Sébastien Pierre
Originally from France, I trained in both software engineering and design before moving to Canada 9 years ago. My interests span activism, politics, museography, information design, open data and technology. I have been publishing and contributing to open-source since 1999, and I believe above all else in in participation, free sharing of information, and the power of communities. I co-founded the local open data movement in Montréal and information design studio, FFunction, which is now in its seventh year. More recently, I started exploring how offline networks can change our understanding of information sharing, and how it can be applied to locative art and new media. I live and work in Montréal.
Presenting
Locative new media: connecting the physical with the digital
Invisible Islands is a locative new media project that poses a simple question: "what happens when information is anchored in the physical space?" Using offline networks powered by Raspberry PIs and open-source software, the Islands create a digital overlay that is only accessible at a specific location. Because they are disconnected from the Internet, the Islands create a surveillance-free data space for the community to exchange and interact on a social and creative level.
Invisible Islands was developed and deployed for the first time in 2014 in Aarhus, Denmark. The project was hosted by the Centre for Advanced Visualization and Interaction at Aarhus University and spread throughout the city in various urban sites, allowing for an initial exploration of offline networks deployment in urban space.
In the Montréal iteration of Invisible Islands in 2015, which was supported by the National Film Board, I worked with Canadian writer Daniel Canty to create a site-specific narrative where fragments of a story are woven throughout several points of the city's Quartier des Spectacles, Montreal's cultural center and former red-light district.
Many questions and challenges pop up when deploying digital devices in the urban space, from the legal grey-area to citizen engagement and how projects of this nature fit into contemporary discourse about locative art, site-specificity, activism, spatial annotation, place-based storytelling and mobile gameplay. In this talk, I'll share thoughts about my journey through offline networks, both from a technological, creative and societal standpoint.
