Festival for Contemporary Psychogeography

CONFLUX 2006 begins this week, and we invite all of you to join us! This year's Conflux will take place September 14 - 17th, headquartered at the McCaig-Welles Gallery in Brooklyn. Over 80 artists from across the US and countries including Canada, UK, Spain, Germany, Finland, Sweden and Australia will come to Williamsburg to present projects including experimental walking, biking, boat and public-transport tours; street games and tech workshops; mobile broadcasts, performances and temporary installations. For more information, including a detailed schedule, project descriptions, and contributor bios, please check the Conflux website! [posted by krista on Glowlab]

KEYWORDS: AMBIENT TECH, AUGMENTED REALITY, CONTEXT-AWARE MEDIA, DIGITAL ARTIFACTS, EXPERIMENTAL TRAVEL, EXPERIMENTAL URBANISM, FEEDS, GPS, IMMERSIVE NARRATIVE, INFORMATION SPACE, INTERACTION DESIGN, INTERACTIVE ART, LATITUDE/LONGITUDE TRACKING, LOCAL SEARCH, LOCATION-BASED SERVICES, MANY-TO-MANY, MAP-MAKING, MICRO-PERFORMANCE, MIXED-REALITY GAMING, MOBILITY, MULTIMEDIA, PERVASIVE TECHNOLOGY, PLACEMAKING, PLAY, PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY, PUBLIC SPACE, RFID, RICH MEDIA, SCRIPTED SPACE, SEMACODE, SMARTMOBS, SMS/MMS, SOCIAL CARTOGRAPHY, SOCIAL INTERVENTION, SOCIAL NETWORKING, SOUNDSCAPES, SPATIAL ANNOTATION, STORYTELLING, TAGGING, UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING, URBAN ECOLOGY, URBAN EXPERIENCE, WIFI.

Killing the Fathers, or: If You Meet Jane Jacobs On The Road...
Adam Greenfield

This is a short talk about a great many complicated things: about urban form in an age of mobile, ubiquitous and pervasive computing; about how our relations with places familiar and unfamiliar change as a result of our engagement with new information technologies; and, above all, about how we may need to jettison our dependence on the beloved heroes and heroines of 20th century urbanism in order to understand what's happening all around us.

Parking Public
Ryan Griffis

Parking Public is an investigation into the realities of utopian thought as materialized in the mundane and pragmatic spaces of parking lots. Parking lots, one of the most visible, yet overlooked, artifacts of American mobility reveal the concrete space required to store the supposed tools of utopian ideals. Parking Public is a mapping of these literally concrete spaces in an attempt to locate the utopia they serve. Underneath both the empty spaces of parking and the empty promises of utopia are real economies and structures of power. For Conflux 2006, The TTO will offer a guided tour of parking in the Brooklyn area that will also serve as a participatory mapping of personal utopias upon the topography of property development. These tours will add to the Parking Public database of research on parking and utopias. This tour will be conducted by van, and can accommodate 11 people. If you would like to RSVP for the tour, to ensure a seat, please visit: temporarytraveloffice.net/rsvp The Temporary Travel Office has created tours of parking lots in Hollywood, historic downtown Los Angeles and Champaign, IL. These tours are augmented with distributed surveys, in embodied space and on the web, recording the utopian desires of the users. Cell phones will allow people to participate in the phone survey, but are not necessary.

In the intimacy of the city
Regine Debatty

Designers, artists, and hackers have been very active over the past few years trying to find a way to reclaim the boundaries that we routinely create in our use of public space and that neither passersby nor electromagnetic fields respect.