work sample 4: PDPal, Eyebeam Edition (2002)
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> PROJECT DESCRIPTION PDPal is a psychogeography mapping project for the web and Palm PDA devices that allows maps to be created and shared based on experiential coordinates rather than the conventional coordinates of latitude/longitude and street addresses. PDPal has pushed at the notion of mapping, attempting to transform the individual's everyday activities and urban experiences into a dynamic city that sh/e writes. PDPal engages the user through a visual transformation that is meant to highlight the way technologies that locate and orient are often static and without reference to the lively nature of urban cultural environments. "Your own city" is the city composed of the places you live, play, work, and remember. It ís made of the routes and paths through which you make connections. Your city is also about the meanings you ascribe to the places you inhabit, pass through, love or hate. You imagine those places and routes as more than a street address, or directions you may give. These places have vivid, metaphorical meanings and histories that PDPal allows you to capture and visualize imaginatively, effectively writing your imaginary city. > MOTIVATION In response to the plethora of mapping projects that have utilized GPS and measurable cartography, PDPal has been anti-geographic and anti-cartesian, preferring to experiment with the construction of relative, emotionally based systems that ask: what makes social or personal space. PDPal responds to the century-old idea of the urban explorer: from Baudelaire's "flaneur" (late 19th c); the Dadaists' public performances of nothing, sometimes called "deambulations" (1921); Benjamin's texts on the urban wanderer (1920's); the Situationists' algorithmic "derives"; Hakim Bey's "Temporary Autonomous Zones" that spring up in the cracks of urban regulations, and are opportunities for brief piracy of a place; and contemporary work in psychogeography - all deliberate projects of "getting lost" in the city, thus restoring it to a great dense space of wonder, not just a locus of labors.
more Julian Bleecker work samples: > work sample 1: WiFi.ArtCache (2004-2006) > work sample 2: MobileScout (2004) > work sample 3: WiFi.Bedouin (2003-2004) slowLab work samples:
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