PDPal

To cover the world, to cross it in every direction, will only ever be to know a few square meters of it… tiny incursions into disembodied vestiges, small incidental excitements, improbable quests congealed in a mawkish haze a few details of which will remain in our memory. And with these, the sense of the world’s concreteness…no longer as a journey having constantly to be remade, nor the illusion of a conquest, but as the rediscovery of a meaning, the perceiving that the earth is a form of writing, a geography of which we had forgotten that we ourselves are the authors.

Georges Perec, “Species of Spaces”

Team: Julian Bleecker, Scott Paterson, Marina Zurkow

Additional collaboration: Adam Chapman, Shruti Chandra, Victoria Fang, Fang Yu Lin, Jen Panasik (Wheatley), and Austin Chang

Project Years: 2002–2004

Project Semantic Tags
APP, ART, TECHNOLOGY, PROGRAMMING, PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY, MAPPING

About the Project

PDPal was a series of public art projects for the Palm™ PDA, mobile phone, and the web. It challenged conventional notions of mapping by transforming everyday activities and urban experiences into a dynamic city users could write. PDPal engaged users through a visual transformation that highlighted how technologies of location and orientation were often static and disconnected from the lively nature of urban cultural environments.

In response to the many mapping projects that utilized GPS and measurable cartography, PDPal was anti-geographic and anti-Cartesian, experimenting instead with relative, emotionally based systems that asked what made social or personal space.

PDPal drew on the century-old figure of the urban explorer: from Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur; the Dada public performances of nothing, sometimes called deambulations; Walter Benjamin’s writings on the urban wanderer; the Situationist International dérive; Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zones; and contemporary psychogeography. These projects embraced getting lost in the city, restoring it as a dense space of wonder rather than merely a locus of labor.

PDPal used mobile and networked platforms as mediating and recording devices that reactivated everyday actions, transforming them into dynamic portraits of urban experience: a way of writing our own cities.

At the core of the application was an Urban Park Ranger (UPR), a software persona who, once downloaded to a PDA, encouraged users to log momentary experiences, actions, proximities, and perceptual phenomena in broad iconic strokes while moving through the environment. The UPR helped create personal and idiosyncratic maps of temporary personal urbanisms.

PDPal provided tools to create maps as place-based memory shells or narrative shorthand, marking intervals of place and experience that could later be uploaded to a central website and shared as a collectively invented city built from subjective and poetic languages that rendered both the visible and invisible.

PDPal was grounded in principles of experimental cartography, social geography, and locative media, a category of new media art explored intensely in the early 2000s, when portable devices such as the Compaq iPAQ, BlackBerry, and PalmPilot enabled mobile and sometimes networked computation.

Exhibition History

• Eyebeam, New York City, “Beta Launch” show and artists’ residency, 2002
• Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2003
• Transmediale, Berlin, 2003
• University of Minnesota Design Institute, “Twin Cities Knowledge Maps,” 2003
• Creative Time, Times Square, New York City, 2003–2004
• Whitney Museum of American Art, Artport, 2003
• Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada, “Database Imaginary,” 2004
• “Talk to Me,” Museum of Modern Art, 2011

Project History

V1.0 “Eyebeam Edition”

Presented at Eyebeam Atelier in New York City. In this first version of PDPal, users beamed the app to their PDA from an installation resembling a bus shelter with a two-sided duratrans display. Users entered criteria about their social, tactile, weather, and speed conditions, and the application returned a pictographic “haiku,” with room for a short text annotation. These haiku could then be shared by beaming them to other users.

V2.0 Walker Art Center Sculpture Garden

Commissioned by the Walker Art Center through its EAEM3 grant, a PDPal kiosk was installed in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden in summer 2003. This and subsequent iterations moved away from application-generated pictograms and instead introduced a fuller cartographic system of stickies, pictographic symbols, and parameters through which users could map their own city, with or without a Cartesian grid.

The kiosk contained a beamable PDA application through which users could map the sculpture garden. After syncing their PDA to a computer, users could upload their data to a website. The site extended the project further, allowing users to map Minneapolis and parts of St. Paul.

