'Lost Connection'


As part of the 2015 UBI Summer School in Oulu, Finland, I participated in the 'Design Fictions for Data Geographies' workshop hosted by Mark Shepard (New York State University), where I collaborated on a fictional narrative through a video production titled 'Lost Connection'.

Collaboration:

Irina Anastasiu
Heather McKinnon
Jimmy Paquet-Cormier

Programme:

UBI Summer School 2015 Oulu, Finland 

Workshop Synopsis

Information today is embedded within and distributed across a variety of urban and exurban geographies. It has become difficult to point to situations where information systems do not play a direct or indirect rle inthe disposition of physical features of the city and its surroundings. These geographies of information are increasingly driven by data -- the raw material from which they are formed, by which they are constituted, and through which they take shape.

This workshop aimed to probe the urban and exurban geographies of Oulu and investigate the role data plays in how they are organised, disposed, and experienced. In small groups, participants learned how to work with sensing devices and sampling techniques to collect data about the environment and how we inhabit it. Visualisations produced of this sensed data formed the basis for the production of short videos that attempt to reimagine our relation to these data geographies through fictional narrative scenarios.

 

Lost Connection

In our video production we developed a speculative narrative where real-time environmental data plays an important role in our protagonists' decision-making in her daily life. Different fictional design artifacts (a polaroid picture, a fridge, a plant, a piece of paper, a lightbulb, etc.) provide an augmented sensory reality where the effects of our actions have on the environment are fed back to us in real-time to raise environmental awareness and ultimately influence our daily routines.