LKL Project Leader

George Roussos

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Jenson Taylor, LKL

Dimitrios Airantzis, LKL

Karen Martin, UCL

Giles Lane, Proboscis

Alice Angus, Proboscis

Orlagh Woods, Proboscis

Gary Stewart, InIVA

Helen Idle, InIVA

Project Web Site

http://socialtapestries.net/snout

Keywords

Body sensor networks,
privacy security,
public engagement

Download

snout (doc)

snout (pdf)

Outline 

Snout explores relationships between the body, community and the environment. It builds on our previous collaboration with Proboscis and Natalie Jeremijenko on Feral Robots to investigate how data can be collected from environmental sensors as part of popular social and cultural activities.

Scavenging free online mapping and sharing technologies as a form of 'guerilla public authoring', the project also explores how communities can gather and visualise evidence about local environmental conditions and how that information can be used to participate in or initiate local action. This project combines an artistic with an evidence-based approach, building and testing a prototype body sensor network that uploads data to the Ning social networking system. This will allow participants to map experiential and emotional annotations to their readings – adding a whole new layer of sentient knowledge to machine data. It is intended to demystify how data is collected, what it produces and how we can correlate it to other factors affecting health such as environmental pollution.

Background

Snout will create two prototype sensor wearables based on traditional carnival costumes. Carnival is a time of suspension of the normal activities of everyday life – a time when the fool becomes king for a day, when social hierarchies are inverted, a time when everyone is equal. There is no audience at a carnival, only carnival-goers. Snout proposes 'participatory sensing' as a lively addition to the popular artform of carnival costume design, engaging the community in an investigation of its own environment, something usually done by local authorities and state agencies