The Edible Landscape: Introducing Boskoi
Boskoi is a free, opensource mobile app that helps you explore and map the edible landscape wherever you are.
Perhaps the most intimate relationship we have with our living environment is through the food we eat. However in developed regions like Europe, this relationship is not so clear. This is particularly true in the Netherlands where the landscape is often highly urbanized due to densely populated cities . For the most part our food system appears as an abstract infrastructure powered by multinationals.
Born from a curiosity of what actually inhabits this urbanized landscape, FoAM (a research group and trans-disciplinary laboratory for holistic and speculative cultures) has built Boskoi, a service to rediscover the edible landscape. Boskoi is a free, open source mobile app that helps you explore and map the edible landscape wherever you are. Named after the Greek word for grazer or browser the app lays out a map of local fruits and herbs and allows users to edit and add their own finds. Boskoi is made by the foragers at Urban Edibles in Amsterdam; it combines the ancient skills of foragers with mobile media.
Boskoi makes wild food sources visible to us through its green arteries that signify their position on the map. It allows us to access an unseen infrastructure of wild food sources that is vital to the health of inhabitants of urbanized areas. It sends alerts on new finds in your current area and it is possible to add wild food sources to the map by phone, mail, SMS, tweet with or without uploading a picture.
Boskoi can be accessed through a website or Smartphone application for Android mobile phones. The platform is based on Ushahadi under an open-source license which allows anyone to adapt the service for non commercial alternative activities.
Boskoi was awarded an honourary mention at Prix Ars Electronica 2011. Version 2.0 was launched on the first of August and it is available via the website or the Android market.
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