La Ville Interface Numérique

In spring 2008, current Attaya director (formerly member of Dånk! Collective) Lalya Gaye was in Geneva, Switzerland to hold a locative media and physical computing workshop called “La Ville Interface Numérique” (The City as Digital Interface) at the Immédiat post-graduate programme of the Geneva University of Art and Design.

During this 3-days-long workshop, she held a seminar about locative media (in particular mobile music and locative audio), hands-on tutorials in Arduino, Pd and other physical computing platforms, as well as supervised mini group projects where students prototyped small installations that created poetic disruptions of everyday life in public spaces:

• A bench telling people they have reached the “end of the world” (name of a Genevan neighbourhood – Bout-du-Monde) when they sit on it
• A discarded mannequin left standing upside-down in an empty pond behind a communal student house, that then talked like Marlene Dietrich to those who approached her, using speakers hidden in PET bottles spread on the ground
• Video-clips of people passing a door hyperlinked with barcode stickers to the places where they had been filmed.