Selfpromotion: Here follows a description of a project I recently designed for a cultural festival in Spain.
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Urban Cursor is a GPS enabled object designed to facilitate social interaction and play in public space.

The object, which is shaped as an oversized 3-dimensional computer cursor (pointer), was placed on a square in Figueres, Catalunya during the cultural festival Ingràvid.

Here, people could touch it, move it around and sit on it as an alternative to the benches.

Despite being removed from its normal screen based environment, the cursor was still in touch with the digital world. Via an embedded GPS device, the cursor transmitted its geographic coordinates to a website. At the website, the coordinates were mapped in Google Maps thereby documenting the cursor's movements in the physical world and making it possible for participants to see how they collectively helped move the object around.

• www.urbancursor.com

The Danish music-poetry duo Bo hr Hansen & Nils Lassen has come up with a novel - and potentially very time consuming - way to promote their latest CD "Hvem er jeg?" (Who am I?).

Those buying the CD are offered a free private concert - via telephone.

In order to qualify for the concert, you need to send them an MMS (a photo via mobile phone) of yourself holding the CD, preferably with the receipt. Upon receiving the documentation, the duo will do their best to find a concert date and time that suits all of you.

Thanks Mogens for the link.

Related: Bubble Star At Home

• Private Telephone Concerts (Danish)

'Goodbye Privacy' was the theme at this year's Ars Electronica festival and perhaps not so surprisingly, there were a handful of projects and exhibitions dealing with the presence of web and surveillance cameras in public spaces.

One of them, 'Self Portrait With Webcam' by the Austrian artist Josef Klammer, is a series of photographic images seen through the eyes of webcams at different Austrian locations.

Klammer himself appears on every image with his laptop, which he used to position and capture himself. Each self portrait in the exhibition is accompanied by a photograph of the webcam along with information about its physical location as well as its webadress.

Related entry: Surveillance Camera Players

• www.klammer.mur.at

Conflux Festival #4

Wanted! by Harvey Loves Harvey (Matthew Nash and Jason Dean) is a collaborative game-like performance where the two artists (players/performers) seek neighborhood help to catch each other.

The artists will start in two different predetermined locations within a narrowly-defined area in Williamsburg. To locate each other, they will begin posting wanted-flyers that show the other artist's face, a short description and a phone number.

Both artists will be guided by calls from people who have seen the flyers, with the goal of eventually helping one of them catch the other.

There is no price for the winner, but the loser will be required to go take down all the flyers when the game/performance is over.

• Wanted!

It was the Italian team that won the Young Creatives Competition:Film 2007.

The competition - sponsored by Nokia Nseries - took place between Wednesday June 20th and 22nd in conjunction with the International Advertising Festival in Cannes.

Twenty young creative teams was given the same creative brief and 48 hours to create a 20-second TV commercial using the Nokia N93i.

The brief is not available from the website ('page not found') but from watching some of the films, it appears that it was politically correct and had something to do with creating an MTV-ad that promotes ecologically responsible living.

(From those I watched, my favorite is the Canadian submission)

• Competition website

Here is a brilliant work by Tad Hirsch that I came across when looking through a ppt presentation by Swiss researcher Nicolas Nova.

Tad Hirsch is a researcher in the Smart Cities Group at MIT's Media Lab, where his work focuses on the intersections between art, activism, and technology.

In 2006 he made the site-specific installation Tripwire, which responds to the relationship between San Jose International Airport and downtown San Jose in California

Hirsch custom-built sensors, placed them inside coconuts and hung them from trees at several public locations to monitor noise produced by overflying aircrafts.

Detection of excessive aircraft noise would cause the sensors to trigger automated telephone calls to the airport's complaint line on behalf of the city's residents and wildlife.

• Tripwire

A few years ago, the American artists Tyler Jacobsen and Nathan Martin created the online application Barcode Generator that could be used to adjust the barcode on products in chain-stores (exemplified as Wal-Mart). The idea being that people should only pay what they felt was right, rather than paying the (over)price determined by the stores.

Barcode Generator was available at the website www.re-code.com but it didn't take long before the artists came under attack from Wal-Mart attorneys who forced them to remove it from the site.

Now the London based product designer Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad has come up with a (slightly related) hack called Shiv Card, which can be used to evade the fare on London buses.

Shiv Card is made from a recordable greeting card that mimics the feedback sound of an Oyster Card when waved at the electronic reader, thereby fooling the bus driver into believing that the card is real (Oyster Card = electronic ticket/smart card).

Bahbak is a designer who experiments with the boundaries of product design, but since his website only contains limited information it's hard to tell precisely what the artistic motivation behind the project is. From my point of view, the interesting thing about Shiv Card is not the free rides that you get but the anonymity that it provides. Oyster Cards are embedded with RFID chips, meaning that the users' movements within the public transportation grid is likely to be tracked and stored somewhere.

I don't know exactly how the Oyster system works, but another way - and without cheating anyone - of avoiding being tracked, could perhaps be to meet up with other commuters and agree to swap Oyster Cards thereby jamming the data and preventing it from being (mis)used. At least, that's what people in The Netherlands (including myself) did a few years ago when they found out that supermarket-chain Albert Heijn was spying on their customers by data mining the discount cards that they so generously gave away for free.

• Shiv Card

Jan Chipchase is Principal Researcher in the User Experience Group of Nokia Research Center. A part of his fascinating job is to observe and describe how different cultures use mobile technologies differently - often in ways unintended or unpredicted by the industry that he represents.

He has carried out ethnographic fieldwork around the world, such as in Uganda where access to electricity and mobile phones is limited and the user need thus quite basic.

As a consequence of these limitations, people have developed an alternative solutions and service economies, such as phone-sharing systems and battery-charging services (photo) where batteries can be recharged for a relatively small price.

Documentation of this and other of Jan Chipchase's interesting findings are available for download at Nokia Research Center.

• Street Charging Service Uganda (PDF file)

GylleSMS ("ManureSMS") is a new Danish SMS service designed to optimize the relationship between farmers and their neighbours.

The popular service enable farmers to send their neighbours an SMS containing information about where and when they are spreading manure (the smelly fertilizer stuff that can spoil a beautiful day at the countryside).

The service-friendly farmers are now pondering whether to extend the service to include a voting system that allow neighbours to have a say about when the farmers should/shouldn't fertilize their fields.

• www.gyllesms.dk (in Danish only)