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Presence: Amsterdam Realtime (2002)

Project Credits: Waag Society, Esther Polak and Jeroen Kee Amsterdam Realtime was an art project that captured the invisible mental map that every individual builds through interactions with the city. The project aimed to visualize these mental maps by examining the mobile behavior of the citys users. During two months, 3rd October to 1st December 2002, all of Amsterdams residents were invited to use a tracer unit that mapped their paths. The data was visualized real-time as an animation that shows the map of Amsterdam constructing itself, not from streets or blocks of houses but from the daily movement of its people. The visualization was a part of an exhibition on Maps of Amsterdam 1866-2000. After seeing a display of 150 years of cartography, the visitors are confronted with a map that is not determined by the cartographers vision but by the lived experiences of its citizens. Reimagining the experience of the first few days of the exhibition, when visitors walked into a dark room only to see their city composed of a few feeble lines, its shape and geography unrecognizable, one can feel how confusing and unfamiliar this must have been. Over the next few weeks, as the map grew and Amsterdam emerged from the random and haphazard collective movement of its citizens, it must have been an overwhelming feeling realizing that although Amsterdam is a physical conglomeration of roads,

Visualization of Movement across the city

http://realtime.waag.org/

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Presence: Amsterdam Realtime

buildings, plots of land, it is more importantly the sum of the actions of its citizens, who shape the city every day by using it. The tracer unit given to each citizen consisted of a PDA with a built in telephone, a GPS receiver and an antenna that could be extended and attached to the tops of cars or outside buses by using a magnet. This helped create an uninterrupted connection with the GPS satellites. The coordinates of the user were transmitted real-time to a server using the GPRS telephone network. The server transmitted the data to a computer that used Keystroke software to collect the data and render it as traces, projecting the image in the exhibition space. Over the three months as the map slowly took shape, spots on the map, which were visited or crossed often, changed from white to yellow to red, showing the intensity of use of these locations. The imperfections of GPS localization were consciously visualized by drawing distinctive lines only when a high degree of accuracy was measured. The traces were also tagged with the name of the person being traced. For the participants who shaped the map as well as the audience who witnessed this process, the realtime experience of seeing the map develop reveals how each individual has a different interaction with the city based on his or her lifestyle. The map gives a sense of the diversity of the city, where each person,

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Presence: Amsterdam Realtime

through his or her everyday life, creates a uniquely personal version of Amsterdam. At the same time, the map emphasizes the collective identity of the city. For the people who did not participate in the project, even the process of observation connects them with the narrative of the project, as they begin to correlate their own everyday experiences in the city with the lives of the people being traced. As much as they see the differences between the usage patterns of some people, they can probably also easily identify with the lives of many of the others. The map highlights the power of collective experiences, poignantly visualizing the role of citizens as active participants in the process of shaping a city. This project used locative media long before GPS technology became commonplace. It envisioned a future that was yet to come, creating a scenario that represented the positive and negative potential of locative technology. The voyeurism of being in the gallery and watching people moving through the city is magnified today with the proliferation of locative media and surveillance. Yet the project really represented a more potent shift in perception that was slowly being created by locative media. Not only did it radically change our notion of space, distance, scale and our relationship with the physical geography, it altered our sense of presence within the living fabric of our environment, by emphasizing the idea that we can claim the space of the city by actively asserting our presence within it.