Aware

3eyes & additional collaborators:Andrew Paterson, Aki-Ville Pöykiö, Markus Ort

Aware is a platform which allows for the publication and syndication of media. Its development focuses upon mobility and collective publication of media from networked mobile devices to groups of people rather than to other individuals. Aware explores the shift from users as consumers, to users as both creators and consumers of media. The Aware platform focuses heavily upon the contextual relationships between media contributions, including proximity, location and temporality. The platform employs a strategy of working from the lowest common technological denominator to maintain flexibility and inclusiveness; open-source solutions within propriety networks; human relationships and experience; context and situatedness.

Aware is designed to be used as both a design tool and a production environment, it has been built to support ongoing projects which actively explore the focus of the platform. Projects that have used the Aware platform focus upon socially-engaged arts, interaction/participatory design, mobile technology development, creative/commercial-research partnerships, and pedagogical workshops. As producers we have co-ordinated workshops and engaged in practice-led research; examining the merging of traditionally polar activities as ‘participant’ and ‘audience’ within the field of mobile-media based practices. Investigating how social groups might use pervasive networked media-capture devices, we are interested in asking questions such as: how/why they might use them? What existing practices can be augmented via the use of these new technologies?