Musings of a Digital Brain

I concocted a new edition of Shifting Metropolis in Brussels with Shelbatra Jashari.
Shifting Metropolis aims to make a descriptive map, a multimedia interpretation of a city by its inhabitants.
We moved away from the aesthetically pleasing but finally hermetic 3d world we made before and experimented with various technologies.

With Balthzar de Tonnac we got into QR tags and figured out how we could link this to the okno web environment.
We encoded urls in the tags, made stickers out of them and started posting them around the city. We put them in precise places, where if you read the tag (with a fancy cell phone) you link to the attached media.
This approach lets us add media in a fairly low-tech way to the city and allows for some nice possibilities, e.g. non-linear story telling by putting tags on fixed and mobile objects such as public busses etc.

Of course the high tech phone aspect was still a big put off, as few people have those here in Belgium, but that seems to change rapidly.
To group it all together, we put the tags on geograpically the same spot on a huge satellite photo in okno, so the public could also scan there and see the media projected.
You can get the urls and most of the content here: shiftbrussels.
The project was nice, but is for now refridgerated untill we find better ways still.

This project was presented at Coop-Bratislava

The workshop was a great succes. All the participants were super motivated Skopjans who really threw themselves at it.
We sent them out to make trajectories through the city, picking places and gathering material there. Text, audio, photo's, video, everything digital.
The material is then put into a digital framework to make a digital representation of people's Skopje.
As an interface we used a large map of Skopje and barcodes on locations, which is nice and nifty.

I had the honourable but somewhat daunting task of making the framework, which I didn't prepare and I got sick. But we pulled it off anyway and I think it was a great experience for everyone.
This was one of my locations, I learned a thing or two about 3d in the process. And got the taste of it, so expect more of that in the future.



Big thanks to all those Macedonians, organisers and participants and of course my partners in crime Annemie Maes and Shelbatra Jashari.
More documentation will follow and hopefully more cities!

I'm taking part in this upgrade international event. I'm doing the workshop Shi fting Metropolis with Annemie Maes and Shalbatra Jashari and doing the first Ca tatonic State Society performance.

Together with the theatre piece Shift(unrelated besides the new media parlance) this causes me to have a pretty nasty schedule.
More info soon (or a bit later) and on the sites of line and upgrade.net