May 22, 2007
Loca Art project tracks Bluetooth users
An art project called Loca is hoping to highlight the issue of surveillance in modern society by using Bluetooth technology to track people without their knowledge or consent. [via the BBC].
In their own words:
Loca is an artist-led interdisciplinary project on mobile media and surveillance; exploring the shifting boundaries between art practice, the event and data systems. Loca is grass-roots, pervasive surveillance; tracking the trail of digital identities that people leave through physical space.
Loca deploys a network of bluetooth nodes around the city that enable it to potentially track anyone with a bluetooth device and send them messages. The content of these messages is informed firstly by tracking data that Loca network has gathered about you, and secondly by urban semantics, (the social meanings of places that you have been).
Other aspects of the Loca project include maps that illustrate peoples habits as inferred by data collected by the Loca network, strap-on devices that alert users to detect otherwise anonymous bluetooth scans, stickers that allow people to record the presence of digital identities in their physical environment, and the surveillance/counter-surveillance ‘Loca pack’.
The Permanent Link to this page is: http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/2007/05/015999.htm
| Tweet |
