This could be either a large-scale community art project or, if the cheapest route is preferable, some educated guesswork that results in a temporarily diverting animated gif. I’ll describe the former.
Select a geographical area that includes a range of man-made environments such as a grouping of a city, and the mixed dormitory and rural settlements around it. Give everyone – or at least a cross section representative of everyone – a gps tracker or similar. Persuade them to carry the gps tracker with them all day, every day, for a small number of days. Collect all the location information over this period of days and use it to plot a map of the comings and goings of these thousands of individuals.
Each carrier is assigned a point of light and, over a single-shaded map of the area, the data, once processed, should reveal amongst a myriad of hypnotic patterns, the paths of the commuters, from dormitory to CBD and back again, like blood through a heart, the static stars of those who died during the period and the circumscribed school and shopping runs of the suburban mothers.-- calum, Mar 08 2006 Commutation rhythms, captured with time lapse photogrpahy, are one element of this hypnotic film http://www.koyaanis...s/koyaanisqatsi.php [DrCurry, Mar 08 2006] gpsdrawing.com http://www.gpsdrawing.com/GPS Art Projects [Minimal, Mar 10 2006] Cabspotting http://cabspotting.org/getting there [calum, Apr 10 2006] Close to baked http://www.mysociet...6/travel-time-maps/though I can't tell, as being boingboing'd seems to have knocked their site over. [calum, May 26 2006] So simple -- use mobile phones instead! http://news.bbc.co....ci/tech/7433128.stm [calum, Jun 05 2008] Real Time Rome http://senseable.mit.edu/realtimerome/The clever guys at MIT had a project that looked at movements in Rome... [Jinbish, Jun 05 2008] Judging by the adverts for "Britain From Above" http://www.bbc.co.uk/britainfromabove/this looks pretty close to baked. [calum, Aug 08 2008] Also useful for locating local brothels, gambling dens, and drug purchase points. Irritated spouses would love it.-- Galbinus_Caeli, Mar 08 2006 //Irritated spouses would love it//
So would the police.-- skinflaps, Mar 08 2006 Sorta like Koyaanisqatsi, which you might enjoy, if you haven't seen it already.-- DrCurry, Mar 08 2006 Can I see this as an art form? Love it.+-- zeno, Mar 08 2006 also handy for tracing alien abductions. + for any artwrok that has random component-- xenzag, Mar 10 2006 Art, pah!
I think it would interesting to compare with methods used for mobile communicationss planning. There are many mobility models for use with mobile technologies, but I'm sure how they'd stack against a genuine, real life mobility model.-- Jinbish, Apr 10 2006 Ah. I never thought for a moment that this could have commercial applications, which was pretty short-sighted of me. I'll split the profits with you, 95/5, Jin.-- calum, Apr 10 2006 How's this haggling malarky meant to work?
94/6?
(10 for that? You must be mad!)-- Jinbish, Apr 12 2006 I can't find an anno on an idea that I remember making: basically, carry a GPS logger around with you for all your life, then publish all the movements as a sort of diary.
Sort of a similar idea, but for one person, and for longer.-- Ling, Jun 05 2008 "London, the crouching monster, like every other monster has to breathe, and breathe it does in its own obscure, malignant way. Its vital oxygen is composed of suburban working men and women of all kinds, who every morning and sucked up through an infinitely complicated respiratory apparatus of trains and termini into the mighty congested lungs, held there for a number of hours, and then, in the evening, exhaled violently through the same channels." -- Patrick Hamilton, The Slaves of Solitude (published 1947!)-- calum, Nov 11 2013 interesting art [+]privacy issues [-]-- Voice, Nov 11 2013 //privacy issues [-]
If you swap the GPS item with someone else, then the privacy of you and the other party is protected.-- not_morrison_rm, Nov 11 2013 random, halfbakery