Questions to answer:
- what is our conceptual stance for this piece?
- how will the interactivity be carried on?
New proposal # 2
There is always a sense of spatio-temporal immersion when in the city. The physical surroundings, sounds, smells, colors and people around simple embrace us. The paths we choose to take and the way we look at it are a structural representation of the relation we have with the city and its components.
In the 90s, media theorists envisionned the internet as a "global village". A small planet, fully interconnected, where everybody would be able to go anywhere, anytime, and know about everyone. The analogy feels almost childish. The dream didn't come true, because there were too many people, with too many different agendas. The global village soon became a global city.
In the global city, travelling becomes a second nature. As physical distances becomes less and less relevant, geography quickly loses ground against culture. How do we travel in this new space? What is there to discover in someone else's neighborhood? Can you be a tourist in your own town?
"Travel agent" proposes a new way of travelling. A camera moves through the city, following its very own agenda, constantly moving, eager to discover unseen places. Through an interactive medium, it asks us for guidance through a single question: where should I go? The piece asks us to revisit our conceptions of travel and tourism and to discover the city through the eyes of the artists.
New proposal # 1
This proposal is the output of the discussion we had tonight. This proposal tries to be an answer to alej00's comment. It solves the choice of wether the agent should be a "traditional" or "media" tourist by putting this choice in the hands (well, feet, actually...) of the users. Plus, it integrates the wireless data by introducing the concept of virtual travelling.
Virtual travelling would refer to what I'm doing now, namely, writing on some hard disk located in Bergen iot communicate with people in Canada and Switzerland. GPS-marked wireless data from geographical spots in the city can have us introduce a correspondance between virtual and geographical networks.
The installation would stand on a graph made out of several (say, 20 to 30) points taken everywhere in the city (some might not even have any wireless signal). At each spot, we would take the following data:
- GPS position
- footage
- wireless data
The good news is that spots are NOT all sightseeing spots. The agent moves from one of these spots to the other depending on the positions of the users on the e-floor: points where users are located will have more chance of being selected.
Thus, the agent will tour in the city wrt the moves of the users on the floor. If those users just want to see sightseeing spots, the tourist will go for them. But it will allow the users to favorise non-sightseeing spots (say, people from Bergen will probably want to see their own neighborhood, for instance...) if they want.
As for Manovich's aesthetics, at this point it's hard to explain, but I think we will be able to tune things up to get the feeling we want: namely getting out of simple, reactive data representation. Of course this is very experimental, but we can work on trying to formalize the WAY the piece will be built. I think the answer lies in the narrativity of the pieces: how could we build the movie sequences/transitions to get this feeling of "moving through time" that is the traveller's daily bread.
Now, we really like the concept of the 81 km but we don't really know how to integrate it to the piece. We have to think about this (sorry that we did not really address that point).
We will move on with the technicals because we need to make some progress there before coming to Bergen. We'll try to program the tools so that they are as much generic as possible i.e. can be adapted to many situations.
answers, comments and reactions
* alej00 on the 81km limit
Tourist agent
Here I want to try to work on the concept of "tourist agent" by going down to the concepts and trying to freely discuss about them without really thinking about the installation.
Tourist
- "A tourist is someone who travels at least eighty kilometres (fifty miles) from home for the purpose of recreation, as defined by the World Tourism Organization."
- from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourist
Keywords: travel, recreation, industry, infrastructure
- "One who travels for pleasure."
- from http://dictionary.com
- "A vacilando is a wanderer for whom the experience of travel is more important than travelling for the purpose of reaching a destination."
- from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacilando
Networked media tourist: http://cfront.org/cf00book/en/tapio-networkedmediatourist-en.html
Question: What differentiates a tourist from a traveller?
Answer: Tourist has "tour" in it, and thus seems to refer to some kind of economic agent that consumes travels. Tourism holds this idea of "recreation" or "pleasure". So a tourist IS a traveller, but not all travelers are tourists. For instance we (as artists) will come to Bergen not only for recreation and pleasure: our main objectives by travelling here are to meet people (most of which aren't from Bergen), communicate/exchange, and produce art.
Agent
- "An agent is an autonomous entity with an ontological commitment and agenda of its own."
- from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent
Keywords: entity/being, autonomous/independent, agenda of its own, empowerment
- An autonomous entity whose behavior is governed by some set of rules.
- from Myself
So an agent is some entity that acts for its own sake, through its own behavior. Agents have been studied alot in the artificial intelligence and artificial life fields.
Tourist + Agent = ?
A tourist IS an agent. I think the "agent" word adds nothing to this, except for bringing some kind of "AI" taste to it. Though maybe I'd thus change the title, the "agent" word brings along some lines of thought.
I think that the idea of "tourist" is good. There are several ways to be a tourist: maybe we could work on that idea. Maybe we can have different tourist agents with different agendas:
- ordinary tourist : just goes for the sightseeing spots
- media tourist : goes in nonstandard areas and takes strange pictures
- food tourist : likes to eat good, doesn't care about the rest
- sex tourist : ...
First proposal
Abstract
We propose to play with the concept of dialog from a touristic standpoint. The residency at BEK will be our first staying in Bergen. Since we have absolutely no idea what the local culture is, we will clearly interact like tourists with the city and its inhabitants. We choose to explore this venue instead of trying to deny it.
This will be achieved by designing an interactive video installation with a video screen, speakers and a electronic floor. On the floor will be drawn a rudimentary map of Bergen, with a set of 10 sightseeing spots. The positions of visitors on the floor will trigger the peregrinations of a tourist agent on the map. The agent will favor places where a lot of visitors are standing.
When the agent is on a sightseeing spot, s/he will choose different actions: either visiting another part of the spot (like another room in the museum) or trying to travel to another sightseeing spot. When s/he chooses an activity to do on a sightseeing spot, the video will show this activity from footage taken in Bergen. When travelling between two spots, the video will show the agent moving in streets of Montreal instead.
The same will go for sound. When on a sightseeing spot, sound will be generated according to the wireless data taken from that spot. When travelling between two spots, the sound will be generated with data from Bogota (or other cities in which S.O.U.P. have been living).
When there is no one on the floor, after some time the agent will just sit down or sleep right on the sightseeing spot s/he is.
Tourists usually follow a certain set of rules. As a Bergen inhabitant, you do not act the same way when you're in Bergen than when you're in Bogota or Montreal. When in your own city, you'll take paths that a few tourists will ever see: "ordinary" roads leading to your house, job, or local tavern. If you travel to another city, the opposite happens: you'll be going to places most of the local people won't go.
In this installation, we propose a new dialog between the visitor and the city by inverting those visions. The visitor (usually living in Bergen) will see and hear the sightseeing places of its own city together with non-sightseeing places of the artists' cities.
Technical
Coming soon.