Locative Media

Introduction

As mobile development has flourished over the past years you've probably heared the term 'locative media' getting dropped every once in a while. So let's start of with the Wikipedia definition.

 

Wikipedia states the following:

"Locative Media are media of communication bound to a location. They are digital media applied to real places and thus triggering real social interactions. While mobile technologies such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), laptop computers and mobile phones enable locative media, they are not the goal for the development of projects in this field. Rather:

"Locative media is many things: A new site for old discussions about the relationship of consciousness to place and other people. A framework within which to actively engage with, critique, and shape a rapid set of technological developments. A context within which to explore new and old models of communication, community and exchange. A name for the ambiguous shape of a rapidly deploying surveillance and control infrastructure." (Russell, 2004)"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locative_media

A report on locative media from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne states the following:

"The term “locative media” refers to every information about the physical location as well as other contextual cues. The most commonly used context of mobile systems is the location of the user since it is easy to determine and it could be meaningful to use it in order to adapt the behavior of a mobile application. Academics (Schmidt et al., 1998) proposes a wider definition of location awareness. They structure the concept of context by defining a hierarchically organized model in which they distinguish two categories according to the level of abstraction : physical environment and human factors. At the lowest level, the physical environment refers to all the physical variables like location (absolute or relative) as well as conditions (e.g. light, temperature) or infrastructure (surrounding resources for communication, computation, task performance). At the higher level, human factor related context is structured into : information about the user (emotional state, knowledge of habits, ...), the user’s social environment (co-location of others, social interaction, group dynamics,...) and the user’s tasks (spontaneous activity, engaged tasks, general goals, ...)."

http://craftsrv1.epfl.ch/MT/research/archives/CRAFT_report2.pdf

Locative Media concentrates on personal social interaction with a place and with technology. Therefore a lot of locative media projects have a social, critical or personal (memory) background. Locative Media let's us interact differently with our surroundings. Overlaying everything is a whole new invisible layer of annotation. Textual, visual and audible information is available as you get close, as context dictates, or when you ask. Keywords are a.o. sharing, messaging, notes, leaving, marking, demarcating, tracking, logging, opinions, trading, collaboration, gaming and searching.

 

From Drew Hemments LocativeArts

When the oceans became navigable due to the invention of the chronometer as an on-board ship location device, the view of the Earth and our relationship to it changed, and so did the forms of representation used to express or explore that relationship. The first photographs from the Apollo space missions changed once more the view of the Earth, and produced one of the most iconic, and ubiquitous, images ever produced. Today it is digital and satellite mapping technologies that have caught the attention of a new generation of artists and DIY technologists, who are exploring the use of portable, networked, location-aware computing devices for user-led mapping, social networking and artistic interventions in which geographical space becomes a canvas.

 

All art engages in location to some degree, even if just in the way that it responds to the space created by gallery and frame, or that the found object is marked by the absence of the location from which it was drawn. If a precursor to locative media were to be identified within the art world it might be Richard Long, who creates his art by walking through a landscape, annotating the physical environment he encounters with stones or other ambient materials, and documenting augmented space that results in photographs that provide an esoteric other to the objectifying gaze of cartography or satellite photography.

Artists are responding to the technical possibilities of location-aware, networked media by asking what can be experienced now that could not be experienced before, in some cases producing more-or-less conventional artistic representations using location data, in others playing with the possibilities of the media itself. The exploratory movements of locative media lead to a convergence of geographical and data space, reversing the trend towards digital content being viewed as placeless, only encountered in the amorphous and other space of the internet. Much like Long, ‘geo-annotation’ projects such as [murmur] and Urban Tapestries weave interlocking narrative threads through the environment, and a wide range of other artistic approaches are also being explored, such as the mixed reality gaming of Uncle Roy All Around You, the ambient narrative of InterUrban, and the sensory immersion of Come Closer.

 

There is 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) which maps journeys using GPS to explore at once incidental meanderings and international flows, using photography and personal testimonies to delve into hidden substrata of meaning in the journey of milk from cow to consumer. This has led Chris Byrne to examine the relation between locative media and documentary realism, while similarly Michelle Kasprzak has explored how truth and fiction are articulated within locative arts.iii In certain cases - such as the mapping of error found in the Karosta images - this picture is complicated by an ambiguity that exceeds the binary of truth or fiction, even though in this case it is an ambiguity that ultimately reduces to statistical variation.

 

Locative art’s focus on digital authoring within the environment, on a dynamic relationship between database and the world, offers the chance to take art out of the galleries and off the screen. All too often its vision of how location can actually be encountered is constrained by the limitations of available technology, participation often presenting the challenge of roaming the environment while squinting at a tiny screen and clunky menu, separated from the world by a barrier of bad usability. But, above and beyond questions of design, for it to “escape its own axiomatic system” (Trans Cultural Mapping, RIXC) and go beyond simple positioning, it needs to engage in how people’s relationship to their environment changes, and to engage not only in location but also in context. It is too simplistic - for all but a minority of projects - to claim that context is reduced to a coordinate point, or that the understanding of place and of being in the world does not extend beyond the pull up display.

 

References

The Shape of Locative Media by Simon Pope