Urban Mobs is a project by Orange and faberNovel which visualises patterns of movement in the city based on mobile phone usage currently being exhibited in the Dans la nuit, les images exhibition. The project includes videos visualising a range of phone usage/movements in France, Spain, Romania and Poland and builds on the work of the MIT Senseable City Lab's 2006 Real Time Rome exhibition.

On a similar theme is the MIT World's Eyes project which data mines flickr photographs to track patterns of movements of tourists in Spain producing some impressive visualisations

Visualisations of mobile usage are now even available as a service for the Blackberry. In San Francisco CitySense allows the user identify nightlight hotspots based on the concentration of phone usage.The application powered by Sense Networks macrosense doesn't provide any richer data other then concentration, but the way things are going can that be really be far behind?

These visualisations of course echo Chombart de Lauwe's famous map plotting every journey a Parisienne student made in a year which so influenced Situationist thought on urban routine and the Theory Of the Derive and in some ways concretise Michel de Certeau's assertion that pedestrian movements form one of those "real systems whose existence in fact makes up the city"

While the impetus behind these and other realitymining projects is to improve knowledge about how people use mobile phones and other devices in order to design a next generation of products which better respond to actual usage requirements there are obvious implications in urban planning and it is even suggested this data can be used to improve epidemiological modelling of the spread of infectious diseases like SARS. I'm interested in them as I think they have an even more important role in visualising the extent of our datatrail, of course the upshot is that once you choose to carry a mobile phone you and your location can and will be tracked, anonymously or otherwise, and the smarter your phone the more data there is to mine.

On that note I leave you with the beautiful BBC Britain from Above visualisations

Posted by stunned to locative at 12:18 AM , December 23, 2008 | Permalink + delicious

I've been doing a bit of research into GPS and I've been struck by the number of stories of Satnav disasters that are in the media. They seem to fall into two broad categories. The first is foolish technologically naive people who treat GPS as a magical device trusting it rather then the evidence of their own senses and end up driving into a river/lake/train track. The second is a more technophobic take where blameless individuals are lead into harms way by faulty technology, often in 'strange foreign places'. I'm reading Carolyn Marvin's When Old Technologies Were New which deals with the social and cultural history of the telephone and the electric light and there is a remarkable and telling correspondence between the contemporaneous 19th century accounts of electrical mishaps she recounts and these tales of GPS disasters.

Anyway I thought I'd share a small round-up of some of these GPS disasters.

GPS guides Norwegian tourists into trouble in Rio

£96,000 Merc written off as satnav leads woman astray|

GPS drivers led astray by the Northern lights

GPS leading drivers astray

GPS failure leads to Utah tourist debacle

Driver follows GPS onto pedestrian walkway, into cherry tree

Faulty GPS lures honeymooners astray

GPS routed bus under bridge, company says

Motorist has faith in GPS, drives into sandpile

UK drivers trust GPS more than their own eyes

GPS leads woman astray near Sweet Springs, cell phone helps her get back on track

Bogus signals send sat navs astray

Heritage Ireland give Brú na Bóinne co-ordinates to stop visitors driving into Newgrange

Sat-nav directions send Ring of Kerry tourists wrong way round the bend

Sat-nav 'trapped' lorry for days

Village shaken by GPS-driven tank invasion

U.S. Tourist Stoned by Palestinian Mob After GPS Gives Incorrect Directions.

Whom Do You Believe, G.P.S. or Your Own Eyes?

Driver Blames G.P.S. for Accident on Metro-North Tracks

Driver follows sat-nav into lake

SatNav danger revealed: Navigation device blamed for causing 300,000 crashes

Lie way code - Don't trust your satnav signs in Wales

Forget satnav, if you want to know your way just ask

Satnav leads minibus into river

Car on rail line in sat-nav mishap

Steered Wrong: Drivers Trust GPS Even to a Fault

Posted by stunned to locative at 11:29 PM , December 16, 2008 | Permalink + delicious

I missed this one but it seems that in a Mr Burns moment cheeky chappy Damien Hirst has used DACs to confiscate collages by 16 year old graffiti artist cartrain and to hand over the £200 he made from selling them because they infringed his skull thingy copyright. Some people might think it a little mean seeing as he recently made £95m in a Sothebys sale and allegedly sold the skull for £50m, but hey it's the recession! Next stop former friend John McKay for advance copyright infringement?

Posted by stunned to Art at 12:28 PM , | Permalink + delicious