It's pronounced "bee an nahl lay".

Continuing on from our previous chat with Leora Kornfeld of Ubiquity Interactive, we discuss the details of the metroCode Biennale cell phone tour.

How did the idea for Biennale come about? What are some great things about it so far, and what are some difficulties?

Our team describes our mobileMUSE project metroCode as, “Making the city clickable.”  The idea is being able to use your cell phone to interact with things in the city by ‘browsing’ and ‘activating’ them. 

The Biennale made a great partner to this. For 18 months, they’ve got some of the most conspicuous browse-able things in Vancouver, including 2 dozen sculptures by some of the biggest names in contemporary art on display in some of this city’s highest-traffic areas – Kits Beach, English Bay, Coal Harbour, etc. 

We had this amazing opportunity to create a cell phone tour / experience to accompany the Biennale.  The Biennale cell phone tour it’s anything but  a conventional audio tour. My thinking was that as the Biennale was public art being presented in public spaces that it should be talked about in a way that is accessible to the public.

I produced the cell phone tour and worked with two incredibly talented improv actors – Theatresports veterans Richard Side and Ellie Harvie.  A lot of formal research was done, and a lot of critical thinking was done of Richard’s and Ellie’s parts. We would record up to 15 minutes for each piece and then whittled them down to 1 ½  to 2 minute pieces, and hopefully we kept that feeling of spontaneity and the sense of listening in on someone else’s interesting conversation. We decided to go with a tone for the tour that was conversational, as opposed to curatorial.  We also built-in interactive features – voting, leaving your own comments via text message or voice message.

What would you have done differently?

I think that one thing I have learned from this experience is that when it comes to commentary about art, people have an expectation that it will be fairly serious. People tend to want it intellectualized and have a degree of formality. Even though the dialogues that Richard & Ellie created for the Biennale tour were based on research from UBC and Emily Carr libraries, the fact that it was presented as casual conversation/banter seemed to make people trust it less. At the same time there were a lot of facts and lots of interesting ideas explored in the interpretive dialogues. If our content was, eg, a tour of Gastown, that informal tone could have worked.  Or maybe if we did the bears around town — the ones in the pajamas, hockey gear, etc — instead of Biennale sculptures, then people would more readily accept a 'lightness' in the tone.

Sound interesting? Take a look for yourself online at http://www.metrocode.net/biennale where you can also find a map of sculpture locations to take the tour! There is also going to be a new and improved Biennale cell phone tour launching in mid-October, featuring text-messaging and multimedia messaging functionality.