gps walking & video / sound / photo recording project (ideas)

I'm heading to New Plymouth this evening for SCANZ 2009 - Symposium being held over the weekend. so I've been reading about some of the participating artists and their projects. the intro for Brett Stalbaum gave me a few ideas for a * very simple * gps video project. below is the paragraph that triggered my thoughts - especially the phrase "letting voluminous GIS data and some algorithms we wrote tell us where to go"

steps
- in your local area, or a place where you can go to easily more than once (eg probably best to do in your own country not whilst overseas unless it's somewhere you can visit again)
- walk around the space once and collect the gps data
- then use (write first) a program - perhaps web based so you could use your mobile phone??? - that randomizes the data co-ordinates and selects a position for you to go to
- goto the gps point and then record video, sounds, photos, artifacts (if you're allowed to remove objects from the place)
- run the program again to select a new position
- goto the new position and make new recordings
- repeat this a few times (how ever many you would like to / have time for)
- then go home and collate the recordings. create a new work using the recordings you made in the order you collected them
- upload / share with others (if others are participating)
- each finished piece would be a new perspective as different recordings used and in different order - different views of the same places

from "Walking art and a short introduction : Notes for 60 Springs students" - by Brett Stalbaum - a SCANZ 2009 artist

"I promised Trudy that by way of introduction I would write a little about some of my other work and collaborations in the location aware media area. But now it is late, the 747 is over the pacific with bearings toward Fiji for my connecting flight to Auckland, so I will keep it short. In 1997 I was in graduate school at CADRE and fellow C5er Bruce Gardner was showing me his GPS device and some C software that visualized the tracklog of his bicycle routes. C5 would from time to time theorize about GPS, but with interests in AI, robotics, database and the emerging contours of what today is sometimes called the Big Data problem, we had plenty to occupy us. That is, until around 2001 when it became clear to us that GIS data sets were among the largest and most interesting of data sets, and that GPS could become a way of interacting with large data in a performative, generative manner in natural environments. So C5’s engagement with locative media began in a very different way than many other projects; the big data problem was the attractor. That led to, among other projects in what is called the C5 Landscape Initiative, Geri Wittig walking and recording the GPS tracks of iconic sections of the Great Wall of China, the development of statistical methods for finding the most similar terrain in a large database of California topographical data (myself and Amul Goswamy), and the application Artificial Intelligence techniques(2) to identify paths through those California environments where the Great Wall of China would mostly likely fit best in a topographical sense if it were actually moved to or recreated in California. Needless to say, a lot of backpacking was involved in finding some of those places. Strangely to C5, many took this project (cleverly titled "The Other Path") as a kind of data-absurdist or even psychogeographic gesture; letting voluminous GIS data and some algorithms we wrote tell us where to go. But it was anything but ironic or absurd to C5! We were and are still quite sincere about what we see as the possibilities of generative, algorithmic relations between big data and human movement across the landscape. In any case, generative walking is still a relatively underexplored territory for new work, even as generative design and architecture have become standard concerns for new media artists."