The ART Mobile Lab addresses cultural discourse and representations of the relationship between nature and technology in a number of ways, through design explorations, interactive mobile experiences, theoretical discussion, public presentations, and analysis of media ethnographies. We ask questions about how mobile media fits into "natural" systems, and how this media is positioned to influence human thought and behaviour when encountering, comprehending, and intervening within those systems.

Context
Hikers often react with skepticism to the notion of using digital technology in "natural" settings like park trails and wilderness areas. The idea of electronic media colonizing "wild" places fills many with disdain. Indeed, people often view "nature" and "technology" as mutually exclusive ideas, perpetuating the notion of a human/nature divide that has characterized Western thought for centuries. Such polarized distinctions are problematic and probably unhelpful, however, in the face of predictions of ubiquitous "everyware" technologies like mobile devices and sensors becoming an embedded part of every social and natural environment within the next decade or two, inundating every global habitat from urban to "wild" within an enveloping field of information and connectedness. "Wilderness", a problematic construct implying pristine freedom from human influence, is already heavily subject to boundless anthropogenic forces such as climate change, and may soon be completely inundated with invisible human technologies as well. And so, if humans and the tools we create are still regarded as inherently separate from nature processes, instead of integral participants within them, then coping with this everyware evolution becomes that much more difficult.

Meanwhile, we are still challenged to observe thoughtfully and see the "nature" in a cellphone for what it is - a concentration of mined and transformed natural materials which have come from the earth and are soon bound to be circulated back there in concentrated form as obsolete species of human dreams turned to electronic waste. In other news, biologists postulate that bees may be disappearing from the planet (thereby endangering the global food supply) because of disruptions caused by wireless communication frequencies, and anecdotal evidence observed by ART Mobile Lab researchers in Banff suggests that when a cell phone emits a raven call, the real ravens sometimes answer back. Though seemingly whimsical, such observations present tantalizing food for thought regarding the role and impact of mobile technologies in global ecosystems, not to mention suggesting whole new paradigms of mobile media interaction. Meanwhile, mobility discourse regularly points to airborne metaphors like flocks or swarms to describe patterns and behaviours of mobile media social ecologies, while downplaying slower ecological metaphors for mobility and spatio-temporal experience (eg. the sloth, the whale, the canoe) as well as metaphors related to "immobility" (eg. the tree, the nest, the house). Textual analysis of such narratives would yield rich ground for debating notions of "temporal diversity" - for what are the birds without the trees and nesting sites that provide them with food and rest? And what are fast living, fast knowing, or fast ecology without their slower counterparts?

But perhaps we digress. Suffice it to say that one direction of the ART Mobile Lab's inquiry into mobile media includes confronting philosophical notions of the relationship between Nature and Technology, and creating actual designs that draw users to reflect upon the expressions and interventions of mobile media as technological "species" within global ecology. In fact, the mobile media interactives we design are often explicitly intended to facilitate a 3-way dialogue between person, place, and media/technology. So the question is no longer simply "What happens when people interact with media systems?", but "What happens when users, media systems, and the surrounding environment all interact with each other simultaneously in complex ways?" In a sense, we are no longer doing Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Instead, we're explicitly doing Human-Computer-World Interaction (HCWI). Which means that the media design and the content we're creating have to carefully to acknowledge not only the human but the environmental context - they have to think about how the design is going to emerge from, complement, or perhaps even resist the surrounding landscape. In a way, we're faced with the task of writing the world into the media, and the media into the world. We're challenged to understand the implicit rules of the environments we're creating for, and to integrate our design so that everything works together.

To put it another way, we've come to think of mobile technology as a kind of feral species colonizing new environments and trying to fit in. Or, in other terms, we've come to think about location-based media as a kind of invisible floating architecture. And if we, as locative media designers, are the architects of this floating world, then perhaps we should be as concerned about how our designs fit with the landscape - and how they converse with it - as an architect working with buildings of iron and stone.

Beyond simply understanding the debate over Nature and Technology better, we at the ART Mobile Lab are interested in creating and exploring sustainable media. To venture a definition: "sustainable media" indicates an attempt to design multimedia so that it works within the existing patterns or dynamics of the ecological world, in sympathy or mimickry (call it biomimickry) with natural physical or biological processes. Sustainable media is about making our designs "fit" with the world and/or interrogate our relationships within it more thoughtfully. All of it - the urban, rural, and "wild". To draw an analogy, the Jungian analyst James Hillman was once invited to teach a course about animals and dreams aboard an old West Coast fishing schooner cruising off the shores of Alaska. He remarked that the boat, an old funky wooden contraption from another era, was actually the perfect place to talk about nature, because it wasn't slick like a big noisy jet-boat or an ocean liner - so it didn't "disturb the world that it was in", but instead suited it and fit within it comfortably in a certain way. As he put it, it "got the feeling right".

Sure, sometime we need to rock the boat too. As artists and designers, sometimes we should make things that disturb the world that they are in, in order to interrogate our relationships to it in useful ways. But perhaps this notion of sustainable media is still a useful thing to think about, because if what we're making does disturb the world in a way we don't want it to, that doesn't suit our artistic goals, our desire for environmental sustainability, our socio-cultural well-being - if it doesn't get the feeling right with respect to integrating the media experience with its context in the way we intended - then maybe there's a problem.

Related Media:

Download the audio from "Tracklines, Mobile Media and the Problem of Knowing the World", a multimedia lecture delivered by Angus Leech at the Banff New Media Institute during Interactive Screen 2006: