Comobility in the Wild
Comobility in the Wild was a workshop for academics and industry professionals to develop a network and future research about collaborative GPS tracking (‘comobility’) in participatory art practice. Comobility is a key concept in my interdisciplinary research across participatory art practice, the sociology of mobilities and speculative software design. It refers to an emerging quality of networked GPS devices (e.g. smart phones), generated by the capacity to share visualisations of movement, and therefore to be mobile with other people at a distance. This emergent quality became evident in my Phd research : ‘Comobility: Distance and Proximity on the Move in Locative Art Practice’. This research aims to test this emergent quality in greater depth and breadth through both ethnographic research and new media art practice.
This workshop explored two ideas ‘Comobilty in Action’ (ethnographic research, visualisation and sonification of data from the iphone app ‘Comob Net’), and ‘Comobility in the Wild’ (ethnographic research, visualisation and sonification of data from Mountain rescue in Cumbria, and International Emergency Response teams based in Gloucester).
