PDPal is a public art project built around the PDA (personal digital assistant), using it as a mediating and recording device that reactivates our everyday actions, transforming them into a dynamic portrait of our urban experience. At the core of the PDPal application is an "Urban Park Ranger"(UPR) - an individual software persona who, once downloaded into a PDA, encourages the owner to log her momentary experiences (actions, proximities, and perceptual phenomena) in iconic broad strokes as she moves about her environment. The UPR helps to create personal and idiosyncratic maps of our "Temporary Personal Urbanisms."

PDPal provides the tools to create maps as place-based memory shells or to stand in as a narrative shorthand, marking personal intervals of place and experience, which can be uploaded to a central website and shared as a kind of "communicity" blog -- a virtual city of individuals who share a subjective and poetic language with which to express their locales in ways that can render visible the invisible.

At present, an alpha version of the PDA application is available for download, and user feedback is welcomed.

PDPal will be presented in ten public kiosks in New York City in Summer 2003 through Creative Time's public beaming network.

PDPal was co-commissioned by Creative Time and the Walker Art Center, and developed in residence at Eyebeam Atelier in New York.

Thanks for help and advice from: Jake Barton, Nancy Nowacek, Mark Podlaseck, Carol Stakenas, Sara Diamond, Steve Dietz, Anne Pasternak, Duggal, hi beam, Palm, and ORG.