project outline
how it will work
RFID interview
presentation history

Vicky Isley & Paul Smith
Research Fellows in Computer Animation & Computer Art
NCCA, Bournemouth University
t: +44 (0) 1202 966699
e: info at boredomresearch dot net

boredomresearch is represented by [DAM] Berlin

realsnailmail.net check out the model we are running at SPACE exhibition and submit a message to be picked up by a virtual snail in the gallery.

Tagged exhibition @ SPACE, London creates a platform for artists and audiences alike to examine RFID technology before its mass implementation, towards identifying new technological directions, social contexts and critical issues (6-21 October 2006)

components for RealSnailMail installation

Where an individual can visit the 'Real Snail Mail' website and email a message which travels at the speed of light to our server where it is entered into a queue. Here it waits until a snail wonders in range of a hot spot. The hot spot is our dispatch centre in the form of a RFID reader. This reader identifies the snail from the RFID chip attached to its shell and checks to see it has not already been assigned a message to carry. If the snail is available it is assigned the message at the top of the list. It then slips away into the technological wasteland. Located at the other end of the pond (in the case of aquatic snails) is the drop of point. When, or if, the snail ever makes it here, it is identified by another reader, which then forwards the relevant message to the recipients email address; once again travelling at the speed of light.

The website would communicate the service, encouraging users to consider the effort involved in lugging there message across the bottom of a pond by a diminutive mollusc and for this reason urging them to send a message of value. At the same time it would warn them that their message would suffer the perils of predation or interception on route.

Normally when we communicate by email the physical endeavours of our fingertips are followed by an uninterrupted digital transportation until our thoughts are emitted through the pixels of the recipients screen. All we are doing here is creating a physical and biological interruption to this flow, but we hope by doing this it may also interrupt, for one small moment, our understanding of communication, allowing us to explore notions of time. It may even enable us to take time rather than lose it.

The research & development of RealSnailMail has been commissioned by SPACE Media Arts, London and supported by the National Centre of Computer Animation, Bournemouth University.


back to top

how it will work?


snail with RFID microchip attached

In the installation version on each snail will be fixed a RFID microchip, the type that are designed for animal tagging which usually are implanted under the pets skin. These microchips work in the low frequency area between 125 and 134.2 kHz. We chose to use these chips as they are very small, light and waterproof (which will be particularly good for watersnails). We have looked into the possibility of using the ACG LF Multi Tag Reader as OEM board or as Plug-In Reader for mobile applications. If we decide to use this reader we will probably use Sokymat's Q5 12mm glass encapsulated tags. We are aiming to communicate the RFID chips and reader by using a Max/MSP or PureData patch. Each message that the snail picks up will be saved within a mySQL database.


back to top

RFID interview by Armin Medosch

What do you think about RFID in terms of its cultural-political significance?

One thing technology promises is speed, acceleration, more of everything in less time. Culturally we seem obsessed with immediacy. Time is not to be taken but crammed to bursting point. Most corporations use RFID for this reason.

As artists we are more interested in time. We make things that occupy time, that compute in time, that change over time. To experience these things you have to sacrifice time. Time that could have been spent achieving, pursuing or succeeding in some other preoccupation.

RFID technology is only of significance to us if we can use it to claim back some time that could otherwise be wasted doing something useful? It is our feeling that technologies are drifting towards the invisible. Giving us the opportunity to mystify in a way that encourages false but imaginative beliefs about what is possible. As a consequence we have been regarding the potential of RFID in terms of imbedding information, narratives and properties into objects that resonates with the way we either sentimentally or spiritually regard both inanimate and animate objects.

How does this (your thoughts about RFID) fit into a bigger picture about a digital and network culture? For instance do you think we experience a real paradigm change from industrial to information age? What are the key aspects of this change? Where are highly developed countries heading?

