Digital derive
From the SENSEable City Laboratory - a new research initiative between the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the MIT Media Lab - comes mobile landscape | graz in real time.
“The city demands continuous interpretation. Today the experience, infrastructure and morphology of the city are more closely related than ever before. The profusion of handheld electronic devices with increasingly powerful networking capabilities offers its users new modes of interaction within the urban environment. It also provides designers, artists, and theoreticians a new means for engaging and understanding the city. Therefore, forget old ways to describe cities!
Real-Time Graz. Digital Derive harnesses the potential of mobile phones as an affordable, ready-made and ubiquitous medium that allows the city to be sensed and displayed in real-time as a complex, pulsating entity. Because it is possible to simultaneously ‘ping’ the cell phones of thousands of users - thereby establishing their precise location in space at a given moment in time - these devices can be used as a highly dynamic tracking tool that describes how the city is used and transformed by its citizens. The polis is thus interpreted as a shifting entity formed by webs of human interactions in space-time, rather than simply as a fixed, physical environment. Digital Derive provides a platform upon which the contemporary city can register the flux and traces its self-constructing and open-ended nature.”
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For more on electronically visualised public spaces, see Jennifer Laughlin’s 2003 list of related projects