MapLocal Community Mapping
Last year and into this year I was involved in an AHRC Connected Communities project led by Phil Jones with Colin Lorne and Antonia Layard (University of Birmingham) in which we designed an Android app that allowed residents of communities to gather information about their neighbourhoods. The app was developed by Chris Blunt (Plymouth Software) […]
Patch-Scape; pads, pods, phones and Spatial data
Digital Landscape Architecture Workshop, June 2013 This is a chance to show off some of the fascinating work that Chris Barker and Pierre Forissier developed for the DLA workshop in Bernberg in June. The workshop developed an interesting Patchscape that took live data from a bespoke iOS app, Comob Net and used Processing to manifest […]
Time of the Clock and Time of the Encounter
This AHRC funded project investigated the difference between the time of the clock and the lived time of experience. We live in a world dominated by the time of the clock, yet many aspects of life have a different rhythm and temporality. The time of community, especially, is very often more complex and differentiated that standardised […]
Temporal Tactics for Mr. Seel’s Garden
Time to blog on The Memories of Mr. Seel’s Garden AHRC Connected Communities project… Many of the projects that I get involved in highlight the stress that network media is placing upon a processional model of time in which the present day is somehow at the edge of time, and all that has gone before […]
Territorialising the Cloud
This week saw a critical step in some research work that myself and colleagues are involved in around the Wester Hailes community, Edinburgh. For a while now we’ve been waiting for permission to place a totem pole in the ground. The pole is part of two AHRC Connected Community projects that extend our interest in […]
The Impact of the Network Society upon a Social Temporal Consciousness
Back in June, Larissa Pschetz and I presented a short paper at the Slow Technology workshop at DIS2012. Organised by William Odom, Carnegie Mellon; Richard Banks, Microsoft Research; Abigail Durrant, Culture Lab / Newcastle University; David Kirk Culture Lab / Newcastle University; and J ames Pierce, Carnegie Mellon University, the workshop recovered Hallnäs and Redström’s […]
Imagining Ecologies Panel ISEA
I couldn’t make the Imagining Ecologies panel that Mike Phillips had organised along with presenters Jill Scott, Paul Thomas and myself due to family funeral (it’s ok to talk about death). So I sent over a 16 minute movie which largely consisted of portraits of people who have been using our iPhone App Comob Net. Jen […]
Take Me I’m Yours – Ubicomp
Documentation of Duncan and my workshop / performance / intervention at the DOMe IoT workshop at Ubicomp2012 in Pittsburgh in September. Thanks to all who take part, it was a small part of a small workshop but for Duncan and I proved very successful. Watching the guys listen to the products for what must […]
Casting Time
Working with Margaret Stewart, Jane Macdonald and Jules Rawlinson, we have developed an artwork for the Cast Contemporaries exhibition that is part of the Edinburgh Art Festival. The exhibition provides a response, reinterpreting Edinburgh College of Art’s cast collection – one of the most important in the UK – through the perspective of contemporary works, […]
Take Me I'm Yours – DIS2012 Demo
A month or so ago Duncan, Kristin and I demo’d Take Me I’m Yours at the DIS2012 conference in Newcastle. This demo introduced a smart phone application that was developed during the Heritage Inquiries: A Designerly Approach To Human Values workshop at DIS 2010, organised by Giaccardi and Sejer Iversen. Take Me I’m Yours extends […]
Drawing with Satellites #2
In 2003 a term emerged to encompass technologies and processes that promised to reconfigure our understanding and experiences of space and culture, this term was ‘locative media’. The terminology framed a particular aspect of mobile media and signaled a shift toward a convergence of temporal and cartographic representations of space. Locative media is now synonymous […]
Twittest
http://www.twittest.org The Twittest is a playful project for students about intelligence based on the use of the social network application Twitter and making reference to Alan Turing’s ‘Turing Test’. The competition, was developed by ourselves at the University of Edinburgh as part of the Edinburgh International Science Festival, and was created to mark the 100th […]
Community Hacking
