There is always a sense of spatio-temporal immersion when in the city. The physical surroundings, sounds, smells, colors and people around simply embrace us. The paths we choose to take and the way we choose to look are the building blocks of our relation with the urban space.

"Travel Agent" proposes an interactive travel in the city through the subjective point of view of the artists. A camera moves through the city streets, following its very own agenda, constantly moving, eager to discover unseen places. Images and sounds reveal to our eyes the city's hidden bricks, the flow of information on which it is built. Behind the camera, an invisible traveler asks us for guidance. The piece interrogates the visitor’s conceptions of travel and tourism, whether he is a stranger only passing by or a local visiting his own town through his interaction with the piece.

As we filmed this journey around the different neighborhoods, wireless networks and G.P.S. data were collected, accumulated and linked to the images and sound captured in the surroundings. By visiting this intangible data space, the visitor sees and hears this invisible reality that is surrounding us in our everyday life, passing through our body. This virtual space represents the canvas on which were shaped the different concepts and thoughts that, once integrated one to the other, form the main body of the work, each part of it influencing the movement of the others.

As media artists questioning themselves about interactivity in contemporary art, we explore the paradigm of the user interface. The loneliness that is characteristic of most everyday life electronic interfaces, like the computer mouse or the ATM machine, brings the user to develop habits that he has to unlearn once he’s confronted to the possibility to interact not only with the interface he’s using, but also with other users that are also giving inputs, each and every one of them influencing what is given to see and ear.

"Travel Agent" was the result of a one week residency at BEK which involved the collaborative participation of two collectives. Drone (Julien Keable, Mathieu Guindon, Samuel St-Aubin, Jean-Sébastien Senécal, Jonathan Villeneuve) is a Montreal-based collective that works on multi-user interactivity, computing and video; they make use of their own Open Source software, available under the Gnu GPL. S.O.U.P (Lorenz Schori, Switzerland and Alejo Duque, Colombia) explores the uses WIFI and GPS data to influence video and sound generation using an open source bridge called k2o and also available via their website.

Web links:

* http://drone.ws

* http://soup.znerol.ch