October 29, 2003

Habitat Perspectives

Habitat perspectives is an online instalation that atempts to visualize spatio-temporaly the places we inhabit. Through GPS-capable mobile phones, participants will be posting geocoded images to an online shared space which starts as a black canvas. As participants post more and more content, a map of the city, and the map of each of the participants "places" will slowly start emerging. One of ther reasons why Tokyo is such a mess as a city is that it is a tangled mess of intertwining main streets intersected and crisscrossed by back alleys and side streets. Specially when you don't own a car, and you mainly travel by subway as most other citizens, one of the biggest problems you get in such a place is that you never get to mentally visualize the relationship among all the places you usually hang out at. You only know about "islands" in the city; you get in the subway in Shinjuku island, you pop-up in Shibuya island. The more you move around those spaces you'll slowly start turning them into neighborhoods, along with your own personal networks of places. If you asked a group of people to draw you a map of the city, you'll notice that all of them will be inevitably different - each of them will have their own particular perspective of their habitat. This is currently work in progress, so as time allows, I'll be adding more functionality to it. Also, I'm currently looking for participants, so if you are interested in popping up in there, please don't hesitate to drop me a line: [ mail at marcosweskamp.com ] visit the instalation