The Charting the Digital team will be making an appearance at the upcoming ‘Mobile Media: Making-Cooperation-Work’ conference in Siegen from the 19th-21st June 2014. As the conference organizers posit:

The growing mobility of people, data and infrastructures is presenting media with new challenges. Where virtuality was till the centre of attention in immobile use, smart-phones, in particular, are currently showing us how central social connectivity, contextual sensing, micro-coordination, and haptic feedback are to our understanding of media practices. At the same time, a variety of phenomena that could be understood as mobile media, such as map apps or connected vehicles, reveal that more and more infrastructures, goods and tools have to be digital and networked in order to make a mediation process possible, as actually portrayed with the Internet of Things. Thus, what this conference aims to focus on, is the specifities of certain media as forms for cooperation.

Led by Nanna Verhoeff, we intend to present on a recent collaborative experiment soon to be carried out in Oxford, UK. Tentatively titled Footage, the experiment is an attempt to bring together playful, navigational and temporal themes in a practical, urban setting.

More details are available at the conference website here. A brief outline is below:

In Footage we [will] use…playful and mobile methods to experiment with notions of temporality, mapping media and space. As a collaborative “experiment” it builds on the ideas of Michel de Certeau: of walkers’ traces and tactics and of spatial and navigational forms, conducted in teams in the city of Oxford as “laboratory” (May 2014). It aim[s] to engage with performative and playful navigational practice-based mobile methodologies and the development of analytical tools for analyzing these mobile and collaborative practices. In this (collaborative) presentation, we will present the goals and design of the experiment, and our experience as researchers working as a team and working with groups of participants.

This mobile game/experiment [i]s specifically designed to reflect on the way in which the city of Oxford holds time and how it comprises a multitude of differing temporalities. The interpretation of these temporalities is experiential – navigational and chronological versus networked and relational. In the experiment we [will] work… with different media maps (still images, moving-image footage, sound, etc.) that encourage…participants to think differently about the way in which you read these maps, experience navigating with them, and then respond to the different temporalities these inform.