[ISEA2009] Workshop: Jen Southern & Chris Speed — Comob: Social and Environmental Mapping

Workshop Statement

Comob is an experiment in mapping environmental footprint and pollution through the spatial and social relationships between people in motion.

Using the iPhone gps application ‘comob’ we will produce live, mobile visualisations of the movements and connections between people rather than each individual’s track. Using their ‘collective’ body to detect, describe and demarcate issues that are central to urban pollution, sustainability and community, groups will contribute to a collective mapping of subjective responses to the environmental characteristics of the city. By choosing to outline a space, or walk closer together and further apart in response to an urban system, participants will be simultaneously engaging in the discussion of both the subject matter and in the process of mapping it.

The relationships between people and spaces elicits a variety of responses, including intimacy, irritation, and exhilaration. We are interested in an awareness of where other people are, and the negotiation of a sense of place between people. This workshop will look at how those relationships can be mapped, as live and moving visualisations, and in the playful uses of group mapping that emerge through practice on the ground.

  • Jen Southern is a practicing artist and a PhD student in Sociology at Lancaster University, UK, and a member of the Centre for Mobilities Research.
  • Chris Speed is Reader in Digital Spaces across the Schools of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the Edinburgh College of Art, UK.

Full text (PDF) p. 72