For a long time information and communication technologies have been understood as ‘placeless’. The dominant vision was that ICTs weaken or even obliterate the importance of physical place (location) in general and the need for spatial concentration in cities in particular , as well as social relations and identities based on proximate face-to-face interactions in social situations (locale). In response to this ‘old’ new media paradigm, recent work shows that mobile media practices in particular are frequently tied to physical places and physically co-present social situations. [1]
Locative media cover a wide range of artistic practices and aproaches, connected with technologies like GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and other location-aware and geotagging applications. Geographical space is faced as a canvas where artistic expressions are inscribed, through portable devices with location recognition technologies, mappings, social media. [2] Locative media artists use cartography as a visual medium. But locative media are not limited to be used only by artists or scientists but also from everyday mobile devices users and therefore are strengthened as a practice.
Marc Tuters and Kazys Varnelis see two categories of locative media. One is annotative – these are media technologies that allow its users to virtually tag (and consequently filter) the real world. The second is phenomenological – tracing the action of a subject in the world. Another way to categorize these new media is between media that take an actual spatial context of a communicative practice as its point of departure and media that provide a virtual but spatially organized interface related to an actual geography for communicative and informational practices.[3]
Locative media don't limit the interaction between humans and media in a screen but place it in the physical space. Place can become again a practical condition of social encounters, offering opportunities for action and social interaction. The rupture of digital information networks through the membrane of the city into the open view of people and their mobile screens relies on the body's capacity to 'proprioceptively' map its own displacement in real and imagined geographies. City is a circuit of ambient informational fields through which we learn to mediate spaces both near and far. Our own bodies are infused and intersected by the extensional networks of the living city, both controlling its machinery at a distance and triangulated socially and psychologically by that machinery in the course of our movements. We learn to operate the city as a meta-interface, one comprised of many smaller tactical interfaces The device becomes a window on to the hidden
layers of data held in or about the user’s immediate environment. Urban and network diagrams are images now animated in hand, transformed from maps into image-instruments with which to connect
and control the immediate and remote environment. Both distance and nearness erode under the weight of the interfaces imagery.[4]
Annotative locative media projects aim in the transformation of space by adding data and personal comments (geotagging). Some applications and services overlay physical space with digital information that can be accessed on the spot via mobile media devices. An example is Wikitude 'augmented reality' platform for media devices. Depending on where one is (GPS), and where one points the mobile phone camera at (compass and accelerometer), the Wikitude application displays information about physical points of interest from online sources like Wikipedia. It projects this information over the camera view on the screen. Users themselves can contribute geotags and points of interest to the Wikitude.me platform. Such services depart from a geographic position in physical space (‘reality’) and add extra layers of digital information. This is why they are called ‘augmented reality’. Augmented reality's ideal is to blend virtual information more or less seamlessly into what people are normally seeing. [5]
Another example of annotative locative media is Urban Tapestries by Proboscis team, and is an experimental platform which allows the user to access place-based content like text, sound, image. Every user can share knowledge, information, stories, while at the same time leaving the trace of his connection with the environment.
One similar application I personally used during the first international training school 'Enhancements:Mediated urban landscapes' held in March in Thessaloniki is 'Way-Cyberparks'. The public open spaces monitoring tool, called WAY-CyberParks, consists of a smartphone application (app) and a web service. The app on one hand tracks the way people use the space, allowing them to get contextual information through augmented reality, to send suggestions or complains, or to answer questions based on the context among other functionalities. It can be downloaded from Google Play (Android based users) and App Store (iOS based users), look for "way-cyberparks". On the other, the web monitors the way people use the space in real time allowing to visualize people’s suggestions, answers, or path filtered by gender, age, occupation, or reason for visiting the space among other location based services. During the workshop we were divided into three large groups and after downloading the app and the maps in our phones, we posted location-based questions for the other teams like 'Would you like more green space here?' so that when a user walks in the city with the app, it pops the questions according to their locations and then collects the data from their answers. We also recorded conversations with other citizens during our walk in the city and later added them to the map of the application. It was a really exciting experience!
