Click here to view a documentary film of Loca: Set To Discoverable.
http://www.loca-lab.org

The premier of the completed film is now being exhibited in Brazil at
Telemig Celular arte.mov, International Festival of Art and Mobile
Media. Beta versions were shown at Mobile Nation (Toronto), Enter
(Cambridge), Futuresonic (Manchester) and Urban Interface (Oslo).

Loca is an artist-led project on grass-roots, pervasive surveillance
by John Evans (UK/Finland), Drew Hemment (UK), Theo Humphries (UK),
Mike Raento (Finland).

Film produced by Drew Hemment.

Scroll down for an article on Loca: Set To Discoverable, soon to be
published in Martin Rieser's Mobile Audience book.




'LOCA: SET TO DISCOVERABLE'
Text by Drew Hemment, John Evans, Mika Raento, Theo Humphries

http://www.loca-lab.org

"In the inverted logic of the post-Orwellian city, Loca agents,
software and human, decrypt the hertzian passages of its own
inhabitants. For better or for worse?"
Steve Dietz, Artistic Director, ZeroOne

Loca: Set To Discoverable is an arts-based group project on grass-
roots, pervasive surveillance which seeks to expose the disconnect
between people and the trails of digital identities they leave
behind. The premier full presentation at ISEA2006 and ZeroOne in
August 2006 combined art installation, software engineering,
activism, pervasive design, hardware hacking, SMS poetry, sticker art
and ambient performance.

Loca is an exercise in everyday surveillance, tracking digital bodies
in physical space. It examines what happens when it is easy for
everyone to track everyone, when surveillance can be affected by
consumer level technology within peer-to-peer networks without being
routed through a central point. The Loca project walks the knife edge
of locative media, itself involving surveillance. But it does not
create a new surveillance potential, it only reveals what was already
there.

Pervasive surveillance is potentially both sinister and positive at
the same time. New ways of organising media and of communicating with
each other become possible when the context of the media and the user
is known. But also as a consequence ever more can be surveilled and
ultimately controlled. Loca seeks to lay bare the truth of mobile
social software, to highlight how it can function as surveillance,
without collapsing this ambiguity. It is an experiment that does not
either blindly celebrate the technology, or claim that the technology
is inherently bad. It aims to raise awareness of the networks we
inhabit, to provoke people into questioning them, and help people
equip themselves to deal with the ambiguity of pervasive media
environments.

THE LOCA NODE NETWORK

One element of Loca is a node network, through which Loca observes
people