Change on this scale is to a greater degree insidious - when speaking to people about the project and talking about RFID there are those who think it futuristic and those who wonder why we are bothering with yesterday’s technology. Most things that can be done with RFID can be done as easily with a marker pen or even some juice from some brightly coloured berries and a finger like the art of cave dwellers using symbols to reference a larger piece of information like notions of 'scary + beast + big + attack + weapon'

Compared to the amount of encoding, data processing, sorting, shifting, registering, our brains do when we see an image RFID is only a tiny shift from the squashed berries. Also like cave dwellers we like to have something to worry about.

What is the role of artists working with 'new media' vis-a-vis the ICT industry and commercial creative industries? I would like you to answer this question in a personal way. What is 'your mission' as an artist working in this environment?

One of our aims is to build environments that engage our audience. In our recent online works we have explored how users can engage and affect a web-based ecology, changing quantities and properties for others. Working with net communities we have further explored concepts of ecology where users can influence the direction of the work. This model is closely linked with notions of positive and negative feedback used in artificial intelligence where the work’s community of users have a collective intelligence.

Another research strand that feeds into our process of work is concerned with belief systems. One of the qualities we feel is greatly significant in our work is the relation between the rules expressed in code and their perception and interpretation by an audience. We are interested in the apparent inconsistencies between a computational process and the cognitive perception of that process. For example a system can exhibit some of the qualities of a living system without being alive. We are interested in the sublimity in the sensation of life and how this can challenge our ability to critically discriminate between the product of an abstract mechanism and the spiritual qualities we ascribe to nature, humanity and art.

Why did you decide to propose an RFID project? What was your specific motivation in this case.

We were keen to use RFID tags to superimpose a narrative onto inanimate objects in a way that explored our tendency to endow objects with meaning and sentiment. Originally, we suggested the possibility of inserting implantable RFID chips into oysters for them to be turned into pearls. We know that the process of seeding pearls is a very specialist science. It involves a specially coated foreign body being inserted by a skilled expert. What appealed to us was the contrast between a cold technology with implications of surveillance and notions of value, sentimentality and identity. But also with how identity relates to power along with current concerns of identity theft.

After considering this idea further we feel that there are a number of likely drawbacks. Firstly it takes a number of years for a pearl to form. During this time the oyster needs to be tended and there may be a disabling cost implication here. There is a high probability of infection resulting in rejection and this would likely be dramatically increased by the size of the chip. An alternative would be to produce a synthetic pearl to encapsulate the RFID chip. However one of the key attractions of the seeded pearl is that it results from a biological self protection reaction.

Another concern we had with the above idea is how to place it in the public domain in a way that would engage an audience. While we were trying to resolve this issue we became more and more aware that RFID tags were being promoted based on their ability to 'speed things up', increasing efficiency, productivity etc. The concept, that we have now, puts forward a nice contrast to this obsession with immediacy and 'just in time' practice.

While considering the drawbacks of pearl seeding we pondered the possibility of a chipped oyster escaping from the farm, free but with an incriminating electronic tag. If we were to select a more mobile mollusc like a snail then we would have a free moving body (on the run) that could be identified and tracked. These contrasting images of a snail moving at snails pace and the promised efficiency and speed increase of RFID tagged products, being rushed to their destination, converged to become snail mail or 'real snail mail'.

back to top

presentation history

Research & development presentations:

2006
'Designing the Not Quite Yet' workshop, HCI2006 conference, Queen Mary University, London (14th September 2006)
SPACE, London (11th October 2006)

Research & development exhibitions:

2006
Tagged exhibition, SPACE London (6-21 Oct 2006)
The projection in the SPACE Gallery is a computer model created by boredomresearch, enabling them to test components they will need to build 'realsnailmail'. Please help them to test their not so real snail mail system by submitting a message for a snail to collect at http://www.realsnailmail.net

This project was built in Processing, thanks to Jeffrey Traer Bernstein (traer physics library), Michael Chang (vector library) & Yonas Sandbaek (savetoweb)



back to top