Loca is an artist-led project on grass-roots, pervasive surveillance by John Evans (UK/Finland), Drew Hemment (UK), Theo Humphries (UK), Mike Raento (Finland). "In the inverted logic of the post-Orwellian city, Loca agents, software and human, decrypt the hertzian passages of its own inhabitants. For better or for worse?" Steve Dietz, Artistic Director, ZeroOne Click here to read full article about Loca   Film produced by Drew Hemment 2007. If film does not load view on: YouTube. Loca: Set To Discoverable A person walking through the city centre hears a beep on their phone and glances at the screen. Instead of an SMS alert they see a message reading: "We are currently experiencing difficulties monitoring your position: please wave your network device in the air." Loca engages people by responding to urban semantics, the social meanings of particular places: "You walked past a flower shop and spent 30 minutes in the park, are you in love?" The premier full presentation of Loca: Set To Discoverable at ISEA2006 and ZeroOne in August 2006 combined art installation, software engineering, activism, pervasive design, hardware hacking, SMS poetry, sticker art and ambient performance. Deploying a cluster of interconnected, self-sufficient Bluetooth nodes across downtown San Jose, the Loca art group were able to track and communicate with the residents of San Jose via their cellphone without their permission or knowledge, so long as they had a Bluetooth device set to discoverable. Over 7 days more than two thousand five hundred people were detected more than half a million (500,000) times by the Loca node network, enabling the team to build up a detailed picture of their movements. People were sent messages from a stranger with intimate knowledge of their movements. Over the course of the week the tone of the messages changed, "coffee later?" changing to "r u ignoring me?". A second element of Loca: Set To Discoverable involves Loca stickers, which are provided to make visible the traces of digital identities people leave behind. People scan for Bluetooth devices using their own mobile phone or laptop, by using Bluetooth in the usual way. On the Loca stickers they record the name of any uniquely named device they detect, and the time and date of detection, which are then stuck at the point of detection. The process is simple, and can be undertaken by anyone with a Bluetooth device. Other aspects of the Loca project include maps that illustrate peoples habits as inferred by data collected by the Loca network, strap-on devices that alert users to detect otherwise anonymous bluetooth scans, and the surveillance/counter-surveillance ‘Loca pack’. On the final day of ZeroOne a node left in the downtown Sainte Claire Hotel was taken away by San Jose Police Department as a suspicious object and "booked in evidence." Pervasive surveillance is potentially both sinister and positive at the same time. New ways of organising media and of communicating with each other become possible when the context of the media and the user is known. But also as a consequence ever more can be surveilled and ultimately controlled. Loca examines what happens when it is easy for everyone to track everyone, when surveillance can be affected by consumer level technology within peer-to-peer networks, without collapsing this ambiguity. It is an experiment that does not either blindly celebrate the technology, or claim that the technology is inherently bad. It aims to raise awareness of the networks we inhabit, to provoke people into questioning them, and help people equip themselves to deal with the ambiguity of pervasive media environments. Loca asks how do people respond to being tracked and observed? How ready are people to observe others? Who is the user, and how? Do we get fear of surveillance, disinterest, scopophobia or scopophilia? What happens in-between physical, embodied space and the digital space of abstract data? Don’t forget: all you have to do to participate in the Loca project is to set bluetooth to ‘discoverable’ on your cell phone. Lead participants: John Evans, 3eyes, Finland Drew Hemment, Imagination at Lancaster and FutureEverything, UK Theo Humphries, 3eyes, UK Mika Raento, Jaiku and Context Research Group, University of Helsinki, Finland Loca works independently from cell phone companies and other service providers.   Click here to read full article about Loca. Loca in the New York Times.. "LOCA ... is a surveillance project that talks back. A crew plans to plant some 30 Bluetooth scanners encased in concrete blocks at bus stations, in shops and at other busy spots in San Jose. Carrying a Bluetooth-discoverable phone within 25 feet of the scanners can trigger the receipt of a surprisingly intimate message like: 'You walked past the flower shop and spent 30 minutes in the park. Are you in love?' Such notes are not sent via text messaging but through a subversive technique called Bluejacking, in which a Bluetooth device's name is replaced with a short message meant to be picked up by neighboring devices. Part of the point is to catch people by surprise, jolting them out of their daily rituals with a Dada- worthy prank. Another goal ... is to show people how much data they may be revealing every time they turn on their phones. 'In an office you can shut the door for privacy,' ... [said Loca team member, Drew Hemment]. ''In conversation you can hide a facial expression. But with the new digital technologies, you may have no idea how much you're giving away.'' If this sounds more like an educational project than a work of art, Mr. Hemment does not seem to mind. He said he doesn't make hard and fast distinctions between the two: he considers LOCA a policy- minded research effort with the art serving as its public face." Jori Finkel, 'An Exhibition Where Paintings Are So Last Century', New York Times, August 6, 2006