Portage at ACM Multimedia 2008

Portage
Monday, October 27, 2008 - 4:00am to Saturday, November 1, 2008 - 4:00am

The ACM MM Interactive Art Program is a premier international venue connecting the arts and digital multimedia. MM-ART is a stage for digital art innovation utilizing multimedia technology, and a research venue advancing multimedia technology through the innovation of the arts.

Professor Geoffrey Shea presents Portage, an aesthetic, technical and social research project based out of the Ontario College of Art & Design which has, as one of its outcomes, a publicly installed interactive artwork, mediated largely through mobile phones. We have created a number of interactions that facilitate both haptic and digital experiences. Users choose among a range of activities that are completed individually or in collaboration: playing musical instruments via mobile devices, viewing themselves as video surveillance subjects, or setting off a series of visual and aural feedback loops based on the presence of mobile devices. The experiences created go beyond cell phones; they include elements of sculpture, performance, and other forms of site specificity.

Venue & Address: 
Science World British Columbia 1455 Quebec Street, Vancouver, British Columbia
Cost: 
Free

Portage at Science Rendezvous

Portage
Saturday, May 10, 2008 - 4:00am

On Saturday, May 10, members of the public will have the chance to play with three dynamic, interactive art installations as part of the Ontario College of Art & Design’s participation in Science Rendezvous, a new daylong festival celebrating cutting-edge science and technology research in the Greater Toronto Area.

“We’re setting up multimedia art installations that people will literally be able to play with,” said Paula Gardner, a principal researcher at OCAD’s Mobile Experience Lab. “It’s a chance for the public to experience first-hand our research into public surveillance and privacy issues and people’s comfort with mobile technology in a way that’s fun and engaging.”

Three installations — all part of a larger research project named “Portage” — will be located on Queen Street West and John Street:

Soap Box, a repurposed newspaper box displaying an electronic newspaper that allows people to manipulate its content by uploading their own photos or headlines (via text messaging) using their mobile phones (Location: Pages Books & Magazines, 256 Queen Street West).

Sound Sculpture, a three-piece sound installation (with instruments such as cowbells on drum petals and an xylophone) played manually, by singing into a mobile phone or by downloading drum-machine software (Location: corner of Stephanie and John streets, south of Grange Park)

Cycle Erasure, a hybrid virtual-mechanical bicycle in a shop window that can be operated with vigorous, on-screen arm or hand movements. Participants are eventually informed that their image has been captured and are given the opportunity to download it to their mobile device, or erase it from the system (Location: Urbane Cyclist, 180 John Street).

OCAD’s participation in Science Rendezvous will run concurrently with its 93rd annual Graduate Exhibition, “Evolving DNA” (for more information on the Graduate Exhibition, visit www.ocad.ca).

For more details about Science Rendezvous, visit http://www.sciencerendezvous.ca/.

Venue & Address: 
Various locations along John Street between Queen and Stephanie Streets. John Street and Stephanie Street, Toronto, Ontario
Cost: 
Free

PORTAGE Open house

Portage
Thursday, March 13, 2008 - 11:00pm to Friday, March 14, 2008 - 1:00am

The Mobile Experience Lab at the Ontario College of Art & Design is hosting an open house for the OCAD community and the professional design community as an opportunity to present the innovative research on cell phone experience done by the Portage research team.

Experience design on cell phones means much more than screen interfaces and ring tones. Emerging location sensitive phones and two-way multimedia is positioning the mobile platform as the successor to the Internet. Participatory and social experiences will overtake game playing and storytelling.

The researchers at Portage are currently creating a virtual streetscape theatre in downtown Toronto. A range of interactive experiences will be knit together and accessible through the mediation of the cell phone.

Come and see some working prototypes and participate in a dialogue about the future of mobile design.

Venue & Address: 
Mobile Experience Lab 52 McCaul Street, Floor 3, Toronto, Ontario
Email: 
jziemianin@mdcn.ocad.ca
Cost: 
Free; Space is limited, please RSVP

Portage

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

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Saturday, February 23, 2013 - 4:30pm
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Portage: Cell Phone Xylophone

Cell Phone Xylophone was originally developed as part of PORTAGE, an artist and designer driven research project, led by Geoffrey Shea and Paula Gardner in the Mobile Experience Lab. It allows participants using a simple cell phone to control and play a networked, mechanical instrument.

Viewers simply dial a toll free number and are then prompted to enter key presses. The patterns they enter correspond to arpeggios and loop several times. Their phone connects to a VOIP service which delivers their key presses to an Asterisk server which relays them to the control machine wired up to the xylophones custom controller board. This version was presented at MobileFest in Sao Paolo, Brazil.

Exhibitions

MobileFest, Museum of Sound and Image, Sao Paolo, Brazil, 2008

Interactive Arts, ACM Multimedia, Science World, Vancouver, British Columbia, 2008
 

Publications

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

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Sponsor(s): 
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Sunday, February 24, 2013 - 4:30pm
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