Symposium

Tactical Sound Garden Toolkit
Mark Shepard
State University Of New York At Buffalo
http://www.andinc.org/tsg/

Summary
The Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] Toolkit is an open source software platform for cultivating virtual "sound gardens" in contemporary cities. It draws on the culture of urban community gardening to posit a participatory platform for new spatial practices and social interactions within technologically mediated environments. Addressing the impact of mobile audio devices like the iPod, the project explores gradients of privacy and publicity in positing a platform for public collaboration in shaping the sonic topography of urban public space.

The TSG Toolkit enables anyone living within dense 802.11 wireless (WiFi) "hot zones" to install a virtual "sound garden" for public use. Using a WiFi enabled mobile device (PDA,laptop, mobile phone), participants "plant" sounds (or “prune” those planted by other) within a positional audio environment. These plantings are mapped onto the coordinates of a physical location by a 3D audio engine common to gaming environments - overlaying a publicly constructed soundscape onto a specific urban space. Wearing headphones connected to a WiFi enabled device, participants drift though virtual sound gardens as they move throughout the city.

The TSG Toolkit is a parasitic technology. It feeds on the proliferation of WiFi access points in dense urban environments as a free, ready-made, locative infrastructure for cultivating community sound gardens in contemporary public space. Access points producing the WiFi signals used to determine the location of a participant may be open or encrypted, and need not be "owned" by those deploying the TSG system. Where the presence of WiFi access nodes is minimal, gardens simply consist of plantings along a sidewalk. Where a local density of nodes exists, gardens potentially take the scale of a neighborhood. In cities where wireless networks are pervasive, gardens potentially extend throughout the entire city.

Biography

Mark Shepard is an artist and architect whose cross-disciplinary practice draws on architecture, film, and new media in addressing new social spaces and signifying structures of contemporary network cultures. His research focuses on the impact of mobile technologies and wireless networks on architecture and urbanism. He is currently Assistant Professor of Architecture and Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he is a co-director of the Center for Virtual Architecture.