The other category are the phenomenological locative media, tracing the walking of people. One of the earliest tracing projects is Amsterdam RealTime by Esther Polak. The idea of this project is based in the notion of 'cognitive map'. Every resident of a city has in mind an invisible, mental map which influences his decisions and determines his movement within the city. Amsterdam RealTime aims in the visualization of the cognitive maps of Amsterdam residents.
Another response to the sense of local displacement associated with networked image-making is seen in a project by artist Mark Selby, Camera Explora. The project employs a specially designed location-aware camera with an embedded map to urge us to explore a wider range of locations and photograph each more mindfully. The camera only allows the user to take one photo for each plotted grid on the map, and when this picture is captured, the camera disables itself until the photographer physically moves to a new area. The photographer's movements around the city are also plotted in real-time on a map, and each photo is printed as it is taken. Selby states that ' these constraints aim to encourage more attentive exploration of the city, more careful consideration of which locations or experiences to record, and consequently, in combination with the materials produced, to allow the creation of more valuable records of experiences.'
In effect Selby's redesigned camera paradoxically enables self-expression by limiting it based on a user's location and movement. One is given incentive to venture new, unexplored areas; one has to consciously decide what the most important characterstic of a specific location might be before they snap a photograph.[6]
References
[2] Δώρα-Δανάη Κολοκυθάκου, Ιχνογραφώντας σ/την πόλη: τα Locative Media στις «διάχυτες» περιπλανήσεις, Ερευνητική εργασία, Πολυτεχνείο Κρήτης, Σχολή Αρχιτεκτόνων Μηχανικών, Ιούλιος 2015
[3] http://themobilecity.nl/background-information/about-locative-media/
[4] iPhone City, Architectural Design July/August 2009, Wiley
[5] Michiel de Lange, Moving circles: Mobile media and Playful identities, Erasmus University Rotterdam, 2010
[6] http://rhizome.org/editorial/2014/mar/26/locative-media-revisited/
Locative media cover a wide range of artistic practices and aproaches, connected with technologies like GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and other location-aware and geotagging applications. Geographical space is faced as a canvas where artistic expressions are inscribed, through portable devices with location recognition technologies, mappings, social media. [2] Locative media artists use cartography as a visual medium. But locative media are not limited to be used only by artists or scientists but also from everyday mobile devices users and therefore are strengthened as a practice.
Marc Tuters and Kazys Varnelis see two categories of locative media. One is annotative – these are media technologies that allow its users to virtually tag (and consequently filter) the real world. The second is phenomenological – tracing the action of a subject in the world. Another way to categorize these new media is between media that take an actual spatial context of a communicative practice as its point of departure and media that provide a virtual but spatially organized interface related to an actual geography for communicative and informational practices.[3]
Locative media don't limit the interaction between humans and media in a screen but place it in the physical space. Place can become again a practical condition of social encounters, offering opportunities for action and social interaction. The rupture of digital information networks through the membrane of the city into the open view of people and their mobile screens relies on the body's capacity to 'proprioceptively' map its own displacement in real and imagined geographies. City is a circuit of ambient informational fields through which we learn to mediate spaces both near and far. Our own bodies are infused and intersected by the extensional networks of the living city, both controlling its machinery at a distance and triangulated socially and psychologically by that machinery in the course of our movements. We learn to operate the city as a meta-interface, one comprised of many smaller tactical interfaces The device becomes a window on to the hidden
layers of data held in or about the user’s immediate environment. Urban and network diagrams are images now animated in hand, transformed from maps into image-instruments with which to connect
and control the immediate and remote environment. Both distance and nearness erode under the weight of the interfaces imagery.[4]
Annotative locative media projects aim in the transformation of space by adding data and personal comments (geotagging). Some applications and services overlay physical space with digital information that can be accessed on the spot via mobile media devices. An example is Wikitude 'augmented reality' platform for media devices. Depending on where one is (GPS), and where one points the mobile phone camera at (compass and accelerometer), the Wikitude application displays information about physical points of interest from online sources like Wikipedia. It projects this information over the camera view on the screen. Users themselves can contribute geotags and points of interest to the Wikitude.me platform. Such services depart from a geographic position in physical space (‘reality’) and add extra layers of digital information. This is why they are called ‘augmented reality’. Augmented reality's ideal is to blend virtual information more or less seamlessly into what people are normally seeing. [5]
Another example of annotative locative media is Urban Tapestries by Proboscis team, and is an experimental platform which allows the user to access place-based content like text, sound, image. Every user can share knowledge, information, stories, while at the same time leaving the trace of his connection with the environment.
