Using Cellphones To Create Art

Boffins from MIT have taken anonymous cell phone usage information to create some interesting profiles of cities. Today the experience, infrastructure and morphology of the city are more closely related than ever before. It also provides designers, artists, and theoreticians a new means for engaging and understanding the city. Therefore, forget old ways to describe cities!

Digital Derive, as their project is called, harnesses the potential of mobile phones as an affordable, ready-made and ubiquitous medium that allows the city to be sensed and displayed in real-time as a complex, pulsating entity. Because it is possible to simultaneously 'ping' the cell phones of thousands of users - thereby establishing their precise location in space at a given moment in time - these devices can be used as a highly dynamic tracking tool that describes how the city is used and transformed by its citizens.

Previous initiatives, notably Laura Kurgan's 'You Are Here: Museu' (1996) and the Waag Society's 'Amsterdam Real-Time' (2002) initiated this process by exploring the qualities and potential of GPS technology. Digital Derive builds on an expands these efforts by using cell phone technology, for the first time, to radically increase the interactive capacity and number of users involved in the mapping of the city. Digital Derive (re)presents the city displayed simultaneously in the Kunsthaus Graz and in a publicly accessible website.

Axonometric view of cell-phone activity in Graz"

Posted to the site on 16th September 2005