Output details

A.E.S.O.P. (An Expanded Sense of Place). (Interactive, real-time installation. Exhibited at European Media Art Festival 2013, Dominican Kirche, Osnabreuch, Germany, 24 April – 26 May 2013.

The basis of this practice as research project began through Johnson's exploration and investigation of electronic media monitoring services, particularly news feeds that analyse and report on news and current affairs content. These are exemplified by services such as those provided by Google News Alerts, Meltwater, Moreover or Newsgator for example. These standard online monitoring services utilise ‘spiders’ to scrape information from websites (Magenta / Meltwater) and RSS aggregation (NewsGator) to organise syndicated feeds provided by the publisher.

This led to the development of A.E.S.O.P. (An Expanded Sense of Place) which utilises real-time, global RSS news data, fed to a network of 9 rotating led message displays within an interactive installation context. Acting like a compass the message displays point at different geographic locations whilst pulling news data from that location. The novelty of the project resides in the notion of “a mash up”, the utilisation or combination of two or more sources of information to create a new context. The project explores and questions the subtleties of meaning, broadcast truths and untruths and consequent distortions through juxtaposed information, whilst instilling in the viewer an ‘enhanced sense of place’ through unfolding global news events. Underlying hypothesis of this research is related to how information can be interpreted and how the reading of the “spaces” inbetween unrelated news events can lead to new but fictitious stories emerging.

Audiences can engage with the work at various levels, from the playful to the challenging in their reading of the ‘received’ information and its veracity or interpretation as a news story. Unlike Aesop’s fables these stories may develop seamlessly or suddenly fracture, creating new temporal and spatial associations in the participants mind, producing cognitive shifts and ‘an enhanced sense of place’.

European Media Art Festival: Mapping Time

Curators

Ralf Sausmikat, Herman Noering, Alfred Rottert