A revolutionary multi-player, multi-site game and arts space to be played across all five cities. Players use their own bodies to send balls of projected light across the playing space, aiming for goals representing the other cities. Entirely interactive, it’s a competition to see which city has the least light balls in their square when the time runs out. Designed to be aesthetically beautiful and great fun to play and watch, games are a minute long and run throughout the night. Just turn up and play, or get your team together in advance…

Link for the site.
Here is a google video of how people are playing it . It follows very basic rules and intuitive in that sense. 5 Courts was conceived, designed and programmed by digital media artists KMA (Kit Monkman & Tom Wexler).

Why do I blog this?
I think this piece is kind of important because of several points. First, it puts the user in its center and this is not only personal interaction, it becomes a collective set of action rules with opponents in other cities with the basic nature of the game. So the fun gets multiplied. Second, it uses cities as “castles” which might fit as a good example of urban computing application.

It talks about software systems like Jaiku’s which is based around the location of friends and family. One researcher from UCLA Danah Boyd puts a good alternative criticism of this information flooding:

“I worry that people attribute too deep a meaning to raw information,” said Danah Boyd, who researches social media at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

“An increased flow of information should not be confused with a deeper bond.”

Boyd stressed that this also applied to other social media that gather large amounts of personal information, like blogs or digital photo accounts.

“The situation these technologies create is similar to what happens with Angelina Jolie or another celebrity,” Boyd said. “Just because I know a lot about a person does not mean they will help me on a tough day.”

An added risk for the location-announcing services is that people might find themselves unable to break away from following friends or old lovers, Boyd added.

“The problem is that people really, really love stalking,” Boyd said. “When you have just ended a relationship, it is not necessarily healthy to follow the exact location of your ex- lover minute-by-minute on your phone.”

First, we built networks to help us find information. Google is a great example of this: pop in a few keywords and get back all the matches to your search.

Second, we are currently building networks to help us acquire knowledge. Knowledge is more than just information; knowledge is information plus context. Knowledge is information which has been sifted by human hands (or, more precisely, human minds), sorted, organized, and structured, so that the next person who comes along seeking knowledge can quickly and effectively absorb it.

And according to this technologist, philosopher and artist Mark Pesce, if knowledge is information plus context, understand is knowledge plus experience. Understanding is not data; it cannot be stored by a computer in any meaningful way. It resides within us, within the chain of experiences that makes us what we are. We can know a fact, but until we have lived through that fact, we have no understanding of it. Also one of the main properties of this approach is, the understanding should be dynamic, blogs as we see are first but static examples of those third era. According to the writer, this is the point where it comes to mobile.

This is rather an interesting point, I remember Josh Knowles was trying to build some kind of digital social network where evey person writes his/her expertise and interest fields. So that if you need any help at that time, you would know whom you are going to contact with.

In his concept of a mobile digital social network he tells more in details with examples. Liverecord is a mobile java application which allows you to submit your quality tips to a backend server. The server could be accessed through top tips from your friends while you share your quality with them. This could be a growing system pretty quick if you make it to read a tip you should write a tip approach.

So I was thinking personally that, the social networks sites that I am connected, I am getting away from describing myself in my profiles. Not that I don’t like, I don’t like that fact that if I start to list I feel like I am getting restricted somehow. It could be the first cautious approach towards those applications, and what I perceive in general is, how much you explain yourself, you are getting that much response.

So this third era is also supporting that view. It is how much you express yourself, so that people can take the most out of from you although I see some flaws and dangerous points at that. This is more likely the potential ultrapost-consumer approach at some point if people realize that their experiences are learnt. It all comes to teacher’s ethics maybe.

Anyway it was an interesting read. It would be nice to test it with an example application based on textmessaging.

Vodafone’s receiver magazine is a neutral space where pioneer thinkers challenge you to discuss exciting, future-oriented aspects of communications technologies. Started four years ago as a platform for exchange about how innovations in this sector affect societies worldwide, receiver is now established as one of the industry’s key idea generators.

word! I was reading an old (2002) but gold paper from Usman Hoquenamed invisible topographies. There are some good points about mobile phones.
Mobile Phones are not only communication tools, but also sensors of the invisible electromagnetic environment that surrounds us. A new term is Hertzian space. He is also talking about the emergence between architechture and art. He explains that new technologies encourage us to think designed spaces not of static silent structures that surrounds us but rather of fluid dynamic fields beyond the edge of our natural perceptions.

This link is a source listing Wireless Arts.

Couple of links that I have found through googling some names on the paper.
Varieties of Wireless Art

He mentions about a design theorist, Anthony Dunne, saying “material responses to immaterial electromagnetic fields can lead to new aesthetic possibilities for architecture.”

His project Sky Ear is exploring the hertzian habitat above Greenwich Park in London.

I like this paper because it is revealing how we can use mobile data in an artistic and informative way rather than trying to come up with new ideas of using it just inside of it.