Bluetooth enabled phones are constantly transmitting an ID which can be set by their user. A simple scan with a phone can reveal these names which people are outputting often without realising.

I have come up with the idea of using a laptop with a bluetooth adapter to record the names which people have assigned to their phones as they walk by. Similar to wardriving but staying still and with the people move around the receiver. The information that can be gathered from this is the ability to see the movement of these devices and therefore the people carrying them. This data could then be visually represented on a website in real time and projected onto the side of a building.

I suspect there may not be enough pedestrians during winter passing through to do it how I would like and the busiest part of Stonehouse, Union Street, isn’t really busy enough to show the information in real time as I would prefer so we would have to present it in a way that displays it for a while. A problem would be to get the data to output in a usable format and setting up the stream and possilby combining the information with another feed of some kind.

Maybe it would be an interesting thing to do in the city centre…

Just an assortment of maps, relatively unoriginal but worth exploring.

Attractiveness zoning. Colours range from green which is good to red which is bad, thicker the circle, the larger its impact.

Transparent image for layering.

Wireless Zoning. Green indicates BT and other public wireless access points intended for boats. Yellow reprisents spreading domestic wireless internet, bluetooth and cordless phone.

Combined with radio, television, satellite and mobile signals nowhere is ever truely out of contact, with layers of digital information flowing through space. It could be possible to make these layers visable in the real world by creating windows into it.

Layered with population density distorted pixelmap. Layered over streetmap.

With a very broad brief I decided to do a premotion of potential for the future from the perspective of the past. Only in the last ten years has Stonehouse really developed having been in a constant state of decay with little investment. I decided to play on this with my postcard which is designed to look like dated promotional material for the area meant to encourage development that never happened or took far too long.

And now in Sarcas-O-Vision:

The real idea behind it is that it shows us that these visions rarely come true. The font was used in the 1982 film Blade Runner in which the dystopic appearance of the city(complete with flying cars) is supposedly set in the year 2019 which is unrealistic yet may have seemed plausible 27 years ago that in 37 years it could be a reality. So widespread and total change in older cities, particularly in Plymouth, is slow with buildings, architecture and street layouts only changing when social, technological and economic needs and capabilities change or historical events and decay force change.

An interesting aspect of the development of cities is the growth of its infrastructure be it visible such as roads or invisible such as sewage systems or mobile phone tower coverage. A one hundred and thirty years ago the people building houses couldn’t have known the effect on wifi and mobile phone signals the stone that they were using to build walls would have nor could have electricians sixty years ago anticipated the amount of electricity we now consume. So as society advances our buildings can be left behind with the need for constant modernisation, some things can be upgraded whereas others need to be replaced. This can seem to fracture a city with mixed architecture, the best example of this probably being London which has massive variance between building designs.

Sir Patrick Abercrombie’s Plan for Plymouth is an example of when a fresh start to an area can accommodate the growth of infrastructure and create consistancy(even if people dislike it). Within Stonehouse the Millbay area is now under development albeit slowly after the demolition of many industrial buildings in the area. On Stonehouse Peninsular there has been regeneration of The Royal William Yard and the surrounding area which is helping Plymouth catch up.

And just as Plymouth starts getting the funding it so desperatly needs, we hit a recession. Oh well.

In a semi-related note I also found this blogpost with a good collection of Retro-Futurism which is worth a look for those who are interested and this talk on faux nostalgia and how yesterday looked at tomorrow.

A symptom too much free time.

Had another Idea. The pixilated map represents a cold statistical view of Stonehouse, but also the area has meaning that can’t be expressed with just numbers, the image needs meaning on a human level. So the idea is to superimpose this onto the pixilated image in a rough flawed yet natural form.

In the first week I sketched a diagram of Stonehouse from memory. As nobody ever really experiences Stonehouse looking down on it from the sky it also reflected my perspective of it on ground level and how far I judged distances so certain labels are in the wrong place and the shape of the coast it wrong, so the map is imperfect. However it more accurately reflects how the area feels and what impression it leaves on you moving through it. For myself I was fairly accurate but it would be interesting to see this done with someone who doesn’t know Stonehouse as well as I do.

So there is a conflict between the humanly perceived space which we live in and the space viewed as data by a machine which cannot make sense of the meaning behind what is inputted into it.

I manipulated the map I drew from memory and superimposed it onto the pixelmap to create a rough example of the concept, the presentation would be nicer in the final piece.

Population density.