Well, things have changed a bit round here since I last posted anything. It's looking a little more slick.

I should have have been continuing with my UrbanAvain project but have been sidetracked by making this little film. 

This isn't a film about boxing... It's more a film about time.

On May 25th 1965 it was my Dad's birthday [well, it was every year] and he and my Grandad went out to see Ali fight Liston, so he later told me. The fight was in Maine, which I believe is 5 hours behind the UK so I have no idea what time the fight may have been screened here or what pub would have had a license to show it outside of the regular UK licensing hours in those days. Anyway, apparently they were slightly late getting to wherever they were supposed to watch it and, given the brevity of the bout, when they got there the fight was over. For some reason I believe that we were on holiday on the Isle of Wight. Neither of them are around to verify these facts any more and it was a long time ago that they told me so it could be that I am remembering it wrongly; but thinking about it recently [out of the blue] gave me the idea to try to make the fight last its full length.

I'm not sure if it would have been a 12 or 15 round bout but either way it should have lasted between 36 and 45 minutes [plus bits between rounds I suppose]. I've stretched it to 38 minutes. That's the 1 minute 40 it lasted plus a bit of pre-amble and the end celebrations on Ali's part. It's surprising how much controversy surrounds such a short fight and the extreme slow motion shows it to be an oddly contested 100 odd seconds. Not being a boxing fan I can't really give an opinion but Ali barely seems to fight, just the odd judicious punch. Fixed? Who can say!

The concept was inspired partly by Douglas Gordon & Philippe Parreno's "Zidane" and Gordon's 24 hour Psycho.

Stretching the clip that much has rendered any accompanying audio useless so I had to think of a 38 minute piece to add to it. I considered something akin to Underworld's contribution to the Frantic Assembly production, "Beautiful Burnout", also boxing based; but I needed something so much slower. The Beach Boys "Help Me, Rhonda" was, apparently, No 1 in the US at the time of the fight so I've stretched that to the same length and the result is, I think, quite haunting; almost Gregorian in parts.

The sum of the two parts means means that it may not last lomg on You Tube but as I acquired both the video and the audio from uploads to You Tube that probably shouldn't have been there to purloin in the first place, who would be to blame, huh? It would be nice to have a better quality version of the original footage and better software to work on it with, but this will do for now. 

Ideally this would be screened simultaneously on 4 screens surrounding a boxing ring.

I've finally made a start on the physical side of my UrbanAvian Project. I have been playing around with the stretched samples for a while now and had to decide how I was going to to present them in a way that I can try to convince someone to assist in creating the "life-size" versions I originally envisaged. What we have here is the following...

1 x Pair of cardboard mounted speakers

1 x Micro SD MP3 player 1 x

1x 1GB Micro SD card

Which I have assembled [everything inside the birdbox in other words] with the SD card containing an MP3 of one of the stretched samples. It isn't too loud but there will be 10 boxes in all, playing different samples, painted to match the plumage of the birdsong sampled [or at least the most prominent colour]. Admittedly this may well be black, brown or grey in most instances!

In an ideal world these birdboxes would be human size, so that individuals can sit inside and listen to the playback, and placed around a particular area to create the impression of territory; birdsong being a birds main method of staking a claim on its territory. I have been amazed in the past few years, living overlooking the South Circular in London SW2, that the birds around here make themselves heard over cars, buses, lorries and sirens [lots of sirens]. Not only that but it's under the flightpath to London's City Airport as well. It is not a quiet spot! Yet, I can hear blackbirds, robins, great tits, blue tits, goldfinches, crows, magpies, jays, those ring necked parakeets that made themselves at home here after the sparrows mostly cleared out; and soon the swifts will return, swooping around our 6th floor window.

So, until I can fund things on such a scale I will have to make do with ten bird-size pieces playing the samples. I'll get some snippets of each audio piece up on a SoundCloud page soon too. The "tracks" are [hopefully all spelt correctly]...

• Apus Apus
• Columba Livia
• Corvus Corone
• Cyanistes Caeruleus
• Erithacus Rubecula
• Parus Major
• Pica Pica
• Turdus Merula
• Psittacula Krameri
• Carduelis Carduelis 

I've yet to decide how long the pieces should be as they stretch to almost 30 minutes to get the effect that I am after. That being a representation of the noise that the birds have to sing over in order to communicate; hopefully an "orchestra of white noise" when all playing together. The volume of my test box isn't high, as I mentioned earlier, as there isn't any amplification used; although the pieces are EQ'd, the volume boosted and some ambient reverb added for effect.

