Workshop

Last summer I participated at a workshop organised by Mediamatic cultural institution from Amsterdam ,the name of the workshop was The internet of things and the main task of the participants was of beeing creator of possible future scenarios about the mergence of the virtual realm with the real realm and what could happen if real objects would be tagged and get linked to online data , so basicaly things would go onnline.
The questions that came up where related to the usefulness of these kind of tagging of the realworld objects. The ideea startde from one of the Bruce Streling esseys where he mentioned ideeas about taging objects and linking them to a geo positioning sistem trough radio vawes .
In the first day of the workshop there was a short presentation of the ideea behind the workshop and a presentation of the speakers ; Regyne Debatty that writes the blog we make money not art and is a repotret of things related to the field of art and tehnology ,Matthew Karau former reasercher at the MIT media lab, Heiko Hansen part of the duo Hehe that is a group focused on instalations and enviromental issues actions , Matthijs Kouw , Malcom Mculough that is a architecture professor at the Michigan university , and Rob wan Krannenburg that is a lecturer at ambient expirience design and has been a log follower of the ideeas realted to tagging .
In the seccond day we where divided in teams , got the tools for the workshop and we started working on the scenarios .
the tools where a Nokia 3220 with a reader , tags and the so named simbolic table a tool that is basicaly a table with a reader and any tagged object that is put in contact with surface of the table is imediatly reconize by the table the best example was to put on the table plastic toy pets that when connected to the table made sounds because of theyr tags so the table" recognize" the pets and because of the software with wich is equipped will make the sound related to that pet , if you put a pet like an cow on the table it will make the sound that a cow makes ..
in the third day we presented the projects with wich we came up and the results where interesting , by that I men that the first team tagged photos so when you crossed with the mobile phone over the tagged photos the phone imediatley recodnise the photo and gives exact informations related to that picture .
anauther team came up with ideeas related to the use of the simbolic table in conferences and to put tagged objects on the table and have a image that is produced by the table when it comes in contatct with one specfic oject , so the objects become carriers of two kind of tipe of informations , the first information that an object is carring is the so called formal information that is the information that our eye is perceiviing , and the seccond information is related to the tag information the information that the tag attached to the object is carring .
We came up with a project related to the tagging of information and we called our project Gaya a name taht in mitology means mother earth . we came up with this name because we started thinking at our project in from the position of a consultancy team ( as they used for the MInority Report movie with the purpose of creeating a more plausible future for the viewer ) and as a team that has to coupe somehow with ecological prblems that our society faces these days ...basicaly we tried to find some kind of tehnologicaly ergonomic solution .
So we studied the way that a tagging tipe of technology could be implemented in a turistical circuit because Amsterdam is a turistical city and the influx on the turists is quite big . So we thought about making a connexion between a tags and Flickr photosharing site ,in this way everyone who is linked to the Hostels or the hotel database can have acess to the users of Flickr and they can trace down previous users , we made a hiperlink between the database of the hostel and the users .
After the workhop we had a discution about architecture , tehnology , internet , ourselfes and society .
It was a n interesting workshop that made me think about a lot of things starting with the persons with wich I worked that where hypercolaborative, to the fact that we where 4 people from the states , 2 from ireland 1 from canada and two from the UK and anauther tree from Holland including me so it was quite an international biotope , to the fact that tehnologi and the things related to the internet are becoming more and more part of our lives and have a more and more important role on a personal level .