R e s e a r c h :

The Mobile Experience Lab at the Ontario College of Art & Design is exploring and developing user-oriented activities for emerging locative media. Led by faculty with art, design and cultural studies backgrounds, we have married the goals and methodologies of these different fields to arrive at a flexible, exploratory and responsive research practice at the intersection of action research, ethnography, iterative development and Relational Aesthetics. The locative domain – which includes elements of mobile data networking and real world site specificity – is evolving quickly, both in terms of new technological developments and social networking opportunities. As a research team with a foot in both art creation and academic studies, we are equally concerned with the actualities of what we and others are producing and the potential that remains to be explored; while we are conversant with the practicalities of mobile communications and cultural studies we remain focused on the transformative opportunity of the user experience.

In the lab, nicknamed ‘the Salon,’ a group of faculty, students and engineers, with input from small industry partners, engage in a cyclic and collaborative process of brainstorming, ideation, concept and scenario development, destabilization, deconstruction and reconstitution, consultation, building, testing, rejigging, production and public presentation. The goal with such practice-based research is to go beyond the probable and plausible and explore the limits of what is possible in a given situation. (cf. Graeme Sullivan, Art as Research Practice: Inquiry in the Visual Arts)

In PORTAGE, our current artist/designer driven research project, a short street in downtown Toronto will be converted into a virtual theatre. Users with a range of mobile devices will be able to interact with participatory content experiences: spraying virtual graffiti on wall, turning surveillance cameras back on themselves, collaboratively remixing music tracks through choreography, or exploring the history of the specific locale. Users equipped with highly capable devices (e.g. with Bluetooth and GPS) will have one level of engagement, but others with simple voice or text capable phones will be able to access the experiences on another level. Even visitors with no device will be able to participate: by banging a steel drum for example, and creating a digital signal in collaboration with other online users.

This project emerges out of other successful locative media creation at the lab and extends a methodology that includes:

• active brainstorming with artists, designers, engineers and breaking down projects into their component concepts, technologies and techniques and recombining them in new and unexpected ways;
• blending established context paradigms (narrative, documentary, gaming) with real-time interactions (co-creation, iterative development, content uploading)
• employing charettes to explore the content creation potential of newly developed technologies and identify further development needs

The goal of PORTAGE is to combine the diverse skills of all the collaborators to address social issues, investigate innovative social interactions (i.e. a digital commons) facilitated by mobile media, create unique technological platforms that can support the content creation, and deliver to the user a meaningful and new experience that speaks to the unique time and space possibilities of mobile media.