Not “Where am I going?” but “Where haven't I been?”

This week has been full of excellent technology-related events here in Charlottetown. Tonight e.co. and I went to go see a presentation on Plazes at the Confederation Centre of the Arts. Here's Peter Rukavina's blog post about it: Link.

Felix Petersen, co-founder of Plazes, will drop in via video from Germany to talk about the history, development and future of the system. Felix will answer questions from the audience, so if you’re curious about Plazes, or just curious about bootstrapping a web system, bring your thoughts.

Felix will be followed on the programme by artist Don Gill who will talk about his approach to urban landscapes and his project Erratic Space created during his residency in Charlottetown this summer.

The event is free.

It promises to be an interesting night.

Plazes

Peter did a great job giving an introduction to Plazes in a way that non-technical people could 'get' it, what it's about, what you can do with it, etc. Felix Peterson was a very good speaker as well, even though we were only able to hear him through Skype.

What I took from it was the heavy emphasis on not reinventing the wheel and taking advantage of other existing open systems, and of user input. Instead of having a team of people in California entering in geographical data about every publicly-accessible wireless router in the world Plazes lets users who 'discover' a new location to enter in the information about its location and leave comments about it, and attach pictures to it using their existing Flickr accounts. In effect you get a swarm of users building up your database for you, and the issue of trust has played out rather well, I personally haven't run into a single inappropriately-tagged Plaze.

Felix described it as a wiki for geographically-centric data.

The crowd was a good mix of half technical people and half who came for the art presentation. But they seemed to take interest in the ability of Plazes to be used for purposes other than just finding free Internet access. Someone asked how it might be used for political and activist group organization, something those of us on the other side of the technologyfencee likely hadn't thought of.

Erratic Space

Don Gill then showed us a presentation on an art project he did based on walking around Charlottetown and collecting little bits of the landscape as he went along.

He made some very insightful remarks about the importance of walking to photography. I've commented in the past that having my camera with me when I go on walks makes me want to go places I haven't been before. Don takes this to the logical extension and makes scrapbooks of his journeys. The quote in this post title is from him.

He also made interesting use of technology by integrating video into his presentation, and using video as a way to show the depth of a scrapbook without having it be ruined when people look through them in an art gallery.

He also said that in his teaching art to students, he tries to avoid teaching them to use expensive tools like Photoshop that are cost-prohibitive to artists after they leave school. Instead he tries to teach them using tools that will be available to them in the outside world, and he takes a very democratic approach to the production of art. This hits the same philosophy as the Plazes developers had, they didn't go out and get a ton of venture capital money to spend on fancy equipment or overly ambitious content. Just build the tools for people to use themselves to build something great.
Technorati Tags: Plazes, Charlottetown, Art