information.

this week's topic is Beyond the Computer Screen

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The pervasiveness of digital technology has a profound effect on the way we live. Our economic system, social interactions and perception of the world are increasingly mediated by technology. In a sense, everything can be translated into digital code. Much online work is about representing the physical world as a digital landscape - accessed via a PC and the Net. The development of portable appliances, with accessible wireless networks, extends online experiences beyond the confines of the mouse, keyboard and monitor.

How can mobile and pervasive technology enhance the ways we experience and interact with our physical environment and each other? Does technology inhibit or expand our sense of 'being there'? How real is virtual reality?

featured product :: www.proboscis.org.uk/urbantapestries.

www.proboscis.org.uk/urbantapestries

Urban Tapestries is a framework for understanding the social, cultural, economic and political implications of pervasive location-based mobile and wireless systems. To investigate these issues, Proboscis has built an experimental location-based wireless platform to allow people to access and author location-specific content (text, audio and pictures). Urban Tapestries is more than a history trail. It is a forum for exploring and sharing experience and knowledge, for leaving and annotating ephemeral traces of peoples' presence in the geography of the city.

Urban Tapestries allows people to author their own virtual annotations of the city, enabling a community's collective memory to grow organically, and ordinary citizens to embed social knowledge in the new wireless landscape of the city. People are able to add new locations, location content and the 'threads' which link individual locations to local contexts, which are accessed via handheld devices such as PDAs and mobile phones.

Sound is indelibly linked to memory - often acting as a powerful trigger for recall. Urban Tapestries offers users a novel way of authoring their own experience of the cityscape and communicating it to others via an album of memories structured around sound.