Bleecker/Paterson/Zurkow
«PDPal»

«PDPal» is an ongoing series of public art projects for the Palm™ PDA, mobile phone and the web. It has pushed at the notion of mapping, attempting to transform your everyday activities and urban experiences into a dynamic city that you write. «PDPal» engages the user through a visual transformation that is meant to highlight the way technologies that locate and orient are often static and without reference to the lively nature of urban cultural environments.

In response to the plethora of mapping projects that have utilized GPS and measurable cartography, «PDPal» has been anti-geographic and anti-cartesian, preferring to experiment with the construction of relative, emotionally based systems that ask: what makes social or personal space. «PDPal» responds to the century-old idea of the urban explorer: from Baudelaire's «flaneur» (late 19th century); the Dadaists' public performances of nothing, sometimes called «deambulations» (1921); Benjamin's texts on the urban wanderer (1920's); the Situationists' algorithmic «derives»; Hakim Bey's «Temporary Autonomous Zones» that spring up in the cracks of urban regulations, and are opportunities for brief piracy of a place; and contemporary work in psychogeography—all deliberate projects of ‹getting lost› in the city, thus restoring it to a great dense space of wonder, not just a locus of labors.

(Source: http://www.o-matic.com/play/pdpal/#doc)