V2.02 Twin Cities Knowledge Maps

PDPal was included in “Twin Cities Knowledge Maps,” commissioned by the University of Minnesota Design Institute in 2003. Nine large interpretive maps were printed, offering views of Minneapolis and St. Paul through the themes of MOVING, WEARING, TELLING, RESTING, PLAYING, DWELLING, EATING, SHOPPING, and MEETING.

PDPal functioned as an experimental documentary, using symbols and short anecdotes to reflect diverse daily paths through the metropolis. On the reverse side, users could write their own city using PDPal’s recording system and a set of pictographic stickers.

V2.1 Creative Time / Times Square

Commissioned by Creative Time in New York, PDPal appeared in Times Square in fall and winter 2003–2004. It had three components:

Once every hour, a one-minute film was broadcast on the Panasonic Astrovision as part of Creative Time’s “59th Minute” series.

Two kiosks, one stationary and one relocated monthly, were placed in the Times Square area. Each kiosk contained a graphic map of Times Square and a beaming box containing the PDA application. Participants could beam the app to their PDA in order to map the area.

Two scheduled walkabouts were led by the PDPal team, Creative Time, and participants. People convened at Chashama Theater, formed teams, and carried out one-hour mapping missions before reconvening to share map narratives. Missions included acting as alien anthropologists, undertaking algorithmic walks, or investigating documentary aspects of the district. Glowlab participated in the first walkabout.

V3 Mobile Scout

To describe space: to name it, to trace it… Space as inventory, space as invention.

Georges Perec, Species of Spaces

PDPal’s third iteration, Mobile Scout, was an audio field guide that collected phoned-in narratives of local surroundings, personal rituals, and public sightings. Using a mobile phone, participants left voice messages with the Mobile Scout Ranger, an automated and eccentric naturalist persona.

Mobile Scout invited participants to look for rare or endangered species of landscape, character, and event, revealing moments that might otherwise remain invisible or disappear: accidental performances, a land developer’s crimes, or the wind encountered while bicycling uphill.

It defined “place” as made of social habitats rather than geography. Recordings were organized into an audio-visual field guide according to the type of space occupied: play, work, nature, culture, public, private, branded, or free speech.

Mobile Scout was presented in “Database Imaginary,” curated by Steve Dietz, Sarah Cook, and Anthony Kiendl, originating at the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre.

Press

• Rebuild Times Square, block by block on your PDA, Time Out NYC, Lisa Sweetingham
• PDPal Some Words by Denis Woods
• MoMA Talk to Me exhibition
• Stroll Down Memory Lane, With PDA, Wired Magazine

Wired article included below.

By Erik Baard 4-5 minutes 10/10/2003

NEW YORK — A new Times Square art project lets people map their insider knowledge, memories and ideas about city landmarks with their PDAs and share those anecdotes online. Just don’t confuse the project with the Zagat Survey — you might get lost in a thicket of strangers’ nostalgia.

Through Dec. 12, people wandering Times Square can wirelessly download a program called Personal Digital Pal, or PDPal, at a kiosk “beaming station” on 42nd Street. Once the program is loaded, users can record their wanderings by sketching the paths they took and writing commentary about the places they visited. When they get to a laptop or desktop computer, they pour all of this into a central website so others can appreciate myriad overlapping perspectives about the same sites.

“People using this will be like squirrels gathering nuts and bringing them back to the tree,” said technologist Julian Bleecker, who created the project with Scott Paterson, an architect and artist, and artist Marina Zurkow. Adam Chapman, an artist and programmer, aided with PDPal’s implementation.

“We want people to use their PDAs to harvest experiences and create another communal sense of the city,” Bleecker said. “The initial program download is available through the kiosks, rather than online, because it forces people to go to this physical space to get started and have these experiences. Times Square may be the most tactile, vibrating and resonant place in the world.”

This might sound like the vision some had of all places getting tagged with information by their GPS coordinates, but the artists decided not to use that technology. This was because of its relative scarcity and the difficulty of getting reception in Manhattan’s canyons of concrete, glass and steel. The artists’ decision was also an aesthetic choice.

