How can users of a public urban space engage in a multi-sensory, multimedia outdoor experience? PORTAGE is transforming John Street, in the heart of Toronto's entertainment shopping district, into a Broad Locative Environment (BLE) - a space that will allow visitors to engage with outdoor multimedia installations and other mobile users.
Users will be able to navigate from Grange Park down John Street through a GPS and Wi-Fi-enabled virtual theatre. Along the way they will interact with installed musical sculptures, create and share interactive audio components, trigger swarms of electronic cicadas residing in city trees and view themselves on surveillance camera which they themselves control.
Through this installation Portage will investigate how cultural content delivery is made possible by emerging multi-capability mobile devices. These devices include cell phones, handhelds and PDAs with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and GSM access. Portage will also examine the processes by which these technologies can be used in conjunction with each other and with environmental sensors and displays to move the mobile experience beyond the phone and to create an interactive and immersive environment.
http://www.mobilelab.ca/portage
Publications
Gardner, P., Shea, G., and Davila, P., Locative Urban Mobile Art Interventions; Methods for facilitating politicized social interactions. Aether: The Journal of Media Geography. 5B, 2010
Geoffrey Shea, Portage: Locative Streetscape Art, International Multimedia Conference, Proceeding of the 16th ACM International Conference on Multimedia, Vancouver, 1131-1132, 2008
Geoffrey Shea and Paula Gardner. PORTAGE: A Locative Streetscape Theatre, at Bauhaus-Universität, Weimar, Germany, 2007
Paula Gardner, Geoffrey Shea, Patricio., Davila, P. PORTAGE: Locative Media at the Intersection of Art, Design and Social Practice, University of Siegen, Germany, 2007
Geoffrey Shea, Sound as a Basis for Locative Media Experience, Interacting with Immersive Worlds Conference at Brock University, June 2007
Shea, G. “Inside Out Experience Design”, in Ladly, M., and Beesley, P. (eds). Mobile Nation, Canadian Design Research Network, March 2007
Shea, G. Art, Design, Education and Research In Pursuit of Interactive Experiences. Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, Cape Town, South Africa, 342-349, 2008
Shea, G., Donaldson, T., Gardner, P., Using the Mobile Experience Engine (MEE) to Create Locative Audio Experiences, 5th International Conference on Pervasive Computing at the University of Toronto, May 2007. Published in: Advances in Pervasive Computing, Austrian Computer Society, 2007
Shea, Geoffrey. Artifact or Experience: Presenting Network Mediated Objects, Interacting with Immersive Worlds Conference, Brock University, June 2009
Shea, Geoffrey. i = i + 1: Participatory Art and Design, Inter(pr)axis Conference, Toronto, 2008
Shea, Geoffrey and Patricio Davila. Catastrophe, conference presentation at DigiFest, Design Exchange, 2008