Cool project from the folks at ecoarttech:
Indeterminate Hikes+ (2011/2012)
Indeterminate Hikes+ is a mobile media app that transforms everyday landscapes into sites of bio-cultural diversity and wild happenings. Generally devices of rapid communication and consumerism, smartphones are re-appropriated by IH+ as tools of environmental imagination and meditative wonder, renewing awareness of intertwining biological, cultural, and media ecologies and slowing us down at the same time. The app works by importing the rhetoric of wilderness into virtually any place accessible by Google Maps and encouraging its users to treat these locales as spaces worthy of the attention accorded to sublime landscapes, such as canyons and gorges.
IH+ can be experienced in two ways: as a participatory public event led by ecoarttech-guides alongside our basecamp.exe installation or as a self-guided excursion taken by a hiker equipped with an IH+-enabled smartphone. Read participants’ responses to Indeterminate Hikes here.
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Indeterminate Hikes+ (IH+) was part of a project originally conceived for the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition, “Undercurrents: Experimental Ecosystems in Recent Art,” curated by Independent Studies Program Curatorial Fellows Anik Fournier, Michelle Lim, Amanda Parmer, and Robert Wuilfe, in 2010. The IH+ Android app was released in 2011 and the iOS version in 2012. Since then, IH+ has been enjoyed by hikers with smartphones all over the world and by groups of hikers lead by ecoarttech at the following venues: Museo y Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain; MIT Media Lab, as part of Upgrade! Boston, curated by Jo-Ann Green; “L.A.Re.Play,” at U.C.L.A. Design Media Arts Gallery, curated by Hana Iverson and Mimi Sheller; the Conflux Festival in NYC; 319 Scholes, in Brooklyn, during Bushwick Open Studios, curated by Igal Nassima and Lindsay Howard; and the Woodstock Digital Media Festival, curated by Joe McKay.
Upcoming performances in fall 2012 include “Art, Environment, Action!,” curated by Radhika Subramaniam, at the Parsons the New School for Design, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center NYC; “Wildernes 24/7,” our solo show at Syracuse University’s Warehouse Gallery, curated by Anja Chavez; re-new Digital Arts Festival 2012, Copenhagen, Denmark; “Tactile Media” Hondakin Festival, at Alhóndiga Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain; the International Symposium on Electronic Art on “Machine Wilderness,” Albuquerque, New Mexico; and the Feast, where we are collaborating with renowned physicist Geoffrey West.
An article by ecoarttech about Indeterminate Hikes+ is forthcoming in a 2013 issue of Leonardo. More info TBA.
Software development: Polina Koronkevich / Created with funding from: New York State Council on the Arts (Media Art Distribution Funds), New York Foundation for the Arts, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the University of Rochester.
