On Friday the 14th of March 2008 ten ’street radio’ nodes went live in Southampton narrowcasting.
Hidden Histories – stories from Southamptons Oral History Archive selected and arranged to correspond with the location of the 10 nodes.
Participants started to meet at around 11 am at the gallery cafe in Southampton’s Civic Centre. There they received maps of the Hidden Histories trail and those who needed them could borrow little FM radio receivers.
The underlying technology has been developed by Hivenetworks over the past 3, 4 years. The technologically creative mastermind behind the project is Alexei Blinov. For many years he has supported artists by finding technical solutions for their ideas. This time it was the other way round, as the basic concept behind Hive Networks is based on ideas and research carried out by Blinov, supported by a network of collaborators and friends. Blinov conceived the idea of a network that is not just a carrier of information but one that sees hears, smells, and which automatically adds new nodes and drops them if necessary, a hive of little devices which interact with each other and the public. While similar ideas have been emanating from computer science labs such as the MIT for the past 20 years, only now, through the drop in hardware prices and the collaborative efforts of free, libre and open source software developers, it has become possible for garage inventor outfits such as Blinov’s Raylabs to experiments hands on with a DIY approach to ubiquituous computing. The concept of Hivenetworks was created by the artist-engineer Alexei Blinov with the proposition that it should enable media artists to create complex public art works without having to get into the deep end of technological development.
This is where Armin Medosch comes in.
The street radio set up deployed by Hivenetworks uses technology which people already carry in their pocket. Most of the newer mobile phones have bluetooth and FM reception. Having headphones, even small ones, really improve the experience. But that’s it, oiff you go and listen to stories from Southampton’s maritime past while taking a walk through the city, smelling the air, seeing radio masts of ships in the distance, being ‘disturbed’ by some live seagulls.
Extracted from The Next Layer.
