Informationlab

How do you trace a cow in West-Africa?
Antropologists and media artists take up the challenge
Date: 29 june 2006
Place: de Balie, Kleine-Gartmanplantsoen 10, Amsterdam

I’m looking forward to attend the upcoming talk/workshop Mobile Habits organised by Virtueel Platform and Esther Polak. This mix of talkshow and workshop brings artists, designers and scientists and challenges them to exchange concepts and new working methods in relation to space, place and mobility. Locative media artists and designers will be opening themselves up to theories about mobility and space from the worlds of anthropology and social and at the same time social scientists are discovering the different cartographic and visualisation techniques found in the world of art and media design.

Mobile Lifestyles

Esther Polak is an artist working in the field of ‘locative media’. She is currently researching the possibilities of setting up a project in Nigeria with the Fulani, West African nomadic cattle farmers. Her initial research came up with a variety of people and researchers, including vets, anthropologists and social geographers, with a shared interest in mobile lifestyles. These various fields have come up with a number of innovative practical and theoretical tools that could be used to set up a project proposal with a well thought out, interdisciplinary basis.

Talkshop

The setting will be a ‘talk-shop’ – a cross between a workshop and a talk show. The morning session will focus on concepts and methods using a series of project presentations/case studies. The afternoon will be more interactive, with participants critically analysing the case studies in terms of what kind of insight they aim to generate – artistic, historic or practical.

Participants

Taking part in the workshop will be an interdisciplinary mix of media artists, designers and social scientists (anthropologists, social geographers) working in the field of place, mobility, storytelling and visualisation.

Speakers/support team:

Esther Polak

Esther Polak is a visual artist working in the field of new media. She is best known for two ‘locative media’ projects, AmsterdamREALTIME and the MILKproject. Both projects use GPS to ‘imagine’ the contemporary landscape. In both projects the participants were given a GPS tool to carry as they went about their daily lives. Their movements were mapped and the participants were asked to reflect upon the routes they had made. The projects resulted in large public installations. Esther Polak in constantly in search of new ways of researching space and can as such be seen as part of a long European tradition of ‘imagining the landscape’.

Christian Nold
Christian Nold is an artist and cultural activist who has spent the past few years mapping human emotions in the urban landscape. His research project is called Biomapping. It looks at the various ways that we as individuals can obtain information about our own body. Security technology has brought about a situation in which we are losing ownership over our own body and health. This project aims to give people access to their own biodata, to interpret and share it.

Hanne Kirstine Adriansen

Hanne Kirstine Adriansen is a senior research fellow at the Danish Institute for International Studies.
Her training is in human geography and she has fieldwork experience from West Africa and the Middle East. Her research interests include pastoralists and their use of mobility, dryland management, and community development. She takes special interest in understanding different people’s perception of concepts such as space and place.

Ab Drent
Ab Drent is a Master of Science in Rural Development and Management of Natural Resources in the tropics. His disciplinary specialisation is anthropology and ecology.

He has followed afoot over more than 500 km nomadic Fulani herders in the Extreme North of Cameroon during ten months. Drent has written an extensive case study about the transhumance cycle of a nomadic group and tested the suitability of traditional social theories to describe the relation between man and nature. He proposes two Actor Oriented approaches and Actor Network Theory as better suited to describe the complexity and unpredictability of nomadic mobility. In a related quantitative study Drent used GPS data to build a Correlated Random Walk model to investigate the relation between mobility and environmental factors. Currently he is preparing a project with Esther Polak to visualize nomadic mobility in alternative ways combining science and art.

For more information, www.virtueelplatform.nl/mobilehabits