One similar application I personally used during the first international training school 'Enhancements:Mediated urban landscapes' held in March in Thessaloniki is 'Way-Cyberparks'. The public open spaces monitoring tool, called WAY-CyberParks, consists of a smartphone application (app) and a web service. The app on one hand tracks the way people use the space, allowing them to get contextual information through augmented reality, to send suggestions or complains, or to answer questions based on the context among other functionalities. It can be downloaded from Google Play (Android based users) and App Store (iOS based users), look for "way-cyberparks". On the other, the web monitors the way people use the space in real time allowing to visualize people’s suggestions, answers, or path filtered by gender, age, occupation, or reason for visiting the space among other location based services. During the workshop we were divided into three large groups and after downloading the app and the maps in our phones, we posted location-based questions for the other teams like 'Would you like more green space here?' so that when a user walks in the city with the app, it pops the questions according to their locations and then collects the data from their answers. We also recorded conversations with other citizens during our walk in the city and later added them to the map of the application. It was a really exciting experience!
The other category are the phenomenological locative media, tracing the walking of people. One of the earliest tracing projects is Amsterdam RealTime by Esther Polak. The idea of this project is based in the notion of 'cognitive map'. Every resident of a city has in mind an invisible, mental map which influences his decisions and determines his movement within the city. Amsterdam RealTime aims in the visualization of the cognitive maps of Amsterdam residents.
Another response to the sense of local displacement associated with networked image-making is seen in a project by artist Mark Selby, Camera Explora. The project employs a specially designed location-aware camera with an embedded map to urge us to explore a wider range of locations and photograph each more mindfully. The camera only allows the user to take one photo for each plotted grid on the map, and when this picture is captured, the camera disables itself until the photographer physically moves to a new area. The photographer's movements around the city are also plotted in real-time on a map, and each photo is printed as it is taken. Selby states that ' these constraints aim to encourage more attentive exploration of the city, more careful consideration of which locations or experiences to record, and consequently, in combination with the materials produced, to allow the creation of more valuable records of experiences.'
In effect Selby's redesigned camera paradoxically enables self-expression by limiting it based on a user's location and movement. One is given incentive to venture new, unexplored areas; one has to consciously decide what the most important characterstic of a specific location might be before they snap a photograph.[6]
[1] Michiel de Lange, Moving circles: Mobile media and Playful identities, Erasmus University Rotterdam, 2010
[2] Δώρα-Δανάη Κολοκυθάκου, Ιχνογραφώντας σ/την πόλη: τα Locative Media στις «διάχυτες» περιπλανήσεις, Ερευνητική εργασία, Πολυτεχνείο Κρήτης, Σχολή Αρχιτεκτόνων Μηχανικών, Ιούλιος 2015
[3] http://themobilecity.nl/background-information/about-locative-media/
[4] iPhone City, Architectural Design July/August 2009, Wiley
[5] Michiel de Lange, Moving circles: Mobile media and Playful identities, Erasmus University Rotterdam, 2010
[6] http://rhizome.org/editorial/2014/mar/26/locative-media-revisited/
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