“We wanted a more poetic application, rather than something so Cartesian,” said Paterson. “People don’t feel urban places in terms of longitude and latitude. One thing a lot of people talk about is the video arcades that used to be here, but they don’t necessarily remember exactly where they were.”

Times Square has been revitalized in recent years. New construction and a whitewash by New York’s city hall replaced strip clubs and seedy bars with flashy retailers and street-level TV studios. Even landmarks aren’t as immutable as they might appear: The Empire Theater on 42nd Street, known as the Eltinge Theatre when it opened in 1912, was lifted and slid on rollers 170 feet to the west in 1998.

Strollers through Times Square will be reminded once an hour to participate in PDPal by an animated mascot on the huge Panasonic screen at the south end of the crossroads. Panasonic is sponsoring PDPal along with Creative Time, a group that fosters convergences between arts and technology. An earlier incarnation of the program debuted at the sculpture garden of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

PDPal is part of a new technology thrust for the district, said Times Square Business Improvement District President Tim Tompkins. “For a hundred years, Times Square has been a showcase for huge-scale display technologies, but these kinds of micro-scale technologies have only been in people’s pockets for 10 years,” he said.

Tompkins said he would love to meet with technologists and artists to find more ways to use cell phones, PDAs or other devices to guide tourists through the neighborhood and give them a glimpse of the place’s history. “I would also love to see how these devices could be used for interactive functions with the mega-signs,” he said.

That mainstream vision of Times Square as a canvas of lights, however, drives home the artists’ point. Zurkow said that before working on PDPal she remembered Times Square as a “place to get fake IDs” when she was a teenager. And the project would have been just as exciting in lesser-known neighborhoods, she said.

“Times Square is where so many issues are concatenated, but to think to say that one neighborhood represents New York City more than any other is anathema to the project.”

Steve Dietz: You specifically refer to PDPal as a public art project. What does this reference beyond the fact that there is a potentially wide public? Julian Bleecker: PDPal is public in many senses. The more obvious aspects of its public nature are that there are channels of participation that invite active engagement by a large audience. The web is one channel, PDAs another. PDPal is also public in that its “subject”—those things with which its audience engages—is, generally speaking, places in publicly accessible physical locations that can be experienced in some fashion by visiting that place. A more interesting way in which PDPal is public is the way it allows one to share the experiences of these places. One can filter the maps PDPal creates by looking at those of particular users; everyone’s maps are available for anyone to view. This is perhaps the most evocative aspect of PDPal’s “public” qualities.

Scott Paterson: I tend to think of the term public as a spatiotemporal phenomenon. It concerns the experience of collectively constructing zones where we then act out roles as citizens of that public. PDPal is a public art project because it provides two platforms that support the collective construction of these citizen zones. Inspired by psychogeography, cognitive mapping, and Hakim Bey’s temporary autonomous zones, PDPal investigates methods of construction via dimensions beyond the latitude and longitude of geographic mapping, such as time, memory, and emotion. PDPal exists as a public art project in that it considers mobile devices and the web as constantly shifting ephemeral public spaces generated by the expressions of its population of users—a place we call the “communicity.”

Marina Zurkow: By public art, I mean it’s a project that is shared by many people in a public forum, open for others to witness and/or participate. It is public in the way it is disseminated, through kiosks both within institutions but also in the street, via beaming stations and free exchange between users’ infrared ports. I am not forgetting that it is not public for everyone (is any art?); you need techno-literacy and techno-access to participate. But it is not a piece to own or consume.

SD: Why did each of you first become interested in the idea of doing a mapping project?

JB: My interest in PDPal as a mapping project continues to be around the possibility of some sort of cartographic mapping of experience. I’m excited by the idea of maps that are able to refashion traditional boundaries of space—flexing political, economic, and even natural borders and instead bounding space along another entire schema of attributes. With PDPal, one can assign to places attributes and ratings, such as “frequently desolate.” What does New York City look like when such descriptions as these are mapped, and when the boundaries are between, say, blasphemous and dangerous zones, rather than two police precincts or the eastern side of a park?

