Biography:

Daniel Roberts is a 21-year old new media artist learning and participating in the Computational Arts program at Concordia University in Montreal. By day, a student focused on educational theory, a freelance graphic designer, but by night, he moonlights creating electro-acoustic art, bizarre robots, mobile electronics, and conducts mad experiments in his basement using biological sensing. He is President and Founder of DATA, a student organization that assists in both technical training and organizes a discussion group combining critical new media theory and practice.

Project Summary:

Egg is a mobile, bio-generated, real time acoustic walking experience, focusing on the themes of walking meditation and experimental biofeedback. Consisting of a headset worn by commuters during their daily commute, real-time audio is generated by electroencephalography sensing. As the commuters move through space, the audio reinforces a state of concentration and meditation. The audio both reinforces and attempts to create a state of mediation and bliss, emphasizing certain frequencies in an attempt to modulate the emotional state of the user.

Artist Statement:

   As we move through public space, we often create aural bubbles to modulate our environment. At times we use these bubbles to extend our social reach, connecting with people hundreds of miles away, or alternatively, we use soundtracks as a buffer zone to disconnect from and to control the spaces we temporarily inhabit as we move through them. Egg simultaneously creates a buffer zone around the user, and deeply connects them with their context and surroundings. By encouraging them to remove their focus from the distractions of their commute and turn it inwards towards themselves, Egg creates a meditative bubble around the user, while at the same time, this meditative state encourages the user to experience a deep connection and awareness of their context and surroundings.

By creating a system where a deep connection to context can thrive, and focus is rewarded, Egg calls attention to the lack of context and focus in modern lifestyle and culture. Similarly, Egg’s technical implementation calls attention to the growing problem of bio-sensing and feedback as tools of surveillance and control. By encountering these tools in Egg, users are confronted with the dilemma of the possibility of this technology being used for more controversial ends.

I think that the problems facing LBS (as they call it) are fascinating, and while I tend to side with Tomi Ahnoen to say that purely locative based services will not be able to achieve commercial success… i would add a large caveat to that. UNTIL… location based services start to becomes socially accepted and widely used. and IF… that ever happens. I’m not sure people are comfortable with the concept of constant location. Perhaps one of the reasons people don’t like using GPS enabled applications is that it reminds them that the same technologies can be used for surveillance.

I also had a brain flash. Tomi talks about the fundamental use of LBS is to get ‘found’… which is the paradigm most people are working under, which is problematic, as Tomi says, because we aren’t often lost in the first place, and when we are, it is often by choice and we don’t even want to be ‘found’ or ‘located’.

But perhaps a much better use of LBS would be to enable the user to get ‘lost’ in the first place. I think the LBS application that has appealed to me the most is a restaurant (yes i know, always with the restaurant) finder which is locatively aware. You input the type of cuisine you want, the desired price range, or leave it up to the app. Then you shake your iPhone (the presence of physical interaction with the app is also interesting) and the app spits out a semi random restaurant near to you that meets you specs. This results in a exploration and discovery of restaurants in your neighborhood that you have never been to before. It allows you to get ‘lost’ in your own neighborhood, to break out of you routines and patterns and go somewhere new that you haven’t visited before.

Also, I found the academic reading to be fairly standard, although I actually found some substance this week. The concept of the ‘grey area’, the fringe, the space between space and motion and everything. I’m not sure I fully understand it, perhaps it would help if I had done some of the readings that the author was referencing, but as much as I love Foucault, I can only read so much before my brain explodes.

In the first artwork we read about, the maps being created fall into the first category, although it is true that the participants played a role in the map creation, and they learned something about the way they mapped out their space. It just seems so constrictive, however, this reliance on cartesian representation. It is almost, I feel, a surrender against the difficulty of representing the complex, multi-demensional realities uncovered in exploring locative media to represent them on a map. It feels as though the next few steps are missing, the extrusion of the artists observation and critique back into the real, complex world.

