About the project

Introduction

Is there anyone you haven't seen for a long time but still think of?

The landscape for A Mutual Friend

A Mutual Friend attempts to explore how your mobile phone can act as a platform for cultural experiences; as a medium for reflecting on the human condition and as a means for making creative interventions in daily life.

The project sets out to propose and develop a mobile phone application which engages with the developing patterns of social behaviour in relation to mobile phones.

Increased mobility has brought about an increasingly disjointed relationship to physical and social space. The transit from home to driveway > car > side street > bypass > industrial estate to workplace and back can be sparsely populated. Public spaces are more likely to be areas of transit, weariness and solitude than of easy sociability, participation, frankness and debate.

The mobile phone has had an ambiguous role in these spaces, at once, providing a means to feel safe and talk to friends, while disrupting your attachment to those around you.

These are the spaces which A Mutual Friend aims to work in.

Phase 1

An initial survey of infrastructure and platforms, including 3G and GPRS/GSM. Our review spanned platforms for developing mobile phone applications (both Java and Symbian) and backend call-centre (PABX) software for managing communication among large numbers of participants.

The outcomes of this activity were to spread knowledge of developing on mobile phones throughout the team and to extend our jointly developed software platform that had underpinned previous projects on handheld computers, such as Can You See Me Now?, to also support mobile phones.

The early stages of this review also revealed the immaturity and lack of availability of 3G devices and networking in the UK at the time, which appeared to threaten our ability to deliver a public test as planned.

The solution to this problem appeared in the form of an invitation from the Government of South Australia, along with additional funding, to undertake a three month residency in Adelaide as part of their ‘Thinkers in Residence’ programme, to work with an experimental 3G network in order to create a public performance for the Adelaide Fringe Festival. The MRL provided additional support for MRL team members (Martin Flintham, Jan Humble, Ian Taylor and Steve Benford) to also travel to Adelaide to take part in the residency.

The creative research component of phase one mainly occurred during the first part of this residency, which was spent working in a new city with local artists and staging seminars, workshops and tutorials.

Phase 2

The second half of the residency involved developing and staging I Like Frank in Adelaide, a public performance based upon 3G technologies. This extended a previous work, Uncle Roy All Around You, building a relationship between street and online players as they journeyed through Adelaide and an online virtual model of Adelaide, exploring the themes of loss, memory and the crossing of boundaries.

This extended work in self-reported positioning where players declare their own positions to others, established new tools to enable artists to directly configure content by colouring maps, and developing new orchestration interfaces for monitoring participants’ actions and intervening where necessary [more]

Though I Like Frank was successful as a performance, it also highlighted the major challenge of A Mutual Friend - the problem of scalability. I Like Frank took a great deal of resources – people and technology – to deliver an experience to relatively few participants and over a very limited area.

In response, A Mutual Friend explored alternative approaches to creating location-based artistic experiences based on creating infrastructure and applications which could be implemented on people’s own phones.

Working with Leif Opperman, Dr Chris Greenhalgh and Mauricio Capra of the MRL, Nick Tandavanitj has developed mapping technology for mobile phone applications, including techniques for automatically sourcing and calibrating map data for different UK cities as well as ways of using GPS to map cell locations within areas of a city.

Working closely with Dr Adam Drozd of the MRL, A Mutual Friend developed a more open and scalable software platform, moving away from our own proprietary server software to open-source & generic web based server software (a combination of mySQL & php).

A Mutual Friend has also explored the potential of PABX and call-centre software to deliver scalable long term experiences, including installing and experimenting with Asterisk, an open-source platform that supports call routing and forwarding between mobile phones and also voice over IP, and that also allows the configuration of dial-up menu systems.

This work on new infrastructure led to two final activities in the closing months of the fellowship. The first was a workshop in December 2004 to explore the potential of these technologies to create new kinds of artistic experiences, carrying out a series of preliminary tests around the Nottingham campus.

The second was to develop a prototype mobile phone application called ‘Hitchers’ that might form the basis of a range of future experiences. A hitcher is a small program that can be created by a user on their phone and released in a given cell in the network. Hitchers pass from phone to phone and cell to cell, moving across the country, interacting with people and collecting information as they go. The creator of a hitcher can view its progress using an online interface, seeing where it has been, who it encountered and what it found out, as might people who have given it a ride.

Phase 3

Archiving papers and reports. The fellowship has contributed to a number of scientific papers and reports. The fellowship has also contributed to publicly available report on the Adelaide residency and I Like Frank that has been published by the Government of South Australia [more]