[ISEA2011] Paper: Carolina Paola Caluori – LazarilloGPS

Abstract

LazarilloGPS is an artistic project through which we make accessible touristic routes for tourists who visit a specific city on a wheelchair. It deals directly with references from net art, web support projects and interactive design related with social matters. It is a work-in-process that goes growing as far as the tours are made, dealing with social participation and great collaboration from wheelchair users. By the moment the project has been developed as from Media-lab Prado (Spain) at the Visualizar data base organization, and in Barcelona with help and funding from Obra Social La Caixa.

We propose the re-mapping of a city with the touristic tours thought for wheelchair user’s, offering them a new way of approaching and looking at the city. We work connecting and searching for data around the city and making routes over maps, to visualize the altitude in the different points along the touristic tour for people on wheelchairs.

The main objective of this project is to help with a new kind of tool for accessible tourism, mixing the practical and functional part of the project with the artistic side where we transform wheelchair users into real artists. They are the ones who carry the cameras on the wheelchair an on their head, transforming their whole moving body into video artists. With their participation we generate a web-based platform to visualize the problems and positive aspects with which they may deal while travelling. It all works through a Google-map api, and with gps technology with which we build a different conception of maps. This time one can see the altitude of the route along the whole trip and so analyse the problems found at a steep slope in the middle of the city with a wheelchair while making tourism.  lazarillogps.net

  • Carolina Paola Caluori, University of Vigo, Galicia, Spain.Medialab-prado, Madrid, Spain.       lazarillogps.net