SP: Having an architecture background, I’ve been making work that seeks the possibility for “architecture” as a protocol between the virtual and the real, that is an interface between the activity of our daily lives and the space of the internet. If we think of physical architecture as a social construct between our bodies and our world, we can also think of a dynamic architecture of information through which we can inhabit and demarcate place within any networked environment—such as the internet. Inherent to this type of work is the mapping of inputs to outputs. In this case the mapping is a kind of translation, an algorithm, an architecture.

MZ: I was first interested in doing a beaming wireless application that utilized character and explored a bridge space between the real and the imagined. This space was one I always perceived as being enriching narratively to both respective spaces, each bouncing off of and informing the other. Scott and I converged in our very different ideas about space and experience design, as I think very narratively (albeit as \[I am\] an experimental narrative maker, that thinking hinges on structure and arc, not on traditional unfolding of plot and conflict).

SD: Is the communicity a utopian notion or another form of data mining?

SP: I’d say it’s neither utopian, for the simple reason that we’ve not dictated the ideal goal, nor data mining, in that the input/output structure is open ended. Our role as artists in this project has been as frame makers. We’ve often discussed the spectrum between work that asserts and work that frames. PDPal provides a provocative frame through which users assert. If we now speak about what constitutes the identity of a place as opposed to space, we get into issues of the criteria for description. We can begin by talking about our senses—touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste—but we can also talk about memory, exposure, connectedness, duration, all of which deal with time. If city building codes are legislation written by elected politicians, PDPal, for me, is a collaborative architecture that exists in a series of ongoing feedback loops.

MZ: The more that the project is framed through the use of instruction sets and specific “assignments” (as in a classroom context), the more the communicity has viable play and doesn’t simply call data mining by a glorified name. Currently, the communicity aspect of the piece is little more than simple data mining. But there are two ways in which we see growing communicities. The first is geographically based but very specifically framed. I wouldn’t call it utopian as much as eye-opening to the ways in which the city can be used, transformed, and examined. For instance, a communicity of anarchist users will have a version of the city that is meaningful to them: sharing locales, sharing impressions, and uses of space that are meaningful to a group at large—a group that may or may not know each other outside the virtual environment. A classroom of students could build overlapping cities that reflect their critiques of the present city configurations. Another user group might find the community to be the equivalent of a menagerie of transformed fantastic city parts, together making this beast that is the city in all its raging glory and dynamism. The second way in which we perceive the communicity is more like a utopian architecture project, and something Scott can address better than either Julian or I can, having to do with refigured space based on shared dynamic properties, confluences of data, and artistic reinterpretations of users’ flows (check me, Scott!). It’s a revisualization project that is really off the Cartesian x/y grid.

SD: Describe each of your roles in the collaborative process—both functionally and psychologically.

JB: Functionally, we were all actively engaged in the conceptual work that went into the project. We spent many, many hours hashing through the project’s motivation and what sort of meaning-making apparatus we wanted it to become. After the project had some conceptual underpinning, we became specialists. My role was the technologist, which meant that I did much of the general architecture of the “guts” of the PDPal system and, even more practically, did the programming for the PalmTM application and the middleware that constitutes what we refer to as the PDPal mothership—the online part of the application. I also worked closely with a really valiant and diligent team of researchers from Parsons \[School of Design\] who built the Flash application that is the front end to the web application: Austin Chang, Shruti Chandra, Vicky Fang, Frank Lin, and Jennifer Wheatley.

SP: Functionally I have been responsible for interface design, interaction design, and some production management of the website. I find I am often the linguistic glue between Marina and Julian because I have both a design and technical background. This has been interesting because I have to take into account both of their expertise in designing the interface and interactions. Marina and I work together on making sure the front-end design is consistent with the project goals and I work with Julian to make sure the schematics I’ve made are doable as well as meaningful. Through it all we developed some interesting working jargon so we had a check that we were all on the same page.

