Research project

Internet of Cars: A Distributed Exhibition & Public Talks

Project overview

The academic team worked with SCAN, an arts/technology agency, to develop an exhibition in May 2014. The aspiration of the exhibition was to offer audiences and communities the potential to rethink how or what a future transport network might be.

Project partners included:

- John Hansard Gallery in Southampton
- Harbour Lights Cinema in Southampton
- Intech in Winchester
- Bridport Arts Centre
- Dorchester Arts Centre

A series of artworks were developed specifically by artists who have worked with 6ST (Sixth Sense Transport) data both collected from the project in real time and in the past:

- Polak and van Bekkum used live feeds from ANPR traffic data and Southampton shipping data to generate a sound landscape that plays the different paces of transport coming in and out, and around the Southampton area

- Lanfranco Aceti's artwork, 'Self-Driven' assumed that people can be cars. Aceti ran a series of workshops in which people adopted characteristics of cars and explored how 'being a car' changes how you relate to people

- Halford and Beard's piece entitled 'Router' was a short poetic film exploring the concept of a road traffic accident blackspot in the context of the routes tracked by the 20 ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Reader) cameras around Southampton City Centre

- Hollington & Kyprianou's work, 'The Car That Turned' was a road movie that's structure is derived from the patterns that emerge from data collected by the UK's ANPR system

- Shingleton's installation, 'Manifesting the flow of CO2' visualised emissions of CO2 based upon live ANPR data. As vehicles are scanned graphic clouds are visualised to represent the real-time flow of carbon between Dorchester and Weymouth

- Stanza's work, 'A New Order Beyond The Fourth Dimension' used robots that read transport data gathered through 6ST to draw the state of the transport systems around the South Coast.

In addition to the artworks distributed across the venues during the two week show, a series of public talks connected the 6ST research, including experts from the fields of computer science, transport, tourism, psychology and design, with artworks allowing the public and press to connect the abstract with the real, and the science with the experiences of modern and future transport. Using iOS and Android apps the public were able to spot themselves within artworks, installations and visualisations extending the impact of the work by making it personal.

Staff

Lead researchers

Professor Tom Cherrett

Head of Department

Research interests

  • Understanding and improving the distribution of goods and the management of freight vehicles in urban areas, including the supply of goods to hospitals and the use of consolidation centres; 
  • How optimisation techniques can be used to improve system efficiency and in what ways Intelligent Transport Systems (smart tagging of assets and the use of smartphones) can improve operating efficiency; 
  • Approaches to more effectively collect and manage the movement of waste in terms of both household domestic waste collection strategies, Household Waste Recycling Centre (HWRC) management and joint domestic/commercial waste collection strategies. He has worked on a number of research projects in these specific areas: (Department for Transport grant PPAD 9/142/034, ‘Optimising vehicles undertaking waste collections' GR/S79626/01, SUE project 55 ‘Transport and Logistics'; EP/D043328/1, ‘Green Logistics'.
Connect with Tom

Collaborating research institutes, centres and groups

Research outputs