From their site:
Early in 2006 the founders of the NetNiet.org Foundation got together with the intent of organising an exhibition about net.art that took place in the streets instead on on the internet. The idea soon grew into the Wireless Festival 2006. The foundation would "promote wireless media art in public space" in all it's possible shapes.
The foundation has three principles which it tries to uphold as best as possible. All three stem from the idea that a broader group of people should think about the way wireless media are weaving themselves into our daily lives.
1. We want our products to be accesible using technological means that are mainstream and in everyone's posession. It's not until technologies become banal and everyday that we can truly understand them, and technologies like WiFi, mobile telephony and GPS have become so at an incredible pace.
To give an example: we don't want participants to have to install rare software of otherwise alter their devices. But we do want them to play with the bluetooth capabilities of their phones and learn to appreciate the rammification of this 'basic' capacity.
2. We want to keep costs down. When engaging the public at large, we want the experiences to be free or low-cost. This is not a problem, as we focus on technology that people already own. Besides, banal technology is often cheap anyway.A phone with bluetooth can be bought for less than 40 euros.
3. We want our work to be literally in public space. Everyone can walk the street for free, whereas certain venues always impose a certain social restriction. We want to be as barrier-free as possible.
In the end we want people to be aware of the of the possibilities of their wireless media and think about the ways it has become engrained in our daily lives. We want to to critically look at both the positive and negative possibilities offered.
Example project: TreasureMapper
Treasuremapper allows you to trigger mediafiles on a mobile phone depending on where that phone is in real space. This allows you to create spatial media experiences, often refered to as 'locative' media.
For example, you could create a detective story that requires someone to walk around town to discover clues. Taking a right turn instead of a left could have dire consequences in the story. You could create a romantic walk for valentines day in which you literally walk down memory lane. Treasuremapper was built to allow you to explore these locative possibilities.
The goal of Treasuremapper is to allow a broader group of people to create locative media experiences. Treasuremapper makes it easy to design experiences, compatible phones are cheap to buy, and the software itself is open source.