The finished pieces should look like this "artists impression". I better get them all finished and think about how much the life-size versions are likely to cost to produce now.

Reading the March issue of the UK Wired I came across the article on, cyborg anthropologist, Amber Case. As I'm pushing my way through Non-Places - Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity: Marc Auge I thought the two may complement each other.

The, very brief, article mentioned Case's latest project, Geoloqi. It's a mobile and web platform that allows you to share your location and "to send a message to your future self. If you drop a note on the supermarket in Google Maps telling you to pick up tea, then when your GPS-enabled phone enters the store, you'll receive the note as an SMS. It's a button you walk into - a button in the air". Which, luckily, led me away from Supermodernity for a bit!

So, off I went to investigate the Geoloqi site. The Geoloqi app is in beta testing with the first release for the iPhone [running 4.0 or later], however, Geoloqi has Instamapper integration, which means that you can use Geoloqi, including sending yourself Geonotes, if you have a Blackberry or Android. The only difference is that you’ll have to use the Geoloqi.com website to leave yourself Geonotes whereas the iPhone version will allow you to do it from the phone.

So, I signed up, got an Instamapper key and downloaded and configured their GPS Tracker app. Once I was set up online and had connected my twitter account to sign in I started to test it out. mainly the feature that caught my eye in the first place; the geonote. You can leave a note on a block, neighbourhood, area or city. These all produce circles of differing sizes [which are scalable anyway] around the point that you wish to leave the note. Obviously the main problem in a city, especially London, is getting sight of enough satellites to get an accurate reading, so any chance of being able to attach a note to a specific address just yet is slim. They are intending to add automatic Foursquare check ins later so I'd imagine that may make it feasible to attach a  note to an actual street address rather than co-ordinates, whether that will make for more accuracy I can't say. I had mixed results. For instance I turned off the GPS Tracker whilst I was at work, where it last remembered me and when I got home I set myself some more test notes for the following day. In the morning I turned on the Tracker and before it could get it's bearings as i walked down the street it fired of an alert that I had a Geonote 4 miles away!

As well as the geonotes, if you keep the Tracker running all day you can see a track [unsurprisingly] of where you have been on your online map. You can also share links should you be involved in an activity that you might want to be tracked by others. You might also have a flat cell phone battery, but they have thought of that and there are tips on preserving it.

it's not slick yet, but the possibilities are there. the Foursquare auto check-ins show they mean it and other things like the ability to create your own layers [Look out Layar] which they will help you realise should you not be a developer or have the ability to work with the API.

What would I like to see? Well, a layer with the London postal areas as geo-fences would be good. The ability to add hyperlinks in your Geonotes too. I haven't actually tried this yet so may already be possible. Some sort of link to social bookmarking tools like Delicious or Diigo to create Geonotes from "geo-tagged" bookmarks, should that actually be possible in itself. There are a lot more ideas to be had here too.

So, who is Amber Case? Check out this TEDtalk, unfortunately the Velma look from the Wired piece seems to have gone though! ; ) or Amber's Posterous or this piece at caseorganic.com. And while you're at it checkout Aaron Parecki

It's been a while since I had a bit of a ramble about locational based servcies and the like. But since I got my hands on a Nexus S I've been pondering such matters once again. Previously I've mentioned my desire to have some sort of itinerary/alert facility on my phone. I had a look at Reqall for the trial period but failed to get it working satisfactorarily. I've started using Foursquare in earnest since too. I defected from Brightkite as its RSS feed just didn't work for me and I can get a nice feed from Foursquare to both my Google maps and My Google calendar. Good for keeping tabs on where you've been if such a thing takes your fancy! Plancast is something else I have looked at and should give a little more attention as it ties in with the Google calendar quite well. But it isn't really a calendar or events facility I'm looking for. Nor another method of recording where I've been.

I don't know what percentage of the many billions of web sites there are out there relate to physical places, whether they are businesses, museums, galleries etc. but those that do obviously have addresses in the real world. If I am putting the details of an event I want to attend into my Google calendar then I will invariably include a hyperlink to the website that relates to that place or event. The alternative is to bookmark that page using something like Delicious or Diigo and it is this idea that I think could be expanded on. Lets have a real life example shall we?

