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Visitors to the Audi Urban Future Award 2012 exhibition at Hasköy Spinning Factory in Istanbul might be wondering what the changing and shifting red–and–green dots on the huge screen positioned on the left side of the entrance are about. Until October 26, 2012, the closing day of the exhibition, a data visualization depicts the density and the movements of the visitors in each of the six cubes–five spaces exhibiting the competing architects’ visions for mobility in their regions and a sixth space about the Audi Urban Future Initiative itself. Mobility Tracking is the title of this project, and it tracks movements in each of the cubes – hence its name – to determine the popularity of the installations.

Mobility Tracking was conceived by the Istanbul–basedartist network Nerdworking, known for their interactiveinstallations in public spaces, and Plato Media Lab of Plato College of Higher Education in Istanbul. The collaborators had only seven days for production of the installation and adjustment of the software. "With a project at such short notice you can't even gather a team in time. We had to design an agile system, include many backups and improvise during several steps," explains Bager Akbay, a new media artist: "Thestrange thing is, it is as accurate as our previousexperiments." In each cube, the group used normalwide–lens cameras that they mounted on the scaffolds

to measure the density in each space during exhibition time. Their software system tracks the background for moving objects. It also determines the time the visitors spend walking around, and where they predominantly stand within each of the six spaces. However Nerdworking aren’t counting the number of actual visitors. "Instead, we try to understand the mass and the flow," Bager Akbay says. For the implementation the group entirely used Processing, an open–source programming language that is preferred by the developer community for generative visualizations and interactive installations. Moreover, Mobility Tracking solely consists of five Processing sketches, short software modules that were coded so that the different components of the installation could interact with each other. Each of the cameras takes a photo every two seconds and transmits the data over a wireless network to a system that detects the visitors. Then the data is shared through a Web connection with another computer. There it is analyzed and finally visualized. The data visualizations depict that–over the course of the first exhibition week–Superpool’s cube about Istanbul and Urban–Think Tank’s installation about São Paulo have been frequented more than the others. But we will know by the exhibition’s closing date on October 26 whether the winner too–Höweler + Yoon Architecture with their Boswash concept for the Boston–Washington D.C. region–is one of the most popular among Istanbul inhabitants and visitors to the First Istanbul Design Biennial. So far, we have also learned that this is an interesting project that tracks mobility within installations about mobility.

1st Istanbul Design Biennial Place: Hasköy Spinning Factory, Istanbul 

Event: Audi Urban Future Award 2012

Date: 11-26 October, 2012

Management: Erdem Dilbaz (Nerdworking), Bager Akbay (Plato Media Lab)

The simulation has been created as part of the exhibition Spoil of Riches – Stories of the Vrouw Maria and the St. Michel to be held at the Maritime Museum of Finland located in the grand Maritime Centre Vellamo in Kotka. The dates of the exhibition are 25 April – 02 December, 2012. The exhibition seeks to portray trading in the Baltic Sea area during the Age of Enlightment.

The work on the simulation is a continuation of work began by the Vrouw Maria Underwater Project in 2009. It is also part of the research done by the Media Lab Helsinki Systems of Representation research group on the theme of digital cultural heritage.

So far the virtual reconstruction has been publicly on display as part of the following events:

Design Museum, Helsinki, Fennofolk – New Nordic Oddity exhibition, 11 June – 28 September 2008

Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, Estrelas do design finlandês exhibition, March 2010

Design Museum, Helsinki, studio space, summer and fall of 2010

Lucca, Italy, Lu.Be.C. 2010 exposition and conference, 21–22 October 2010

Gallen-Kallela Museum, Espoo, Akselin aarteet (Akseli’s Treasures) exhibition, September 2012 onwards

The short movie presenting the pavilion was part of the Akseli Gallen-Kallela exhibitions of Museé d’Orsay in Paris and Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf in the spring of 2012.

Inside the pavilion model there are digital three-dimensional replicas of some artifacts that were exhibited in Paris. At the time they represented the best Finnish design, construction and crafting skill. The building was drawn by architects Eliel Saarinen, Herman Gesellius and Armas Lindgren.

The reconstruction process has been challenging since a great part of the artifacts shown in Paris in 1900 were destroyed after the exhibition. For example the frescos in the ceiling painted by Axel Gallén were not preserved. In the reconstruction process photos and other historical material have been used as aids to find out how the pavilion might have looked.

In addition to Aalto University, the University of Applied Sciences, Metropolia has also been involved in the project. The first part of the work was developed through HandsOn, a research project funded by TEKES Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation. In HandsOn new concepts, methods and metaphors for interaction in virtual reality environment have been developed.

In the reconstruction project new possibilities to present content in three-dimensional virtual reality environment in a museum space were examined. We have aimed at creating an understanding of how an installation like this fits in a space with a large amount of various kinds of visitors. Furthermore it was cultural-historically important to create a model of a building that does not exist anymore and that is significant from the point of view of Finnish national identity.