Petra and I were invited by Atau Tanaka to collaborate on a locative media project presented at Sony CSL's Intensive Science symposium. Net_Derive was created with the support of ClicMobile for the 10 year anniversary of Sony CSL, Paris held at Maison Rouge in Paris on Oct. 6, 2006.

A short description from the website is

• Their work sets up social interactions, supported by mobile phones and internet technologies, within a loose network of people that are exploring a city, in this particular case the urban environment around the exhibition space near the Bastille in Paris. From the paths they take and the experiences they have, a collective narrative emerges which is fed back through audiovisual means to each participant and thus shapes their evolving experience.

The piece consists of a real-time audio/visual representation of the participants' paths through the gallery's near surroundings. The representation is realized in the gallery space as sound and video, and also streamed to each participant. Each participant is given a scarf that contains two of these cellular phones and this BlueTooth GPS module. The cellphones provide bi-directional audio visual streaming with the server that generates the sounds and images in the gallery. The GPS modules inform the server of each user's location, thereby affecting the generated music that is streamed to the participants and heard in the gallery. The participants' paths through the city are also traced in real-time in the gallery in various representations.

My role in this collaboration was to build the real-time software engine that produced the sounds and images present in the gallery and streamed to the mobile participants. Additional Flash visualizations running on the cell-phones and in the gallery were made by my man Jens Lofberg of cubedesigners. My notes as they appeared in the symposium program are here.

Petra made a video that is informative, as are the article on we make money not art dot com or Rhizome.