A collaboration between Proboscis, inIVA and Birkbeck College, Snout builds on an earlier project using Natalie Jeremijenko’s robotic feral dogs, but presents a model of participatory sensing built on carnival.

I went along to the inaugral performance/demo in East London yesterday and it was a lot of fun. The initial two characters, Mr Punch and The Plague Doctor, wear specially-made costumes that incorporate wearable computers with sensors in their noses to measure carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, organic solvents plus acoustic noise levels. On returning to base with the data it is uploaded to the website, a grand mashup of google maps, flickr, planning alerts and others, all integrated using ning — this is the “scavenging” aspect (which I’d initially interpreted as being more like scraping).

Giles Lane of Proboscis pointed out that this modular approach is key to the project, in that any communities who want to do so can create their own version of the system, modified to suit their needs and reflect their own interpretation on the data and content. For example linking to more radical activist resources rather than petition websites.

I love the way this work brings together carnival and street performance, political activism and street protest, pervasive computing and environmental monitoring. I’ve been involved in most of these in the past, through playing with samba schools and other street bands, anti-war protests, street performance, busking, reclaim the streets, public art projects and of course the tech. But I never imagined that all these could come together in one project, so I find this particularly inspiring.

(Also, since February I’ve been working in a similar area for my final college project, albeit with a different take on sensing. I guess I should get around to blogging this…)

The forum afterwards was perhaps less focused on the project than I was expecting, but inspiring nevertheless, and Tamsin and I met some really interesting people. Giles was keen to point out that this was the first public performance , so I’m interested to see where it goes next.

See also: Feral Robotic Dogs (Natalie Jeremijenko), Air (Preemptive Media), participatory urbanism (Intel/UC Berkeley), and snout london flickr pics.