Mark Shepard

artist, architect, Assistant Professor of Architecture and Media Study at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York

The Tactical Sound Garden Toolkit

The Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] Toolkit is an open source software platform for cultivating virtual "sound gardens" within urban public space. It draws on the culture of urban community gardening to explore new forms of social interaction within technologically mediated environments. Addressing the impact of mobile audio devices like the iPod, the project examines gradations of privacy and publicity within contemporary cities.

The TSG Toolkit supports the creation of shared social spaces within which people cultivate collaborative sonic environments. The project attempts to spatialize the practice of "playlist sharing" in the context of everyday urban environments as a means to transform passive mobile listeners into active participants in shaping the sonic topography of the city.

The Toolkit is a parasitic technology. It feeds on the propagation of WiFi access points in dense urban environments as a free, ready-made, location-aware infrastructure for cultivating community sound gardens in urban public space. Where the presence of 802.11 access nodes is minimal, gardens simply consist of plantings along a sidewalk. Where a local density of nodes exist, gardens potentially take the scale of a neighborhood. In cities where wireless networks are ubiquitous, gardens potentially extend throughout the entire city.

Mark Shepard is an artist and architect whose cross-disciplinary practice draws on architecture, film, and new media in addressing new social spaces and signifying structures of emergent network cultures. His research focuses on the impact of mobile and pervasive technologies on architecture and urbanism. His work has been

exhibited and screened at museums, galleries and festivals internationally, including Artists Space, New York; Conflux 2006, New York; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Queens Museum of Art, New York; ISEA 2006 / ZeroOne San Jose Symposium and Festival; Beall Center for Art and Technology, University of California, Irvine; Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art, Florida; Cyberfest, Boston; Hot Docs, Toronto, Canada; Viper International Festival of Film, Video and New Media, Basel, Switzerland; Impakt Festival, Utrecht, the Netherlands; and Arealle99 Electronic Arts Festival, Brück/Linthe, Germany, among others. Selected publications include "Situating the Device" and "working title: Industrian Pilz", in Shark, a Journal of Poetics and Art Criticism; and "Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] Toolkit", in 306090, a journal of architecture. He is currently Assistant Professor of Architecture and Media Study at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, where he is a co-director of the Center for Virtual Architecture.