augmented illusions

Thought I’d do a brief mention of Sleppet, a Norwegian site, where they were gracious enough to link to augmented illusions through a technorati feed. Sleppet brings together artists whose interests range from marrying visual to sound to sound recording the arctic in mid-winter. Very, very interesting artists and projects on the site, all of which urges me to travel to Norway or visit Ars Electronica to meet them.

Finding good sources of field recorded sound can be tough going, especially because so much bandwidth is consumed by discussions about the best recording gear and mp3s devoted to the sound of steam trains going by. So it is a real relief that epitonic sees field recordings primarily as “music”, and both appreciates the “Pete Seeger - Folkways” tradition and more modern “Varese - Accidental Sound” strains. A rather extensive archive introduces you to artists like Elders of Zion and Laminar.

• mapping sounds, making the blog text to speech friendly #
• out for coffee, to the market #
• on the red couch #
• finally done redesigning my blog and transferring old posts to my archive, but the bacarat post is lost forever…. #

An audio game by Blind Adrenalin

Kestrell writes about interfaces and how we use them to navigate, to imagine the body in space and in transit: 

a virtual environment for blind people which allows them to explore a physical space and the objects in it before they travel to the actual location. What I like about this is that it provides a low-stress period for the blind person to absorb information about the environment without the distractions of other variables one usually experiences in the real environment, such as live humans or moving vehicles or noise pollution, the opportunity to separate layers of sound and control the onslaught of information without being overwhelmed by noise.

I’ve been wondering for quite some time what that would be like. Synthetic worlds offer opportunities for simulation, but I know that being taught this, the most useful instructions were those that directly related my environment to how I sense my body. Being told that if I cross a two lane street, and I’ve reached the middle section, cars will approach me coming from behind my right shoulder was more enlightening than anything my instructor had been telling me before. I’ve been experimenting with GPS and voice instructions, but, while that is a solution to general map-based challenges, it will not help you to get around. Being able to merge the map-based world of GPS with a body based modality, for instance clothing with sensors that would exert pressure on my body so as to make me stop, or turn sideways, would really be interesting. After all, that is, in the rough, what guide dogs do, functioning as a haptic interface between the body and its environment.

I’ve spent much time over the past couple of weeks “constructing” how people sense or imagine their body in metaverses. It is interesting that metaverses are not only full of kinship terms (”friends and families”) but are also stuffed with bodily metaphors: on Facebook, I can poke, on Twitter I can nudge, and with custom applications I can hug, slap and tickle the personages I call “friends”.  The preceding year has also produced haptic controls to console games, (the WII remote) that I’ve already used to control a midi interface to my computer. Obviously, there is this urge to want to connect our real bodies to imagined or inferred space. To me that means a reversal of how we usually experience “us going towards things”. Reversing it is much like the way Polynesian sailors navigate, imagining themselves as being a fixed point, while the course they’re steering means the sea and islands are “rolling” in towards them.