3 research outputs found
Data and the city – accessibility and openness. a cybersalon paper on open data
This paper showcases examples of bottom–up open data and smart city applications and identifies lessons for future such efforts. Examples include Changify, a neighbourhood-based platform for residents, businesses, and companies; Open Sensors, which provides APIs to help businesses, startups, and individuals develop applications for the Internet of Things; and Cybersalon’s Hackney Treasures. a location-based mobile app that uses Wikipedia entries geolocated in Hackney borough to map notable local residents. Other experiments with sensors and open data by Cybersalon members include Ilze Black and Nanda Khaorapapong's The Breather, a "breathing" balloon that uses high-end, sophisticated sensors to make air quality visible; and James Moulding's AirPublic, which measures pollution levels. Based on Cybersalon's experience to date, getting data to the people is difficult, circuitous, and slow, requiring an intricate process of leadership, public relations, and perseverance. Although there are myriad tools and initiatives, there is no one solution for the actual transfer of that data
Walking-with-sounds: creative agency, artistic collaboration and the sonic production of acoustic city spaces
This thesis interrogates the urban environment through the filter of the sonic to
explore the significance of sound in society. As such, it is located within studies of the
auditory culture in combination with theoretical aspects of sociology, cultural studies,
anthropology, philosophy, geography, and musicology that together comprise the
inter-discipline of sound studies. Examples of sound art are introduced that
demonstrate the development of the social interactions that take place in the
networks formed by the interlacing of spatial, acoustic and informational layers,
mixed realities and digital landscapes. This thesis focuses on sound art works that are
coproduced by artists and audiences, exist in - real, imagined, or hybrid - space, are
technologically mediated, geo-located and experienced through headphones. The
audiences of this type of sound art are the listeners who explore and appropriate an
area while becoming aware of the rich soundscapes of everyday life. Audiences in this
sense may become participants involved in creating the content of sound art, which is
in most cases field recordings and soundscape compositions. These interactions
between sound art and the public space construct acoustic city spaces where sound
art audiences may form acoustic communities.
I argue that sound art generates new ways to think about our cities and the ways we
exist as social agents within them. For this, I explore phenomenological listening as a
form of collective belonging to a place and a feeling of participating equally to our
everyday sonic experience of our cities. I propose the use of an interdisciplinary
research methodology that firstly triangulates ethnographic tools, and experimental
auditory phenomenology, and secondly understands soundwalks and soundmaps as
a method for knowing soundscapes. A research methodology for the artistic practices
that use mobile audio devices can contribute to the development of a new
interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological framework for researching sound
art practices in public space.
The research is based on the concept of the soundscape and its multiple uses for
capturing and studying the sonic environment. A case study of collaborative sound
walking/mapping enables me to explore the relation between body and physical
space, and in this, consider the application of playful, collaborative and creative sonic
affordances in urban design and in the right to the city. Ultimately, I present a
definition of acoustic communities and acoustic space through a sound art outlook. I
examine acoustic community emergence and formation and how this informs the
ways these communities perceive, document, and share their experience of space. My
aim is to show that the development of a sound art practice, where everyday and
artistic listening practices intertwine with agency and creativity, assembles inclusive
acoustic spaces where emerging artistic acoustic communities are empowered to
construct agonistic acoustic city spaces