capsules

I visited Gunpowder Park on Monday afternoon with my girlfriend, Charla. We met up with Keith Watson there, the Field Station Manager for the Park. Keith showed us around the grounds, which look for all the world like long-established meadow land, but which in fact have been completely remade in the last few years. Gunpowder Park used to be a weapons testing facility, so the old, contaminated topsoil had to be replaced and then all the carefully-planned species of plants planted.

My impression of the Park was that of verdant pre-civilization. A blank slate, not in terms of nature but in terms of human culture.

Keith mentioned his interest in mobile phone-based network services that allow the user to associate SMS messages with specific geographical locations (utilising their mobile phone’s Global Positioning System). Charla, who works as a drama therapist, was much taken by the idea of being able to, as it were “etch in the air”. I posited a network whereby users could leave rich media (text, sound, images, video) “capsules” at any location within the park and “discover” other capsules simply by moving around the landscape with a mobile device.

I gave some more thought to this concept yesterday. I realised that the Gunpowder Park website could be developed to centre around this digitally-enriched landscape: an interactive map could allow the user to move around, zooming in and out, and to discover the media “capsules” at any given location within the Park. What could be really exciting would be to have the whole web site integrated into this virtual landscape, so that the various strata of information about the place (history, info about the organisation, plans and forthcoming projects and events, “capsules” from previous projects and events and so on) would all be accessible through the same map (while being clearly differentiated from one another). In this way, the web site could become an extension of the physical site.

Capsules could be accessed according to various combination of criteria: not only location, but also date and time, media type, the capsule creator’s name and so forth. So, for instance, one could revisit a location one year on from a project held there and build on what was created one calendar cycle previously. Or perhaps work with the sound capsules stored at the location from each of the four seasons of the year. Or work with video material created by a particular group in various locations from the same time period. Imagination is the limit!