FOUND

Great Circle is an audio visual iPhone app that we have developed for the Scotland Can Make It! exhibition (7 September 2012 – 13 January 2013, The People’s Palace, Glasgow)

Scotland Can Make It! is an exhibition of souvenir prototypes inspired by the London 2012 Olympic Games and the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games. It features six prototypes created by Scottish artists collaborating with Scottish manufacturers.

Rather than producing a physical souvenir we’re making a virtual one – an app for the iPhone that will be like an audio-visual postcard of Glasgow. When you open the app you will see an image and hear some music. Exactly what you see and hear will be determined by where you are in the world and by which direction you are traveling in relation to Glasgow, more specifically the Commonwealth Sports Arena in the east end of Glasgow. While the app is running the music and pictures will change depending on whether you are moving towards or away from the city. If you are moving in the direction of Glasgow the music and visuals will become richer and more complex and if you are moving away they will they will become more minimal and abstract. In order to experience the most complete version of the music and pictures the user will have to be standing in the Commonwealth Sports Arena. In effect our souvenir actively encourages you back to the place that it commemorates.

Our souvenir app is called Great Circle after the ‘great-circle distance’ method that we are using to calculate the user’s distance from Glasgow. It is a digital software application that doesn’t require any physical manufacture. Instead we are collaborating with Chemikal Underground who will act as the publisher for our app in the Apple App Store.

The app fits into a larger theme that FOUND are currently investigating: the music industry’s obsession with a definitive version of a piece of music. We are interested in exploring new ways of adding value to music and distributing it in formats that cannot easily be pirated. Our Great Circle app will provide a unique experience for each individual user every single time it is played.