The Mobile City

Category: Blog

  • Joseph Pine at Mobile Monday Amsterdam

    Foto source Last Monday Jan. 21 I attended the 4th meeting of the Dutch Mobile Monday branch in Amsterdam. The turnout was huge: an estimated 300+ people gathered in De Rode Hoed. The meeting was well-organized, the crowd mixed, and the atmosphere friendly. The topic of the day was Location – LBS – GPS –…

  • Conference announcement: Space-Interaction-Discourse 12-14 Nov. 2008 Aalborg, Denmark

    http://www.placeme.hum.aau.dk/conf2008/ The aim of this international conference to be held in Aalborg, Denmark from 12th – 14th November 2008 is to bring together researchers who investigate space, mediated discourse and embodied interaction from different perspectives. The conference will highlight interdisciplinary research that explores how embodied and virtual social actors communicate, interact and coordinate their activities…

  • Mediacity conference @ Weimar: the design of urban situations

    Last weekend I visited the Media City Conference organized by the Bauhaus University in Weimar. One of the main themes of the conference was the concept of ‘situations’, or ‘the settings in which people interact’, as formulated by Jens Geelhaar. This concept was probably best illustrated by a photo that Mediacity-fellow Katharine Willis showed of…

  • TV glasses – watching video in private

    Picturephoning has a very brief entry about one of the new gizmos presented in Las Vegas, about which Martijn has already blogged. It’s a pair of glasses that enable you to watch a movie played on the iPod, cell phone or Zune projected inside the glasses. Why do I find this interesting? First of all…

  • Prisoners chipped under their skin with RFID

    Under the sinister heading “Prisoners ‘to be chipped like dogs’”, The Independent has a well-balanced article about a plan issued by – amongst others – the British Ministry of Justice to put RFID chips under the skin of prisoners. The plan is meant to lessen the burden on the overcrowded penitentiary system in the UK.…

  • Urban computing, Lifestyle management and Google Earth Urbanism

    Working on his new book, Adam Greenfields asks: what do you feel are the most significant contemporary developments in urban informatics? The most resonant projects, the most powerful interventions, the scariest precedents? Nicolas Nova, one of our pannelists, has a very interesting overview of suggestions that I recommend reading. I found Timo Arnall’s suggestion also…

  • Mobile City Fantasies @ CES

    So the yearly circus called Consumer Electronics Show has come to an end again. I didn’t make it to Vegas (and rightly so, if you may believe Gizmodo) but I did do a round up of some blogs and major news outlets today. Was there anything launched or announced that could impact the experience of…

  • Confronted with my geographical habits by bliin

    Why do I only document and share routes and places when doing something unusual? I went to pick up my stolen bike that had been found by the police. This trip can be interesting for bliin, I thought, and therefore shared it. For those who are not familiar with bliin; you can share your position…

  • Designing for Locative Media: seamless or seamful experiences?

    During the New Year’s holidays I was taking a short vacation in the southern part of Holland. The bungalow we rented provided some proto-locative media: a cheaply printed leaflet featuring rasterized b&w pictures of local attractions with local companies advertising their services (rent-a-bike, visit-our-sauna) in the margins. One of them was a specialty butcher’s shop…

  • Rethinking Community, Rethinking Space (Call for Papers)

    If you are interested in The Mobile City conference, you might also be interested in this upcoming conference organized by the Association of Internet Researchers, called Rethinking Community, Rethinking Place. In the past few years, new forms of net-based communities are emerging, distributed on various websites and services, and making use of several media platforms…

  • Arithmetik Garden – RFID City

    On a few blogs I found reviews of the Roppongi Crossing show in the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. One of the exhibits that seemed very interesting was the Arithmetik Garden by Sato Masahiko and Kiriyama Takashi. When entering this interactive exhibit, the player picks up a card with a number on it. Then the…

  • Towards a Starbucks-urbanism?

    Over Christmas I reviewed some literature on locative media, and came across a handful of texts that addressed the changing role of the coffee house in our urban culture. Perhaps we are seeing a paradigm shift here: away from a BLVD-urbanism of public culture and towards a Starbucks Urbanism of a networked culture? Kazys Varnelis…