U. of I. Course Explores Using Technology to Encourage People to Walk

May 22, 2006
Champaign - These days, when people walk down the street “alone,” chances are they’re actually doing so in the company of remote others – connected by a cell phone. Or the tell-tale iPod cord extending from an ear means they’re otherwise focused, marching to the beat of their own personal soundtrack.

For better or for worse, our culture’s attachment to portable electronic devices appears to be here to stay. Meanwhile, everyone – from doctors and researchers to television anchors and newspaper advice columnists – is drumming into our collective consciousness the benefits of a simple activity that had almost become obsolete in our car-accustomed culture: walking.

This past semester, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a group of students from diverse academic backgrounds – from computer science and electrical and computer engineering to painting, photography and music composition – pooled their talents in a course exploring ways to merge the art of walking with the culture’s emerging passion for portable electronic gadgets.

The course, “Mobile Mapping for Everyday Spaces,” was taught by U. of I. art and design professor Kevin Hamilton, with assistance from visiting Canadian artists Simon Levin and Laurie Long, and Piotr Adamczyk, a U. of I. graduate student in human factors. The students’ experimental playground was fairly vast, consisting of the grounds around the U. of I. campus as well as a few off-campus sites. But their base camp was the Siebel Center for Computer Science, which, when it opened its doors in 2004, was billed as a “living laboratory” and an “integrated ecosystem.”

With its wireless networks, sensors, information panels and video walls, the center was designed to function not only as a home to the computer science department, but also as an incubator, where students and researchers could explore ways to combine physical and digital infrastructures with human interfaces.

And from the beginning, plans for the facility called for the integration of art. Not corporate or institutional art – not pretty pictures on hallway walls, but rather, edgy, experimental, immersive and even collaborative art and installations that reflected the nature of the work taking place within the facility.

Hamilton, who is among a new breed of visual artists who glides comfortably between the dual, increasingly interconnected worlds of art and technology, was tapped to serve as Siebel’s resident exhibition curator. For the past year plus, he has organized a series of shows at Siebel featuring work by emerging digital artists. Last summer, he co-taught a computer science-arts hybrid class that used technology to create a museum installation based on the work of artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov.

Hamilton said the recent “Mobile Mapping” course was an extension of a symposium he organized in spring 2005 in the art and design school called “Walking as Knowing as Making.” Both the symposium and the course explored the act of walking – which provides opportunities for observing and interacting with one’s environment – as an art form.