Datascape: A Synthesis of Digital and Embodied Worlds

Abstract

Digital and synthetic worlds are often conceived as self-contained entities that exist in abstracted and remote spaces. The author elaborates an approach to hybrid space that instead focuses on local contexts of digital information correlated with the embodied spaces people inhabit-an informational substrate that both describes and regulates human activity. The author presents a mobile interactive art installation as a way to bring geographically referenced information out of databases and into everyday experience of traveling through the world. Datascape enables a hybrid ecology whereby participants author dynamic geographic narratives that compose a digital world coextensive with the planet Earth. A vehicle-mounted digital periscope engenders action between passengers and a visual and sonic landscape that unfolds and emerges based on conversations between people, data, and dynamic representational entities that compose the landscape. By allowing people to view and interact with information descriptive of the location in which it is encountered, Datascape enables awareness of and engagement with the hybrid digital/physical spaces people traverse and inhabit in their everyday lives.

Getting our hands dirty (again): Interactive documentaries and the meaning of images in the digital age

“…Interactive image-makers are attempting to address life beyond the screen, as it were, entering the hybrid space between life 'offline' and 'online' (see Kabisch, 2008;De Souza e Silva, 2006). In a way, they seem to approach i-docs simultaneously as I would like to substantiate these notions through one last example; 18 Days in Egypt (hereafter 18 Days) is an interactive, crowd-sourced documentary created by the documentary film-maker and journalist Jigar Mehta and the interaction designer Yasmin Elayat.…”

“…Apart from experimenting with different modalities of content exploration, many interactive image-makers today are also extensively engaging with such technologies for the purpose of addressing social issues, of strengthening community work and creating momentum for social change. Interactive image-makers are attempting to address life beyond the screen, as it were, entering the hybrid space between life 'offline' and 'online' (see Kabisch, 2008;De Souza e Silva, 2006). In a way, they seem to approach i-docs simultaneously as an instrument of augmented reality and empowerment.…”

A hybrid cultural ecology

“…Milgram and Kishino, for example, established the notion of mixed reality as a "subset of virtual reality related technologies" in order to create a taxonomy of the various instantiations of technological systems that merge "real and virtual worlds along the virtuality continuum, which connects completely real environments to completely virtual ones" [26]. More recent approaches on hybrid realities are concerned with the ways in which various technologies and non-digital artifacts merge in different situations and across multiple systems [5,14,15,21,22].…”

“…Thus, in this paper, we moved beyond understanding hybrid practices as something new and arising from emerging ubiquitous and mobile technologies [22]. Online gaming in China provided a rich example of socio-technical practices that shape existing hybrids in the messy settings of everyday life.…”

Mixed reality interaction: audience responses to robots and virtual characters

“…In the twenty-first century, while virtual fantasy worlds still play a strong role in the popular imaginary, the separation between virtual environments and physical world has been significantly eroded. Mixed reality and augmented reality applications, where virtual images and information are merged or overlaid on the physical world and vice versa, are becoming growing technological, commercial and social trends (Milgram and Kishino 1994, Asuma 1997, Haller et al 2007, Crabtree and Rodden 2008, Kabisch 2008. We are now living in a mixed reality paradigm where the real and the virtual, the natural and the artificial blend and intermingle in complex ways.…”