WikiMap Linz

2005

Nicoletta Blacher (AT)
Stefan Feldler (AT)
Helmut Höllerl (AT)
Horst Hörtner (AT)
Günther Kolar (AT)
Nicolas Naveau
Gerfried Stocker (AT)
Friedrich Kirschner (DE)
Bartosz Polonski
Alexander Seifert
Christine Sugrue
Stefan Eibelwimmer (AT)

“WikiMap Linz” opens up an interactive virtual city map on which visitors can link visuals, texts and sound elements to particular locations just like thumb-tacking items to a bulletin board.

“WikiMap Linz” is a Web application with its own presentation setup in the Ars Electronica Center. At editing stations in the Museum of the Future, visitors can input their own contributions to the virtual city map of Linz and experience via 2D and 3D projections how their material ends up at the sites they’ve chosen—as soundscapes, with visualizations of imagined urban spaces or in text-based metropolitan impressions. Bring your digital images along with you and inject your narratives into the new urban communications network!

With “WikiMap Linz” and the wide variety of uses to which it can be put, the Ars Electronica Futurelab has developed a self-contained and expandable format for so-called location-based multimedia storytelling. Suddenly, a city map no long consists of just representations of streets and buildings; now, the stories, impressions and pictures of the city’s inhabitants and guests are part of it too. A new domain of communication and ideas is engendered.

The “WikiMap Linz” Web application is part of the Web portal of “Hotspot,” the city’s wireless LAN initiative. Its development by the Ars Electronica Futurelab was commissioned by the City of Linz. In 2005, the city is launching an unprecedented wireless LAN initiative in cooperation with the Ars Electronica Center. Through 2008, hundreds of Hotspots will be set up on public squares, in municipal cultural facilities, youth clubs, schools and kindergartens, senior centers and libraries all over town that will provide citydwellers and guests with free wireless Internet access.

For details, please visit www.hotspotlinz.at
Cartographic material and support: Municipal Administration of the City of Linz, Informationstechnologie, Geodaten Management

The participation of Bartosz Polonski has been made possible thanks to a residency grant of KulturKontakt Austria.