Bluetooth technology is a short-range radio technology that allows the wireless networking of computational devices, data can be exchanged between mobile technologies (i.e. Mobile phones, PDAs, laptops) which can be linked at a distance up to 10 meters. Traditionally, a beacon serves as an aid to navigation. For The Haunting project, a Bluetooth radio, coupled with a microcontroller, a power supply, and an LED, was placed “in-situ” in the park. The beacons were used to help users identify content hotpots and navigate the park at night. As users approached a beacon with a cell phone, the phone would discover the beacon via Bluetooth, which in turn would trigger content on the phone and switch on an LED for the duration of the interaction.
Published in Chapter:
Voices from Beyond: Ephemeral Histories, Locative Media and the Volatile Interface
Barbara Crow (York University, Canada), Michael Longford (York University, Canada), Kim Sawchuk (Concordia University, Canada), and Andrea Zeffiro (Concordia University, Canada)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 21
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-152-0.ch011
Abstract
The Mobile Media Lab (MML) is a Canadian interdisciplinary research team exploring wireless communications, mobile technologies and locative media practices. By developing interactive mobile experiences, we observe and reflect on the dynamics inherent in wireless immersive environments connected to a growing tendency towards ubiquitous computing or pervasive media. Our projects, whilst rooted in digital ephemera, treat physical territory as an active and volatile interface creating networked situations to connect the physical to the virtual. Our intention is to use media to quietly augment everyday life and to initiate novel ways of telling stories of the past by harnessing digitally rendered images, text and sounds. In our chapter, we will focus on two projects, Urban Archaeology: Sampling the Park and The Haunting, which were part of our work done under the rubric of the Mobile Digital Commons Network (MDCN, 2004-2007). We will use the phrase voices from beyond as a trope in our reflections upon the deployment of mobile media technologies and use of locative media practice to intentionally blur past and present moments. As we argue, archival fragments and ghostly images can be presented via handheld devices to use the power, potential and public intimacy of media dependent upon the presence of electromagnetic spectrum. In addition to key texts on locative media, we draw on Benjamin’s understanding of history as a sensibility whereby the past and present co-mingle in the minds and embodied memories of human subjects, Darin Barney’s notion of the “vanishing table” as an alternative means for engagement in technologically mediated zones of interaction, and writing on communications theory that deals with the spectral qualities of new media (Sconce; Durham Peters; Ronell).