The other day a tweet showed up in my twitter stream about an exhibition at the Transition Gallery that I thought I might attend. The Transition gallery is located at Unit 25a Regent Studios, 8 Andrews Road, London E8 4QN. I bookmarked their website and added the following tags Transition GalleryLondon art E8 E8 4QN to do transition gallery

Shortly after the New Year celebrations I was discussing with colleagues where we had celebrated the event and a pub was mentioned, the Cat & Mutton, the address of which is 76 Broadway Market, London, E8 4QJ. This I tagged as Broadway MarketLondonE8 4QJE8to dopub

I have several options available to me here. I can search for all my "to do" tags, but that will bring up everything, be it in London or any where else in the world. More accurately I can search for my E8 tags as I have done here, http://www.diigo.com/user/stevewilde/E8, which brings up the seven items tagged with that postal area. This is good if I am planning my day out but it could be better. What if I found myself in the area for some reason, business for instance? An early morning meeting isn't as long as was expected, I don't have a lot of plans for the rest of the day and want to find something to do in the area [this is all highly unlikely to occur but it might do for someone!]. I can do all that searching malarkey on my trusty Nexus S, with the Diigo Power Notes app [which is pretty marvellous in itself] but I'm lazy. I want to be told where I wanted to go before I've even thought of it.

What if my bookmarks were treated as geo tags? I can already get an RSS feed of my E8 tags so if I could get the geo data into the bookmarks and had a GeoRSS feed as well I could place these bookmarks on a map. If I could also geofence the E8 postal area on that map and set an alert to SMS me [or an audible alert] that sent me a list of places in the vicinity that I am interested in visiting once I crossed that fence that would be excellent.

If businesses are coming to terms with Foursquare then surely they can be persuaded to include geo data [Micoformats?] in their web pages. Maybe some already do and I'm not aware of it; if so what use are they putting it to? It's the personalisation that I am interested in though. Sure this lists/areas could be shared via social networking sites in a similar way that sites like GPSies share walks/journeys but ultimately the idea is for personal itineraries minus the monetisation, although that is inevitably going to follow any geo-locational development.

I'll keep on pondering this for a while as I am also thinking of ways of taking art and music to the streets in much the same way and I know there have been some attempts at this already. There are many other areas that this could work too. Along the lines of the Museum of London's iPhone app. In liminal or "psychogeographic" fields. After all, the hardware is getting smaller and we all need to get out more.

So? Anybody got any similar ideas? Augmented Reality needs to be considered too. I'm thinking of Diigo, Google Maps [Latitude? Places], Foursquare, Facebook Places, Layar, Junaio... What else? Who is developing their apps for personal customisation, who is linking with who? Can this already be done? HOW!!!

Let's hear from you.

I'm just pondering the benefits of tumbl.in

I posted this link to my new Random Features book at Blurb

Added it as a Favourite tweet, obviously I've already connected by twitter account with tumbl.in, and voila its in my feed. Along with all my other favourite tweets. Alternatively I can select from any of my lists or from my main stream.

Not immediately a great benefit but if like me you check a lot of your twitter stream on the move and favourite those with links to check on a bigger screen later then having a specific list or links or adding them to your favourites means you can open up one and scroll you the web pages of the other links. Add the option to tag them and you've got a mini alternative to Delicious etc.

From the tumbl.in bar you can Like a page to Facebook or tweet it and you can see who tweeted the original tweet with the link in

I quite like it.

Just trying this embed a set thing I've just noticed. Won't work on Wordpress. Also, trying the Facebook Like button on Posterous

I rarely get a chance to compile a #FF [follow Friday] tweet. It's generally been a busy week and is the start of a busy weekend come Friday. But I took a little while to think about one this evening and came up with this Tweet

People and places: @GeoMeme @zentracker @liminalgeo @fugueur @geoapi #FF #liminal #locational #geo #LBS #history #walking Think about it!

It was mainly my thinking further on my previous comments on Locational based developments. We're seeing check-ins and Social Media developments and we are bound to see advertising but what about education, urban exploration, walking, history or the "psychogeographic" elements that could be exploited? With the Google Latitude API avaialable and the release of the Museum Of London's marvellous Street Museum app for the iPhone we might be heading somewhere now. So I feel a ramble coming on! [One I don't doubt I'm going to have to edit later!].

It's all looking a little Augmented Reality based to me but I don't think that waving your phone around in a big city to augment your reality is very practical. Not that I have anything against the Augmented Reality apps but what if locational aware devices prompted you to look at web links or texts/tweets that you received once in the vicinity of certain areas? Either pre-defined on a Google Map [or similar] by yourself or by a third party. Let's think of a scenario [I'm repeating myself from a previous post here but I think it's worth my while].

