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Locative Media n. describes a set of location-based technologies – wireless, surveillance, tracking and positioning technologies – that enable information to be tied to geographical space. These include Global Positioning Systems (GPS), mobile phones, wireless laptops, bluetooth, wireless networks and RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), WiFi1 and Global Systems for Mobile Communications (GSM); these enable people to locate themselves and others within geographical space, while also attaching information to geographical positions (by using the longitude and latitude received from the GPS device). Most modern mobile devices as well as having location aware capabilities are also able to access the Internet, allowing information to be stored and retrieved from remote databases. The mass proliferation of these technologies has rendered them almost ubiquitous.
Locative Media n. names the field/s of practice coalescing around artists and technologists who use portable, networked, location-aware computing devices for user-led mapping, commercial location-based services and artistic interventions in which geographical space becomes it's canvas.
The term Locative Media was initially proposed by Karlis Kalnins at the RIXC Centre for New Media Culture in order to distinguish the latter creative explorations of the medium from the corporate hype surrounding location-based services (LBS.)As an artistic form Locative Media explores the social potential of location-aware devices, inspired by the use of tracking technology and wireless media, human relationships, movement and identity, seeking to extend and reappropriate the functions of locative technologies by exploring ways in which they can be socially constructive and facilitate new dynamics to occur within everyday life.
The rhetoric of Locative Media as an artistic form gestures to a utopian near-future in which the digital domain and geographical space converge, and the course it plots towards this future demands not only that data be made geographically specific but also that the user - if not defined by their location - at least offers up their location as a condition of entering the game.
In this respect, not to mention its choice of tools, Locative Media operates upon the same plane as military tracking, State and commercial surveillance, its concern for pinpointing and positioning shared with coercive forms of social control
For most artists in this field the interest is in the consideration of how Locative Media might critique and challenge such forms of social control, and in examining the point at which 'the locative utopia rubs up against the dystopian fantasy of total control' (Hemment,2004).
It is also being developed and shaped by the commercial industries in the form of location based services, the government in the form of tracking and surveillance and by the public who are re-appropriating inherent functions of mobile and wireless devices such as Bluetooth and SMS (probably because both functions are cheap if not free) enabling new forms of spontaneous self-organisation to emerge which previously would have not been possible.
In its constructive collectivism, Locative Media marks both the power and the limit of new forms of surveillance, deconstructing the operation of technologies of political control by introducing moments of distortion or uncertainty at that limit, and in building open platforms offers the chance to reverse, multiply and diffract the gaze, suggesting the arrival of the locative dystopia might be interrupted by the emergence of its other from the spaces in between.
Locative Media has the potential to change the way in which we perceive and interact with the world around us, it facilitates the possibility of new forms of decentralized activity that challenge traditional hierarchal structures within society. Examples from around the world indicate how people are beginning to utilize locative technologies as a means of resistance and as a form of power. At the same time governments are utilizing locative technologies to usher in a new era of discreet and ubiquitous surveillance.
Engineering teams are working to create devices that will know where they are, know what objects and places are nearby, and be able to communicate with other devices and servers over new, standardized protocols, such that location becomes a new data type in our applications and on the Internet and World Wide Web.
Today, most ‘first-generation’ location applications are variants on the "thing-finder" theme: find a restaurant, find a building, etc. Even the navigation systems in cars are really "thing-finders." Many companies are working on a broader array of device types, and a broader array of applications beyond "thing-finders" to make them location-aware.
The Global Positioning System (GPS) is perhaps the most familiar technology that uses location-aware computing. Two dozen satellites, orbiting 11,000 miles above the Earth, help car drivers and hikers find their way virtually anywhere on the globe. In fact, using GPS has also become an integral part of a game - a treasure hunting sport called "geo-caching."
But beyond the novelty, what uses for location-awareness will we think of when it becomes part of our everyday computing environment? What location applications will emerge when we can determine our location anywhere - indoors as well as outdoors - and when location applications and content become the domain of the Internet, instead of proprietary cellular networks? How much easier will life be when mobile devices know where they (and each other) are, and automatically do the right thing for that location?
The Headmap Project politicizes Locative Media by arguing that it has the possibility of becoming a form of dissent, that is collectively constructive rather than oppositional. Urban Tapestries illustrate this through custom built tools, which facilitate localised organisations, and knowledge building within the local community context. By allowing users to annotate their own virtual space, they enable a community’s collective memory to grow organically.
Its central themes of being user-led, collaborative, community inspired/based and the creation of open tools (not unlike the free software movement where freedoms over distribution of code and improving a program are granted), reiterate similar ethics to online culture.
Projects such as Amsterdam Realtime have sought to bring attention the possibilities of the individual as a ‘producer of space’. They attempt to visualize mental maps by examining the behaviour of the city’s mobile users. User-led cartography as a practice and form of expression, could lead to significant outcomes in terms of how of we are able to ‘see’ the city, differing from visualizations created by the media, or static representations of ‘official’ maps.
Users of applications such as GeoNotes or Geograffiti are able to use their mobile and wireless devices to attach notes (in the form of text, sound and image) to specific geographical locations, these notes are then made available to others using the same application on their mobile devices, passing within a certain radius of the notes.