Community Web2.0: creative control through hacking Chris Speed, Martin Phillips, Sharon Baurley, Amadu Khan, Eoghan Howard, Prospect Community Housing Organisation, and Whale Arts. Connected Communities is a cross-Research Council research programme, led by the AHRC, in close partnership with the ESRC, EPSRC, MRC and NERC and a range of other potential stakeholders. http://www.communityhacking.org http://www.facebook.com/FromThereToHereaWesterHailesStory Intro The Community Web2.0: creative control […]
Hacking histories
Amadu‘s brief history of hacking toward our Community Hacking project – coming soon We would suggest that to enable a systematic debate and understanding of ‘hacking’ as social praxis, we ought to look at the application of the concept in two main domains, namely techno-scientific and socio-political domains. This will enable us to unpack the […]
From RememberMe to Shelflife
Well here it is… http://shelflife.oxfam.org.uk/ After 18 months since we offered up RememberMe at Future Everything in Manchester the Oxfam App is launched for a ten store pilot in Manchester. The project’s emphasis upon personal stories is an antithetical response to the quantitative data such as price, temperature or other logistical data that reside in […]
Thingema and The Memory Mix
In October Jane and I worked with the National Museum of Scotland at their central Edinburgh site to explore a series of extensions to the Tales of Things project. As well as a series of story capture workshops that gathered material in support of the The Scottish Mental Health Arts & Film Festival we also […]
Thinking back on time
Like John Wood (Deaf School and Goldsmiths) said “It’s all about time!”. Perhaps more recently networks have afforded a better framework with which to understand relational temporalities, but nevertheless a lot of my research remains about time. And since a number of projects have popped up recently in which time is a central concern I’ve […]
A rolling stone gathers no moss and other consumer conspiracies.
Taken from: Speed, C. (2011) A rolling stone gathers no moss and other consumer conspiracies. In Future Everything. Edited by Hemment, D. Published by Future Everything. In April 2010, a group of trans-disciplinary academics launched the web project www.talesofthings. The site offered a simple but novel approach to recording social histories and a playful critique […]
QR Video Projects
Updating on some projects that a few of us completed last year during the Edinburgh Film Festival and part of the New Media Scotland Atmosphere series. Atmosphere is one of the research programmes at Inspace, the digital laboratory of New Media Scotland and the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics. First premiered at the 2010 Edinburgh […]
Architecture and Field/Work
Toward the end of last year Suzanne Ewing, Jérémie Michael McGowan, Victoria Clare Bernie and myself edited together selected papers from an AHRA Conference held in Edinburgh a year before: http://www.fieldworkconference.net/ The conference and subsequent book dealt with the role that Fieldwork has played in the work of architects and landscape architects and the many […]
Thinking on GPS
This blog post is taken from the intro to the book of the same name, available here in PDF form, or from here at Blurb. GPS technology retains some of the magic that all astronomical instruments possess – a dimension of reconciling the scale of the spaces that are outside of earths atmosphere with a […]
Text Block @ Hawkes Bay Museum and Gallery
Earlier this year the Hawkes Bay Museum and Gallery, in Hawkes Bay, New Zealand published a small commissioned artwork by Duncan and me. The artwork operates as a representation of the donations that have been received by members of the public toward the cost of extending the existing museum gallery. The resulting artwork is an […]
Pigeon post: Community Web2.0 and creative control through hacking
This post is an adaptation of a small UK Research Council grant application that was successful. We are now advertising for a Research Associate: http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/ABY930/research-associate-04-fte/ I’ve ‘laced’ the article with images of pigeons. On a recent visit to the East end of Glasgow, old men could be seen hanging around on corners in the middle […]
Exhuming Spectral Cities
A short essay reflecting on our Walking Through Time iPhone App and the potential for locative media to access social hauntings. Spectral Cities Ten years ago, at the Habitus 2000: A Sense of Place conference in Perth, Australia, the cultural geographer Steve Pile articulated the potential for cultural events within cities to bring back the […]