MZ: As Julian said, we all developed the project conceptually. This meant sitting around for hours fighting about how far out you can go with calling something a map, and what is feasible in software development on a relatively small scale for minimalist platforms like the PDA. Functionally, I am the character developer. I designed the Urban Park Ranger and although we all contribute to and critique its manifestation, I am responsible for its realization. I also do all the motion graphics for the project (intros, trailers, etc.) and all the spin-off (be that T-shirts or an analog version of the project). I also spearhead giving voice to the project, though Scott’s been instrumental in contributing provocative language to the instruction sets and the phrasing of any textual components.

SD: I think the cartographic aspect of PDPal and its genealogy with the Situationists is clear, but I’m interested in how you think about the narrative/character aspect of the project. What is the role of the Urban Park Ranger beyond a help function?

SP: Every project has a voice or bias. It’s the artist’s prerogative to make this voice explicit or implicit. Much software-as-art work being done today has an implicit voice in the protocols inherent in the interaction, which is not readily apparent because the project is seen as enabling action rather than limiting it. The Urban Park Ranger on the contrary acts as a provocateur as well as a host to explain the particular bias of the software and in doing so inform the user of our critique of more traditional mapping techniques.

MZ: The world may be divided—somewhat unequally, I suspect—between those who need an anthropomorphic conduit and those who want their material straight up. I’m in the former camp most of the time. It’s been our hope that this character gives tone to the piece—a playful stance—and through its characterization as a park ranger/crossing guard, a sense that this “city” we’re trying to forge is populated. In addition, the character, by being developed as a system of malleable and morphing parts, suggests the flexibility of all of the parts within the established system of PDPal.

SD: Last question—three parts. I think one of the big issues with open systems is how to design a framework, as you put it, that is open enough to the spontaneous emergence of communicities but also encourages “good” input. What have you learned from the initial implementation at the Walker Art Center and what are you changing for the Times Square launch?

JB: I learned that there is a profound deficit that arises when attempting to simultaneously strive for technical and creative sophistication when one’s resources are constrained. Conceptually the project is rather sophisticated and I am afraid that way we caught ourselves in a bit of a language sinkhole. I describe the project to friends and colleagues using the various idioms we’ve crafted over the last 18 months—“locale,” “attribute,” “route”—all supernaturalized amongst “we,” but quite fast-and-loose when it comes to trying to give an elevator pitch to even clever folks. There’s constantly this “What is PDPal?” question, and it’s not meant to be a set-up question that one gives for the purposes of an interview. It’s a real question, and you can see the earnestness in people’s faces because they want to know what we’ve been spending so much time on. I’m hoping the changes we’re making to the Times Square evolution of PDPal—the ability to create a more literally connected dialogue amongst users, as well as the commissioning of PDPal maps of Times Square that are historically, culturally, geographically specific and that mark the many facets of Times Square in authored ways—will bring us to the point where that earnestness for an understanding of PDPal is satisfied.

SP: First, that it’s difficult to even overcome the perception of the PDA as a productivity device and, second, to transform it into a creative tool. We had to spend a good deal of time simply explaining how to use the PDA interface, let alone the PDPal interface. In the face of tabul(et)a rasa, most users froze up creatively. When given a very specific assignment, however, they more quickly generated a framework for remembering the basic functions, and when challenged by a specific point of view (e.g., the Urban Park Ranger), users had immediate entry into their own imaginative voice. For Times Square we have three directives to begin the experience. The directives grew out of research about Times Square’s past, present, and future. We plan to have mapping workshops with the various populations that inhabit Times Square during the run of the installation as well as invite a series of guest map makers as a catalyst for discussion. Lastly, we added a feature to allow users to comment on each other’s recordings, thus increasing dialogue and community.

MZ: I’d add that the directives we came up with—three questions—are distilled from thinking about the different ways a user interacts with a city: through time, movement, consumption, fantasy, memory, and projection. The questions we chose specifically for Times Square ask users to consider what and how they consume a place; what they remember and project; and what sort of transformative fantasies they have about the present—in other words, how they characterize that space.

The other thing we learned is that we no longer give total primacy to the software version of PDPal. We have made a one-minute film and several print versions of the project, having developed a core visual language that allows us to express it in a variety of forms, from the overtly interactive to the contemplative.