URBANtells/Baltimore, '06
URBANtells/Baltimore
“URBANtells: Station North”
Steve Bradley, James Rouvelle and Joe Reinsel
Synopsis:
“URBANtells: Station North,” employs a network of handmade AM transmitters that broadcast the histories, tales, experiences and facts, both official and personal, that make up the Station North community. Visitors to the neighborhood will be able to listen to the different broadcasts by simply tuning an AM receiver to the common frequency of the transmitters and walking.
Description:
To accomplish this goal, we have designed a robust, inexpensive, and relatively simple AM transmitter that is connected to a PIC chip (a micro-controller from http://www.microchip.com) that controls an ISD chipcorder (RAM chip designed to store and play audio files from http://www.winbond.com ). We are going to conduct interviews and do research into the district and “seed” the PIC/ISD chips with audio content that speaks to the past and present of the neighborhood as described in the introduction. The audio content will be comprised of interviews with historians, and local residents in their own voices. We would like to maintain the piece for a series of years, and to insure that residents will have the opportunity to attend workshops where they will be taught how to build their own transmitters/PIC/ISD circuits, and to add their own content to the network. In addition, a website will be created to provide residents with details about how they might participate.
Visitors will be encouraged to wander the neighborhood (maps will be available via a website, and kiosk, and will be updated as transmitters change location and come online) with an AM receiver tuned to the frequency of the transmitters (currently 1000Mhz is open in most of the city of Baltimore).
The idea is to provide the residents with a platform to express
and embed their neighborhood with their own content, and to connect with each
other by listening. Our goal is to reach out towards and into the community,
that the community will actively contribute to the content of the piece, and
that the content will change over time to reflect the current “character”
of the neighborhood. We are committed to working with the community to realize
our intentions of providing residents with a platform that they may shape on
their own.
Materials (thus far): micro-controllers, AM transmitters AM receivers (any one will do), ChipCorders, php,mysql, GoogleMaps API.