Suppose I have a weekend away planned. I want to visit a city to go to gallery or something. I want to have a meal out and I've booked somewhere to stay. I might arrive around midday and have tickets booked for a return journey late the next afternoon. If I visit the gallery the afternoon I arrive and eat out that evening then I probably have a few hours to kill the next day before my journey home. How do you fill that time?

I tend to meander. Set off from A and hope to reach B in an allotted amount of time... Passing who knows what? Well I might have a vague notion as to what I want to see but sometimes you are drawn down different paths. Something shiny catches your eye. A photo opportunity presents itself. What then? You either select a feasible area that might be covered in the time available. Three hours? Nine square miles? And maybe "pre-tag" the latitude/longitude of the places likely to be of interest to you in that area that will alert you of their proximity.

Failing that, maybe the "Internet of Things" could alert you? How's that going? Isn't everything supposed to be destined for it's own IP address come IP6? Aren't we there yet? RFID technology? Or is that destined for different things? I think so. Too near-field for this purpose I'd imagine as well.

The point of my "Follow Friday" was then, to maybe look at ideas that would bring those of us that like to pound the streets, for any reason, on-line looking for information. Or to get the PC bound outside interacting with the real world for reasons other than spending cash in a high street instead of on-line. It won't come as any surprise to anyone that has read this blog before that I do attempt to write some sort of post about anywhere I have visited.

So my need for geo-data is both historical as well as pre-planned. I like the ability to record journeys. What I don't really need is to broadcast my location in real time. While I don't have any Big Brother size fears of anyone knowing where I am at any given time I don't really need an application to let my friends know this. Sure we may find ourselves within the proximity of one another when we weren't expecting it but generally we'd have pre-planned a rendezvous!

So, much as I like the feature in Latitude it is the historical data that interests me the most. But what is Google, or anyone using the API, going to make of this data? They are going to sell me shit aren't they?

All I want is to be able to educate an app like this to check me in, a la Brightkite, whenever I stop at any location for a pre-determined amount of time. Or, as above to alert me when I am in the proximity of somewhere that I might find interesting or useful. Feeding my historical data into Google's new beta dashboard is a start. But how about the ability edit them more easily. Or to add blog posts/notes to these locations and then publish selected locations on a blog or similar?

Let's start thinking of other uses too. Location based art? music? theatre? there's a lot more there to be explored other than becoming Mayor of some check-in point.

If this get's even more rambling towards the end then blame Charlie Brooker and the Pipkins!

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We just got back from an "interesting" discussion on birdsong at the Barbican. I say "interesting" as although the speakers were knowledgeable in their field they weren't so hot at public speaking. Billed as a discussion on the world of birdsong and how it inspires musicians, composers and artists;  it involved musician and writer David Toop and musician Aleks Kolkowsi and was chaired by writer and producer Lindsay Kemp.

The purpose was to add some context to the Céleste Boursier-Mougenot commission in the Curve Gallery which runs until May 23rd. I am familiar with Toop's work from reading his Oceans Of Sound and Haunted Weather books. Kolkowski I was not at all familiar with. Toop gave a small plug to his forthcoming book Sinister Resonance and was very much of the opinion that birdsong is not something that humans will ever successfully replicate nor can we really train birds to copy us [apart from the obvious mimics]. Kowolski played us a few audio and video clips to argue to the contrary but pretty much proved Toop right. I wasn't convinced and nothing either of them said really put Boursier-Mougenot's installation into context. There is no attempt to incorporate birdsong into his work. It is incidental in that the work includes birds. Birds will sing! The point, surely, is the randomness of the instruments that the zebra finches land on.

The discussion would have worked better purely as a discussion of the Curve installation. Eventually the discussion was thrown open to the audience [of approximately 50 people] but there wasn't anyway to shoehorn any sort of comments on the territorial nature of birdsong that is of  interest to me. There were some references to the parts of birdsongs that are out of the range of human hearing and of slowing recordings down to pitch them lower so as to render them audible. Also a nod towards the pitch and volume of urban birds making themselves heard of the noise of city life. This would have interested me more than the arty performances but we only had an hour and suddenly time was up.

Sadly there was no time to visit the finches downstairs beforehand as we barely made it in time for the 7:00 pm start. in fact when we arrived a wind-up gramophone was warbling out a canary accompanied version of O Sole Mio and we thought it had already started. I think there was reference made to an accompanying info sheet but  being an almost latecomer I didn't see a copy or take any notes like many of the audience.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89Kz8Nxb-Bg]

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63 eggs laid at the Barbican (guardian.co.uk)