Outdoor Media: A Background

Canada is a nation built upon the notion of "going outside." Canadian art and culture from literature and painting (Margaret Laurence; the Group of 7) to opera and film (Frobisher; Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner) have long grappled with the country's incalculable spaces, inclement weather, and their influence on our national identity. And while Canada has become an increasingly urban place in recent decades, climate, geography, and environment continue to play an essential part in our urban designs, activities and collective psyche. As such, at the ART Mobile Lab we are interested in creating media for outdoor spaces and communities - innovative technologies, interactions, and experiences designed for remote locations from cultural heritage sites and wilderness areas to urban parks.

When enhanced by the addition of peripheral technologies, even the everyday cellular phone has enormous potential as a location-based mobile media platform, to be used for the creation and dissemination of meaningful and challenging cultural, heritage, recreational, environmental, and educational experiences in Canada's outdoor public spaces. Specific technologies of interest include: mobile devices, portable sensors and servers, environmental installations and interactive artworks, wireless networks, public-authoring tools for in-situ media creation, geobrowsers, renewable design materials and power sources, robotics, etc.

Projects in this area investigate how outdoor landscapes and virtual environments may be linked together to create cultural media experiences outside of the gallery, museum or home: on city streets and urban playing fields, in back country locations, or at outdoor World Heritage sites like Banff National Park. Our intent is to use these technologies to create mobile media experiences that are commensurate with the surrounding environment and cultural context. It is the social and cultural practices that Canadians engage in outdoors, our connection to natural and built environments, and community activities linked to outdoor experiences, which motivate our research design practice.

Click here for more background on what's happening worldwide in this research area.

Related Projects:

Tracklines

Global Heart Rate

Heliograph (coming soon)