Pixelspaces 2007: Onfield




In Onfield, Pixelspaces 2007 explores the emerging transfer of Community Informatics’ strategies and methods to location-based services. Ars Electronica Futurelab thus continues the practice, launched in 2000, of incorporating current trends in a symposium series and exhibition and discussing them from the perspective of an atelier-laboratory.

With the broad spectrum of social and participatory media applications and instant messaging services, forms of interaction have been established on the WWW that require people to accept being publicly traceable to a completely different degree.

Pixelspaces 2007 investigates possible forms of transference of functions that are presently anchored in the Web for creating virtual communities and the facilitation of new ways of perceiving and using space by linking user-generated content with digital cartography on the physical living space.

The resulting exchange between “online” and “onfield” means to equip the individual moving through space with various “pairs of glasses”, but also design tools, in order to facilitate a change of perspective and of reality in relation to the otherwise perceptible surroundings and the people and objects in them. By linking the metaphor of “being online”and the physical localization of users as well as the user-generated contents, the “being online” metaphor is transformed into “being onfield”. Thus Pixelspaces 2007 is based on the analogy that the physical movement of the individual through space corresponds to an active use of social software and instant messaging. The living space is understood as a public accessible and useable store of multimedia information fragments and levels. Psycho-geographical navigation tools and various digital aura profiles personalize this space. Synchronous and asynchronous communities can develop on the basis of location-based search engines and onfield group functions. In an emergent environment that links functions for online communities with GPS data, the physical and virtual realities of the user are mutually fruitful—from onfield networking to collective intelligence strategies.

The research and development fields addressed in this project range from the changing functionalities and interaction paradigms of the mobile devices needed here, to the elaboration of meaningful multi-user scenarios in urban space. The omnipresent enhancement of our surroundings through geo-coded functions and information challenges the interfaces of the devices to extend their context sensitivity and to increasingly meld with the bodies and everyday activities of the users. The question also arises as to where the development of perception, use and appropriation of space will take us and which new tactics and perceptual levels this will open up. Besides the options of leaving behind and receiving location-related virtual material in the physical space, the non-moderated, collaborative scenarios seem to be particularly interesting. Which approaches in information design and which interaction metaphors turn the physical space for this into a community tool and social knowledge provider? If people become sensitized to the invisible space, i.e. the sociocultural dimension of space and what it is used for, then onfield community informatics will ultimately also constitute a challenge for urban planning and telecommunication design.

Pixelspaces 2007 addresses these questions in a transdisciplinary fashion, drawing upon various approaches from microblogging to mobile online and GPS-based games, from onfield collaborative mapping to tangible media in the public space.

Translated from German by Catherine Lewis

Masahiko Inakage / Keio University Inakage Lab
imgl / Keio University Inakage Lab

Maribeth Back, Tony Dunnigan / FX Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc.
Takashi Matsumoto / KEIO University, Media Design, Okude Laboratory
Post-Bits