Residency BR/NL - Nimk / Vivo arte.mov

Vivo ARTE.MOV and NIMk are pleased to announce the results of the call for the two months artistic residency programme using a mobile platform. The initiative is pioneering in using specially designed street vehicles equipped with features of digital media developed in the cities of Amsterdam and São Paulo.

The criteria for the final selection took into account not only the conceptual quality of the projects, but also how the proposals responded to the goal of mediation with local communities on a mobile platform, as well as their unfolding prospects beyond the period of the residency.

The selected projects for the residence in 2012 were: "Project Jandig" by Angelo Moscozo (aka VJ Pixel) and "The City Talks" by Sander Veenhof.

"Project Jandig" is a research about markers to the visualisation of works through augmented reality technology in the urban space. According to VJ Pixel, “it is a collaborative digital art project that proposes to establish a kind of Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ) in the spaces where it is installed”. Intervention occurs when users interact with markers, using mobile devices to “open windows in the real world to view digital creations”, which in this case, would be works distributed through the Creative Commons license.

"The City Talks" is a project that revolves around the documentation of parts considered 'intangibles' of a city: stories told by people in the streets, in markets and bus stops. Instead of recording their thoughts and conversations and outputting these elsewhere using a documentation medium such as film, a webpage or even a mobile website, “The City Talks” produces output right at the spot. The city becomes the medium. Using geo-based augmented reality and a cartoonish way of displaying texts spoken by people, the stories come to live in their original context.

One of the decisive factors in the choice of the residents was the technological similarity of both proposals. The residents will work together in meetings in the Netherlands and Brazil, improving their projects from their different experiences in researching augmented reality (AR) systems. There was always a lot of expectations with respect to the aesthetic, social or functional promises associated with these systems. The forms of collaboration, involving public engagement from mobile platforms, and the use of open software in these projects, may ultimately prove to be a key differentiator, and is likely to indicate a distinctive step in developing these technologies.

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Selection committee: Annet Dekker, Annette Wolfsberger, Gisela Domschke, Lucas Bambozzi and Nimk + Vivo arte.mov staff.

The mobile platforms (mobile labs) were developed in Amsterdam by the Netherlands Media Art Institute (Nimk) and in São Paulo by Telefonica’s Programme Arte e Tecnologia (in partnership with Vivo arte.mov).