eRuv: A Street History in Semacode

eRuv: A Street History in Semacode

eRuv is a digital graffiti project installed along the route of the former Third Avenue elevated train line in lower Manhattan. The train line, dismantled in 1955, was more than just a means of transport; it was part of an important religious boundary — an eruv — for a Hasidic community on the old Lower East Side. Using semacodes, the former boundary is reconstructed and mapped back onto the space of the city. Pedestrians with camera phones can then access location-specific historical content linked through the semacodes.

What is an eruv? An eruv (pronounced ey-roov) is a structure erected around orthodox Jewish communites throughout the world. It usually consists of a series of poles connected by a cord that circumscribe an urban neighborhood, often incorporating existing municipal infrastructure such as utility poles and electrical wires. They are erected with the permission of local authorities and in accordance with the lengthy and complex set of architectural laws set forth in the Talmud. The construction of eruvin (or eruvim, plural for eruv) stems from the observation of Shabbat, the weekly sacred day of rest (Friday sundown to Saturday sundown) that includes a prohibition against carrying objects outside of one's home, or private domain. The reason Jews construct eruvin is, according to most Rabbinic authorities, that the shared public space within an eruv is considered the private domain of a community. In this way, observant Jews can carry their keys or prayer books on the Sabbath while acting in accordance with sacred principles.

Underground

The last couple of weeks have been busy with research on the project, preparing the ICA presentation, participating in the workshop at the Pervasive Media studio in Bristol. It is clear that the realisation will involve Flash bundled inside the M-Scape software, to enable the video elements and to interface with the web components.

I am currently participating in the e-mobilArt workshop week in Athens. There is the possibility of extending the Riverains idea to other cities in Europe-possibly Vienna with its extensive underground structures.

This is an exciting group of 34 media artists from across the globe working with location based ideas and a huge range of diverse skills so anything may happen! There are two exhibitions already arranged for Poland and Greece.

Manchester is literally riddled with hidden underground worlds, from the vast Victorian sewer systems to a giant nuclear command centre 500 feet below the surface. There are culverted rivers and canals, railway and tube tunnels, coal mines, secret passages, 2nd world war air-raid shelters and priest holes-all with a history and a litany of human pain and experience. This is the base metal for the project.

Introduction

Riverains Is a multi-user mobile story game, which collaboratively maps an imaginary world onto a cityscape. Riverains are souls tied to energies, running under our cities in rivers, cables, sewers and tunnels. They travel unseen by these invisible routes and cluster around sites of past unhappiness. Participants can use their PDA like a douser to discover this hidden world, which will correspond to real underground locations and sites of crimes, and, then use the Riverain’s overheard tales to map those sites and find clues and directions to others. One can play as a team and add one’s own stories and avatars. The team with the most completed online map will head the online league.

Avatars are everywhere from the internet to mobile surfaces, but not so far as meaningful locative presences. I wish to map the video sprites and stories across a large area of central Manchester. The project will also allow the public using a combination of website and GPS-enabled PDAs to create and animate their own evanescent video avatars, which will follow participants around, suddenly appearing at seemingly random times and places to participating individuals. They will emerge on screen and speak when automatically triggered by pre-tagged locations, which can be determined by other participants through a collective web interface. A dark map of the city will be progressively lit by a virtual torch or lantern as the teams or individuals discover the stories.


While a basic terrain and story map will have been placed online by myself in advance, the avatars will also be able to speak user-submitted texts using text-to-speech and lip-synch software and will be pre-designed on an accompanying website using existing avatar-generating software links (such as: http://www.verbots.com/ or http://www.gizmoz.com/)
The website will be the means to enable further texts to be submitted by the public and mapped to chosen locations. It is hoped that ultimately participants would also be able to create an animated 3D avatar simply by submitting a photo and text via their mobile device (http://www.seestorm.com or http://www.fix8.com/index.html )

The database will be form an urban map of user-generated stories, but an editorial level will be built into the project along the lines of the earlier Starshed project, which mapped tales of the uncanny across a city. (see: http://www.electricpavilion.org/media/projects/) and be visually similar to the installation Hosts (see:http://martinrieser.com/installations/hosts.html)

Manchester has a rich underground world of hidden or “lost” rivers, nuclear fallout facilities and command centres and 2nd world war bunkers, in addition to a Victorian sewer s and underground railway system. It also has an archeology going back through medieval to Roman times. The Riverains will be drawn from this rich history and from the City’s annals of poverty, industrial revolution, protest, gang warfare, gun crime and uncanny happenings.

The project will be researched and informed by references found both online and in several relevant books:

Keith Warrender, Underground Manchester: Secrets of a City Revealed

Geoffrey Ashworth, The lost rivers of Manchester, Altrincham : Willow Publishing, 1987