The money will be used to research and develop a system that will enable visitors to not only enjoy the natural surroundings but also artists' digital projects that respond to the settings.
Metal Culture, which provides innovative, multi-disciplinary residency space for artists, is leading the project which is supported by the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts.
The project, called NetPark, will involve the creation of a wi-fi service in a park in a park in Southend, and artists will be commissioned to produce new innovative works that visitors will be able to tap into on their mobile phones or tablets.
The project is one of 12 pioneering ideas to receive new grants totalling approximately £1.4m from the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts, a partnership between , and .
The 91¶¶Òõ will work in partnership with Metal Culture which is based in Chalkwell, the Southend park chosen for the project. The second project partner is the software services and app development company Calvium.
Frauke Behrendt, Senior Lecturer at the 91¶¶Òõ's Faculty of Arts, said: “We are delighted our project has been accepted. Our aim is to devise a fully-tested toolkit for locative media in public spaces. By toolkit we mean a set of joined up processes - commissioning new locative artworks, software, wi-fi gateway and analytics.”
“The project will demonstrate how to host and distribute work digitally in public spaces. We will produce a toolkit showing the key stages and development processes to turn a public space into a mobile and locative platform.”
School pupils and students from higher and further education colleges will be involved in testing the technology and to provide feedback on smart signage around the park and on events. In addition, there will be educational tours and workshops.
Frauke Behrendt said: “Increasingly, arts organisations want to devise projects that can be consumed by large, diverse audiences on mobile devices. The complexity of the production process often leads to works being over budget or unfinished.
“The NetPark toolkit aims to narrow this knowledge gap in terms of creativity, enterprise and technical knowledge and will support the process of developing new work that can be commissioned as a mobile device experience, building locative experiences using GPS for engaging narrative and non-narrative original works, and engaging artists to work across platforms, learning how to target a broad set of devices (e.g. iOS, Android).”
She added: “We are excited by this project and hope that this innovation could be rolled out in the future in parks across the country.”