When we explore these massively important concepts of space, location and mobility as artists, it seems too simple to just map out our results and say, “here i am”, even if the map is representing an emotional response, or an unknown longing for home. Perhaps these maps were neccesary to have us think about these things on a fundamental level, perhaps we need these maps as early guides into these complex worlds, but to me, it seems as though these issues are crying out for intervention, for real, concrete representations and critiques.

Functionally, what I was to do is construct a mobile EEG brainwave scanner, which would be hooked up to a very small computer running Linux. Then I would take the signals and convert them into audio. There are three immediately obvious applications of this for me. Like Sonic City, it could be used to change the way that we experience walking around the city, except receiving it’s cues from our changing emotional state as we pass through various spaces. I also wish to explore the Buddhist concept of ‘walking meditation’. As we talk about our hyper-connected state, and the act of disconnection, I find that one of the serious problems with our hyper-connected state is our lack of connection with ourselves. Many people use connectivity as a way to escape thier personal issues, and in that way, the internet has the capability to be abused in a surprisingly similar way to drugs and alcohol.

When I try to purposefully stop what I am doing and spend time with myself, usually in the form of meditation, I become incredibly agitated and uncomfortable. Lately I have been attempting a form of mediation called ‘walking meditation’ which is basically attempting to move incredibly conciously and intentfully when you are walking from place to place, in a type of meditative state. The audio system would read brain waves and level of agitation, heart rate etc. and would produce a harmonally pleasant tone when the user was calm and unagitated. When the user is in a rush, or when their mind is racing, the audio tone would become unpleasant. This would require the user to try to ‘control’ themselves, be calm, and mediate.

The third obvious application of the system would be creating live music out of the brain-waves, with the intention of creating a controlable system that could be used to create music intentionally. This is something that I will probably explore, but is somewhat outside of the scope of this class.

I have been reading the book About Face 2.0, which is a very thorough analysis of research based design methodology. Even in this book, Cooper and Reimann emphasis the importance of having a quality research process, in order to receive quality data and results.

Thom-Santelli criticizes one of the main design research methodologies, the creation of ‘personas’ as inherently limiting, in that designers tend to create personas that are too homogeneous and similar to themselves or social circle.

I think that one of the critical issues facing research based design is the problem that designers, especially those coming from a art-school education, have fundamentally flawed research skills. If you compared, for example, the field of design with the field of anthropology, I believe (although I really have nothing to support this belief empirically), that the quality of research at similar academic levels (graduate, post graduate, etc) would be significantly higher in the anthropology field.

Methodologically flawed research will naturally lead to flawed and restrictive products, software and visual design. I think that the role of research, especially social research (as opposed to literature-based research), needs to be significantly strengthened at the under-graduate level of design education. It is already emphasised and practiced on both a professional and graduate level, but design researchers have a four year deficit of methodological practice and analysis.

I was talking about how I found that there was an inherent danger to homeless people. Several of the other students in the class, as well as the professor, I believe, interpreted this to mean that I was physically frightened by the possibility of a homeless person attacking or being violent towards me. A rebuttal to my statement was something along the lines of that not all homeless people are violent and dangerous, and that my statement was a generalization brought about by class-based prejudice and misunderstanding.

The conversation twisted before I was able to reply.

I was not intending to say that all homeless people were dangerous by nature, a scourge of our streets, and should be packed up and shipped off. I was trying to comment on the inherent presence of violence in the way that homeless people are exposed in our society. Living on the streets is a violent proposition, not least in the violence that has been perpetrated upon homeless people by society, but also in the reality of day to day life, the search for food and shelter, and interactions with others in the homeless society.

Whenever an interaction between two people, in this case a homeless person and non-homeless person, is predisposed be such a large amount of violence, there is an inherent violence in that interaction, and by extension, an inherent danger.

My name is Daniel Roberts, I’m a 3rd year CART Specialization student. I enjoy a broad range of interests, although my background is mainly in video graphics and web design. I espeically like exploring the artisitc possibilities of code. I’m also newly interested in experimental educational pedagogy. I’m also running Photoshop and HTML tutorials this semester, they will be held every friday in an as of now undisclosed location. I think that Cheney might be there.

-Dan