In the case study it was expected that the collaboration to create hybrid urban citizen would emerge. The creation of collaborative identity in hybrid environment, where people could see or follow their everyday parts of body tagged geographically, was expected to motivate people participating in this activity.

The results of that experiment indicated that it is quite a long process to foster active collaboration in creating such kind of online art. Probably there is need to establish user groups (e.g. photographer communities). From participants’ point of view the motivations to be involved in other people’s projects are quite low. It may be that people don’t bother to use all system’s social sites and often forget tagging. Probably the reason also hides in unsocial routes that lie in art creation (Democratic Innovation, 2009): not all people are interested in art and participation from the beginning (when there are no strong benefits for participation); they just want to observe, and see the results.

Therefore, there is need to find more motivations to engage participants and automatic, easy system for making the whole thing working. Besides it is suggested to create more interactivity such as linking the slideshows to original photo sources and Google or Flickr map, make slideshows downloadable etc.

Evidently, such kind of online art collaboration should consist of a lot more complex set of “attractors” and ways of motivations in order to get more active participants. Also, the visual results should inspire for participation from the beginning. The involvement in the experiment requires many boring actions to do, so another option for motivation might be a mash-up application that of course eases the process. There are possibilities to mash some social profiles and applications in one. For example, mixing Google maps with Flickr slideshows and create links to other narrative sources in this hybrid environment or let users upload images through Zannel email service. In order to compose a more participatory engaging system, it is needed to make clear and comprehensible application with attractive mission for users, so that it also could be used in another context, more interactive and beneficial for audience (e.g. as an interactive installation with screens and photo capturing technology).

HOW TO USE: you need at least your mobile phone, photo or video camera and flickr account. You can also use photos that you already have on your Flickr.

PS: If you want you can also use some other social tools like zannel.com, brightkite.com, ping.fm

They help with tagging, geo-tagging, and sending photos right from your mobile.

Step 1 take picture of different body parts
Step 2 upload them to your flickr account
Step 3 tag them
Step 4 add them to group www.flickr.com/groups/mixedbodies

Outcome: www.hot.ee/mixedbodies

TAGGING: you choose how you mark your photo! You have 4 options

#mixedbodies head
#mixedbodies right foot
#mixedbodies torso
#mixedbodies right arm

#mixedbodies head
#mixedbodies left foot
#mixedbodies torso
#mixedbodies left arm

mixedbodies.wordpress.com

#mixedbodies

About the project: the idea is very simple and I think it might be good point to start investigate how we can create art with web 2.0 tools and other point is to collect good data for the thesis. So your collaboration is really appreciated. Read more…

E-vent page

Another strange thing that some untagged photos are automatically added to particular set.

Tired part of the weekend, originally uploaded by olja levistova.

Tired part of the weekend, walking in old town after the party

It became very big  interest for me, cause it’s just what I’m researching for my master thesis.

As in previous projects there were less people on images I came up with the idea of new narrative using parts of bodies in urban environment and trace the dimension of urban hybrid being, thus research how different people perceive and participate. For this experiment common tag besides #narrativeecology is  mixedbodies and then for particular images – head, foot, torso, arm. In flickr you can easily organise photos in a batch (rotate, add tags, geo location to all needed pictures at once and send them to the group sets However it would be great to do it right from the mobile, but I don’t know how. At least to Zannel you can send pics from mobile with tags I hope.Also i discovered this plugin feature that connects Zannel to Blog but still trying to make it happen.

The flickr group is created and you are welcome to add your body parts.

Also knowing the results I’ll try to concentrate more on some new options of the system like using Zannel, facebook, maybe embed sounds, mapping, stimulate the collaboration, etc.

Additionally I found such sites as MyBlogLog (that seems to be like feed reader available to everyone and it’s little bit “scary” cause it displays all kinds of your social profiles on one page but still fun while you not publicate much private information) and Noovo Social sites that I haven’t mangaed to investigate well yet, but it seems they might be used in our new narrative system.

List of tools