<incom> Workshop Mobile Habits (Modified by Geert Lovink)

[Esther Polak]

MOBILE HABITS
How do you trace a cow in West-Africa? Antropologists and media artists 
take up
the challenge.

Date: 29 june 2006

Time: 9.30 - 17.30

Place: Amsterdam

Fee: 100 Euro, student discount fee 25 Euro

How to apply: send an email with your CV and short bio to:
info at virtueelplatform.nl

Both the arts and sciences have carried out extensive research into the 
issues
of mobility and space. Both fields use new media such as GPS and GIS to 
back up
their research. As a result the more recent research into mobility and 
space has
been given a big boost. Both art and science now need each other as 
never
before. The ?Mobile Habits? workshop brings artists, designers and
scientists together and challenges them to exchange concepts and new 
working
methods in relation to space, place and mobility.

Locative media artists and designers are opening themselves up to 
theories about
mobility and space from the worlds of anthropology and social and at 
the same
time social scientists are discovering the different cartographic and
visualisation techniques found in the world of art and media design.

Mobile Lifestyles

Esther Polak is an artist working in the field of ?locative media?. She 
is
currently researching the possibilities of setting up a project in 
Nigeria with
the Fulani, West African nomadic cattle farmers. Her initial research 
came up
with a variety of people and researchers, including vets, 
anthropologists and
social geographers, with a shared interest in mobile lifestyles. These 
various
fields have come up with a number of innovative practical and 
theoretical tools
that could be used to set up a project proposal with a well thought out,
interdisciplinary basis.

Talkshop

The setting will be a ?talk-shop? ? a cross between a workshop and a 
talk
show. The morning session will focus on concepts and methods using a 
series of
project presentations/case studies. The afternoon will be more 
interactive,
with participants critically analysing the case studies in terms of 
what kind
of insight they aim to generate ? artistic, historic or practical.

Participants

Taking part in the workshop will be an interdisciplinary mix of media 
artists,
designers and social scientists (anthropologists, social geographers) 
working
in the field of place, mobility, storytelling and visualisation. In 
order to
get a balanced interdisciplinary mix we ask to send a CV and short bio 
when
applying to participate. Deadline june 8th 2006.

Speakers/support team:

Esther Polak

Esther Polak is a visual artist working in the field of new media. She 
is best
known for two ?locative media? projects, AmsterdamREALTIME and the
MILKproject. Both projects use GPS to ?imagine? the contemporary 
landscape.
In both projects the participants were given a GPS tool to carry as 
they went
about their daily lives. Their movements were mapped and the 
participants were
asked to reflect upon the routes they had made. The projects resulted 
in large
public installations. Esther Polak in constantly in search of new ways 
of
researching space and can as such be seen as part of a long European 
tradition
of ?imagining the landscape?.

www.milkproject.net

www.waag.org/realtime

Christian Nold

Christian Nold is an artist and cultural activist who has spent the 
past few
years mapping human emotions in the urban landscape. His research 
project is
called Biomapping. It looks at the various ways that we as individuals 
can
obtain information about our own body. Security technology has brought 
about a
situation in which we are losing ownership over our own body and 
health. This
project aims to give people access to their own biodata, to interpret 
and share
it.

www.softhook.com

http://biomapping.net


Hanne Kirstine Adriansen

Hanne Kirstine Adriansen is a senior research fellow at the Danish 
Institute for
International Studies.

Her training is in human geography and she has fieldwork experience 
from West
Africa and the Middle East. Her research interests include pastoralists 
and
their use of mobility, dryland management, and community development. 
She takes
special interest in understanding different people\'s perception of 
concepts
such as space and place.

Ab Drent

Ab Drent is a Master of Science in Rural Development and Management of 
Natural
Resources in the tropics. His disciplinary specialisation is 
anthropology and
ecology.

He has followed afoot over more than 500 km nomadic Fulani herders in 
the
Extreme North of Cameroon during ten months. Drent has written an 
extensive
case study about the transhumance cycle of a nomadic group and tested 
the
suitability of traditional social theories to describe the relation 
between man
and nature. He proposes two Actor Oriented approaches and Actor Network 
Theory
as better suited to describe the complexity and unpredictability of 
nomadic
mobility. In a related quantitative study Drent used GPS data to build a
Correlated Random Walk model to investigate the relation between 
mobility and
environmental factors. Currently he is preparing a project with Esther 
Polak to
visualize nomadic mobility in alternative ways combining science and 
art.

www.virtueelplatform.nl/mobilehabits

Virtueel Platform
Keizersgracht 264
1016 EV
Amsterdam
Nederland
Email: info at virtueelplatform.nl