Andrew Zollie introduced the first session of the Pop!Tech conference. This is an event that takes place in Camden, Maine each October. Zollie is the host and curator of the Pop!Tech conference in the beautiful Camden, Maine—a place that inspires and moves the spirit with the changing colors of leaves, crisp, fresh air, and beautiful bays surrounded by trees that stretch for miles.

The guiding set of principles and theme of this years conference is The Human Impact, shaping the way we impact the mental and cultural environment. Attention this year is specifically on the psyche (what does it mean to be human, psychologically, biologically, emotionally), systems (the working systems of oceans, consumerism, agriculture, etc), and solutions what can we do to solve the problems that we face?).

On Wednesday, a series of sessions were hosted with topics ranging from Slow Food, Mobile Empowerment, The oceans, and Islam. Mobile Empowerment: Dialing Social Change was a Wednesday session with EPROM, Mobile Active, and Nokia. Here, KatrinVerclas from MobileActive.org, discussed major shifts and developments in how mobile technologies impact social change. Nathan Eagle is a researcher who talked about the Entrepreneurial Programming and Research on Mobile Devices (EPROM). He sets up learning and collaboration sessions called SMS bootcamps. Nathan leads SMS bootcamps to help establish new applications for mobile phone users worldwide, and to create a widely applicable mobile phone programming curriculum. Some excellent resources for Python development are available in the new book, Mobile Python and Nokia’s open source projects, here.

The first session today included two artists who deal with the communication and visualization of the vast amounts of data that surround us each day. Chris Jordan spoke about how we can raise a collective consciousness of our mass consumption, specifically through his “Intolerable Beauty” series which depicts images of industrial yards, car and cell phone dumps that show the enormity of consumer culture and the intensity and scale of mass consumption. He hopes to raise an awareness of consumption in the US and to create a visceral experience so that people can truly feel its impact enough to change the way things are taking place.

Christian Nold had a compelling presentation and has created an entirely new type of mapping—he uses emotion to map how the city impacts us, and how we are effected by our experience in the city. He uses Participatory Sensory Mapping, where he temporarily blindfolds and deafens people so that they can re-explore their local area without hearing or seeing—using senses such as smell, touch, and vibration. Nold additionally spoke about his BioMapping project, where he uses a gadget similar to a lie detector to read how people feel in specific locations within the city, and visually presents these feelings on maps. Farsi link