for Open Road

I always knew I wouldn’t be able to realise my full-blown ideas for a locative media version of In C whilst I was in Banff this November: there just wasn’t time to organise the tech, the musicians, the recording and the power issues.

Still, not one to be put off by technicalities, I set off for a walk and a low-tech version. In C for musicians, speakers, GPS and open road.

Armed with a map and some chalk I walked along a road that had been closed to vehicles for the Winter. Taking each of the motifs in turn, I walked until what felt like the appropriate moment to pause and draw the music onto the road’s surface.

I’m not sure how long I walked for or how far I travelled, only that I got up to the 17th motif before my chalk ran out. This, I decided, was the end point for the piece.

Only not quite.

My minor obsession with In C is tied up in with chance meetings, interactions and collaborations with various people outside the group directly involved with the residency I was on and, as such, somehow really underlines the true value of residencies such as these. I still had 4 more sticks of chalk (kindly donated by Laura, thankyou!) and decided that rather than continuing in a different colour, I should open things up to further collaboration from other people.

A kit containing instructions, the remaining chalk, the score for In C and a map was passed on to Dohi Moon – one of the In C musicians from the concert – for interpretation and, perhaps, adding another layer of chalk to the road.

I’m not sure what happens next, I just wanted to give it back.

update: Dohi Moon has posted a photo of her interpretation.

the trouble with…

The trouble with… from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

In C for musicians, speakers, GPS and open road

Visual references for this and this.

Call for contexts

Artist seeks context (real or imaginary) suitable for the application of digital hobo signs.

We’ve a partially-developed prototype for a GPS-based system for ‘tagging’ physical space with digital media (photo, text, audio, video…) with a mobile phone.

We’re trying to think of contexts to test this system against, so that we can refine the user interface and fill in the details.

The process goes something like this:

• 1st person goes to the location they want to comment on
• 1st person records their media at the location
• 1st person sends media to the server
• Phone also sends GPS co-ordinates
• 2nd person, at home, sees location (but not media) marked on map
• 2nd person goes to location
• 2nd person views media on their phone
• 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th persons plus friends work towards common goal.

Any suggestions?

edges

Yesterday was spent making a start on defining the territory for a mscape project I’m working on.

A few hours walking around the campus looking for hazards, natural boundaries and tempting trails to follow away from the main path. Eyes mostly on the landscape, but also having to pay attention to the varying behaviour of the GPS signal in different locations.

Click on the image below for a larger version:

using Google Earth to locate a map for use in mscape

A run through of how I did it today; so I can remember it for another time….

Grab a map

In this case a campus map in the form of a .pdf

This will then need converting into a file format that Google Earth can accept (.jpg, .tiff, .png, .gif etc). Whilst I was in Photoshop I also rotated the image so that North was orientated towards the top:

Locate it

Open up Google Earth (available for free from here: http://earth.google.com/) and navigate to the area your map corresponds to.

Double-check your settings for latitude and longitude values are set to decimal degrees. (Tools > options…. )

Overlay your image. (Add > Image Overlay) You’ll also need to reduce the opacity so you can make out landmarks from the photo below the image.

You can then position your map in the correct place. (More information about image overlays and resizing/moving/rotating are available on this Google help page.)

Once you have positioned your map you need to get the longitude and latitude values for at least three of the map’s corners (this is why it helps not to be using a map with a transparent background!).

Set a placemark at the map corners. You may find this easier if you first change the marker to a cross-hair rather than a pin.

Right click (or equivalent on your operating system) on either the pin on the map or the pin name in the places side-panel to get to the properties window.

You can either repeat this for each of your corner pins and write down the latitude and longitude values given, or you can leave this window open and copy and paste the values over in just a minute…

Import into mscape

Open up your mscape file (or start a new one if you need to) and then click on the import map button at the top.
Create New Map > next > Type them in by hand > next > browse to your file > next > select lat/long and make sure you have WGS_84 as the datum type.

In the following window you can then enter the values you got from Google Earth.

Save you map as a .maplib file and then import it to your project.

Testing it out

Next, if you follow these instructions for how to set your mscape to log your GPS trace, you can then check your map positioning (and the GPS accuracy) to check things are as they should be.

…then you’ve just got to make the rest of your mscape…

the nature of stuff

Yesterday was a day of presentations with artists and peer advisors giving short introductions to their practice and Almost Perfect projects. Today were the technical interviews and some sessions on GPS led by Daniel Belasco Rogers.

After talking the talk we headed out into the snow with some GPS units to map the Banff Centre campus.

This included experimenting with some of the quirks and short-comings of the technology and then comparing tracks by superimposing the data onto Google Earth.

I’ve just got back from the canteen and a wide-ranging conversation from which I have distilled this diagram as a memento:

And now to the pub and the election results…