Amble Time

Amble Time, the creation of Irish researchers associated with the now-closed Media Lab Europe, is "a digital map that provides visualisations of time constraints to help support decisions about where to go in navigating a city on foot." Using GPS (global positioning system) technology, the project differs from similar navigation tools in that its interface describes not only the shortest route between geographical locations but instead offers a visual array of journeys that might be taken during a given time period.

In one experiment, the researchers chose evocative passages from James Joyce's famous Dublin novel Ulysses to help guide Amble Time users through this Irish city. Rather than navigating directly from a place of departure to a destination, users were invited to amble through parts of the city for an hour, choosing locations referenced in Joyce's text. Upon arrival at a common destination, users were invited to reflect upon their journeys using another piece of interactive software called ("Polymorphic Letters") linking their commentaries to the locations they had visited, creating what the researchers call "neighbourhoods of narrative."

A paper discussing the project may be read here (clicking the link opens a .pdf document).

The Amble Time project (with its associated software, Polymorphic Letters) facilitates what lead researcher Carol Strohecker calls a "map with a sense of time." In a number of respects the project is profoundly psychogeographic because it invites people to wander the city with something other than their destination in mind.

If you are interested in psychogeography, you might want to read Anna Bowness' article, A Literary History of the Flaneur, which appeared in Spacing Magazine, No. 2., or Stephen Cain's essay, Annexing a space for poetry in the new Toronto, which was published recently in The State of the Arts: Living with Culture in Toronto (Coach House, 2006). If you are interested in walking, you might wish to read Rebecca Solnit's book Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Penguin, 2000).