ARTYTECHS PARLOUR

i-DAT

Port-Pods

Port-Pods is a audio distribution project for the public. On the day of the
festival a team of people with Port-Pod T-shirts will be offering free MP3
audio tracks for the public to copy on to their iPods and MP3 players.

The free tracks will be copied on to peoples iPods from the Port-Pod booth
which will be manned by team members. Alternatively the public will have the
opportunity to leave a credit card at the booth and borrow an MP3 player in
order take part in the Port-Pod Experience.

The Port-Pod tracks are part of an audio experience that turns a walk around
the extraordinary architectural spaces of Port Eliot into an aural
phenomenon. Listening 'stickers' stuck to particular architectural points
around the area will prompt people to play a specific tracks to listen to.
Immersive audio pieces that are derived from Port Eliot's history and
peoples relationship with the environment will provide an extraordinary
sensorial layer to walking through around the site. Tracks may include a
variety of narratives, spoken word pieces or stunning immersive acoustic
environments, all of which will be based on research with the visitors and
residents to the site.

By engaging with a technology that many members of the public have embraced
so readily, Port-Pods is an active means of distributing audio art to an
audience who will retain the choice to play and engage with it at their own
level. The audio files will be available for free download before and after
the event so that the experience has a life beyond the day.

Cheap, simple, exciting and using popular modern technology the project will
allow Port-Eliot to be 'seen' and 'heard' in a way that transforms peoples
perceptions of the place. The free audio files also prompt the public to
think more openly about the nature of the technology that they have invested
in, and encourages them to use it as a framework for engaging in their
environments and each other.

i-DAT is a creative playground for trans-disciplinary practice at the
interface between art, technology and science.
i-DAT aims to define and establish new fields of practice and
critical discourse in the context of emergent technologies and cultural
forms, new scientific paradigms, and new media art – telematic,
interactive, generative, architectural, technoetic, performative,
sonic, transgenic, transmedia.
i-DAT integrates teaching, research and enterprise, as well as other
creative output to disseminate its activities to its community and
wider public.
i-DAT comprises a group of artists, designers, historians and
theorists uniquely situated in a School of Computing, Communication and
Electronics that has its own high profile scientific research. It
supports doctoral and postdoctoral research at the interface between
technology art and science, and houses:
• CAiiA – the hub of the Planetary Collegium
• Trans-technology Research
• Nascent- Art & Technology Research