Across a broad range of contexts the interface between data environments and location has emerged as a central concern, reversing the trend towards digital content being viewed as placeless, or only encountered in the amorphous space of the Internet.
Artists have long been concerned with place and location, but the combination of mobile devices with positioning technologies is opening up a manifold of different ways in which geographical space can be encountered and drawn, and presenting a frame through which a wide range of spatial practices may be looked at anew.
A coherent discourse around locative art is only starting to emerge, and it is common to find different artists speak of or engage in a similar set of interests, without referencing other works in the field or contextualising their own practice
Projects
Artists re-appropriate positioning and tracking technologies to engage people in experiences, exploring human-computer interaction with the urban landscape, and those who inhabit it. The emergent sociality promoted by Locative Media is driven by networks of reciprocity and trust, very much like the online culture of message boards, mailing lists and wiki systems where knowledge sharing takes place without financial renumeration.
The Urban Tapestries project explores the boundaries between the geopolitical space of the city, through ordinary citizens embedding their own social knowledge into the new wireless landscapes of the city through geo-annotation technologies similar to Geonotes.
One technique that has become common is to generate line drawings from GPS data generated by people moving through the physical environment. An example is GPS Drawing by Jeremy Wood, which uses this as a means to create figurative images; of animals, symbols and words, including the worlds biggest IF stretching from the south coast of England to East Anglia.
A more interesting example, that exploits this technique for user-led mapping rather than the conventional form of figurative drawing, is Amsterdam Realtime by Ester Polak (NL). In this participants roam the streets of Amsterdam equipped with a networked GPS device, and a trace of their movements is relayed to a projection screen in an exhibition space. At the outset the screen is blank, but as the journeys are recorded individual meanderings fuse into a composite representation of how people occupy and use the city, density and concentration recorded in the luminescence of overlapping lines, spaces unvisited remaining dark. While such composite images generated through successive superimpositions are statistical in nature, the project offers an evocative visual portrait of the life of the city, and a grass-roots mapping of how urban space is used that offers an alternative to the top down perspective of conventional cartography.
There is also a strong current of work that takes a documentary approach, seeking to archive and embed hidden meaning or collective memory, such as the MILK project by Ieva Auzina and Esther Polak (LT/NL)
The question of ambiguity and statistics highlights the way in which projects that draw not only on cartographic tools but also on metaphors of mapping tend to aim for a one-to-one correspondence between the movements of participants and their screen based representation. The same issues also arise in geo-annotation projects. These involve assigning media contents spatial coordinates such that they can be accessed from that location with an enabled device. While the true location of the content is a database, by making it possible to access that content from a particular position its place migrates into the physical environment.
Geograffiti (CN/UK) and GeoNotes (SE) which seek not to document or interpret the environment but to embellish it with digital graffiti or virtual tagging as expressive mark.
Locative Media arts focus on digital authoring within the environment, on a dynamic relationship between database and the world, and offer the chance to take art out of the galleries and off the (cinema) screen .
Some see the most prominent and playful forms of Locative Media art, dubbed “Locative Gaming�?, as representing a critical balance between the poles of the commercial/entertainment and the military applications of these technologies, in that they successfully engage public audiences to recognise and consider these otherwise unnoticed and hidden implementations.
But when Matt Adams from the UK group Blast Theory gave a keynote talk at the Futuresonic 2004 festival, in Manchester, and triumphantly announced the dawn of a new medium riding unproblematically on the back of the telecommunications industry, he was received with outright hostility from several media theoreticians from the avant-guard of the electronic arts including Andreas Broekman, Amin Medosh and Karel Dudesek who accused Adams of masquerading what in essence was a weapon of the military as art.
Ubiquitous Computing is different from PDA's, dynabooks, or information at your fingertips. It is invisible, everywhere computing that does not live on a personal device of any sort, but is in the woodwork everywhere. For a complete explanation of the conceptual differences herein follow the links on Ubiquitous Computing below.
In a move away from the telos of virtual reality research, mixed or augmented reality represents its phenomenological inverse, where the ultimate goal is to create a system such that the user can not tell the difference between the real world and the virtual augmentation of it.
In a VR system the user is completely immersed in an artificial world and becomes divorced from the real environment. In contrast, an augmented reality system is augmenting the real world scene necessitating that the user maintains a sense of presence in that world.
Follow the AR links below to see how AR and Locative Media intersect.
Mobile Computing - Current Technologies
Locative.net Locative Network is a collaboration between researchers, grassroots GIS activists and new media artists
Headmap.org The space, the social network, thinking tools and the network interface in the same field of view.
SmartMobs.com A Website and Weblog about issues discussed in the book Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold
Ubiquitous Computing Ubiquitous computing names the third wave in computing, just now beginning.
Ubiquitous Computing Ubiquitous Computing entry on Wikipedia
Augmeted-Reality.org A "portal" to the world wide web of "Augmented Reality"
AR Definition Augmented Reality (AR) is a growing area in virtual reality research.
This page first created by Adam margerison 10:14, 4 Sep 2005 (EST)
