Over the past 10 years Proboscis have developed an enviable reputation for using new media to develop creative projects around public authoring - including Urban Tapestries which I wrote about earlier. As Proboscis explained then:
The Urban Tapestries software platform allows people to author their own virtual annotations of the city, enabling a community’s collective memory to grow organically, allowing ordinary citizens to embed social knowledge in the new wireless landscape of the city. People can add new locations, location content and the ‘threads’ which link individual locations to local contexts, which are accessed via handheld devices such as PDAs and mobile phones.
There was some sophisticated technology behind the project - so I was particularly intrigued to get an update from Giles Lane announcing that in future they will be using free online services - a kind of guerilla public authoring, as Giles calls it. They'll be experimenting, and producing a scavenging handbook.
Our concept of scavenging is to break down the core components of public authoring and devise a methodology for linking them together and sharing them. The method will be one that requires little or no expert knowledge to set up and which can be adapted to the local conditions depending on what resources are available to the community.
This is the sort of thing that techies might call mashup, though I think Giles's term is much more evocative, and fits their approach of shifting the focus from technology to the social and cultural practices by which people make sense of their surrounding, and add their own interpretations by analogue and digital means. While mashups often require programming skills, the Proboscis handbook will help people put together their own systems without too many tech skills. As Giles explained to me in a follow-up email:
The scavenging idea is a development of our original approach for Social Tapestries, which was to look at each group or community we work with to see what were the appropriate technologies and capabilities, and to adapt our approach to those. Whilst we have been developing new versions of Urban Tapestries over the past 2 years we have struggled to secure the resources needed to deploy and maintain such a service, to resolve significant technology issues and make it available to the public. This leads us to think that whilst a dedicated system for public authoring is desirable, we should have alternatives that enable the fundamentals to be achieved that are not dependent on a single service.
While the costs of developing custom systems is clearly an issue, things have changed dramatically over the past few years with the development of the sort of free services offered by Google and Yahoo. On a slightly different front, I'm impressed by the way in which Ismael Ghalimi is putting together what he calls Office 2.0 - a range of free and paid-for tools covering, well, just about everything from calculators and calendars to word processing and video publishing. Get scavenging!
What if I don't want to have my media 'scavenged?' - the sites you scavenge from have a small print you know. It would be a good idea for the artist to read it.
Posted by: Tom | February 18, 2007 at 06:38 PM
Scavenging media for guerilla public authoring?
It's actually called copyright theft.
Posted by: onionbagblogger | February 21, 2007 at 06:43 PM
Sorry - my headline was misleading. The scavenging is for free or low cost applications, not content
Posted by: David Wilcox | February 21, 2007 at 11:54 PM