Locative Media Arts

One of the most innovative and coherent approaches recently proposed in the study of the work of McLuhan has to do with the concept of space. This concept appears in McLuhan’s thinking from the very beginning of his work and evolves as his research widens its scope in topics and complexity, surpassing the natural limits of literature, on one hand, and communication theory, on the other. The concept establishes a bridge between the theory of the visual space, which characterizes the first stage of his research, and the theory of the aural space (audio-tactile) of the last stage. It represents one of the least analyzed contributions, yet it stands among the most enlightening within the work of the Canadian scholar.
Edited by Matteo Ciastellardi, Cristina Miranda de Almeida, Carlos A. Scolari.

Supervisors
1. Professor Janis Jefferies
2. Professor Lanfranco Aceti

Walking has always been the nexus between humans and the city, constituting an expression with artistic, cultural, performative and sensorial implications for an array of artistic and intellectual voices. This thesis investigates the personal and shared emotional geographies of the city (e.g. streets, tube stations) through performative and aesthetic considerations of walking, senses, metaphors and embodied technologies. Three areas primarily inform this thesis and shape its chapters: i) contemporary urban walking theories and artistic spatial practices (e.g. flaneur, psychogeography), ii) sensory/technological aspects of walking and of contemporary city and iii) the investigation of emotional geographies. The research has opened up new dialogues within the 21st century city by highlighting the sensory and social importance of walking as art and the flaneur in the production and exploration of emotional geographies. Consequently, it proposes a hybrid walking as art method, which is pursued through a trialectic of actions, senses and selected metaphors (e.g. “botanizing”, “weaving”, “tuning”, “orchestrating”) amplified by technologies. The core inventive method and methodology is personal or shared walking, shaped by the qualitative sub-methods of talking whilst walking, embodied audiovisual/GPS tools, metaphors and online blogging. These methods contribute to a live reflection and documentation of sensory and emotional attentiveness. Outputs of this research include a series of fully documented walking artworks in London and Athens, presented through audiovisual means and maps. This thesis argues that the trialectic of actions, senses and metaphors through technologies extends our understanding of walking and flaneur as a hybrid method of production and analysis. Consequently, it re-contextualises the concept of flaneur in the 21st century city by proposing the one of the hybrid flaneur/flaneuse through a merging of artistic, sensorial, sociological and geographical standpoints. Therefore, the thesis offers new and distinctive insights into the practices and theories of walking, regarding interdisciplinary explorations of emotional geographies of the city.

n this paper, we introduce the concept of the Playful Locative Ensemble, present three recent projects as examples, and distinguish its form from other sound-focused projects in public space. We also discuss the organization of player roles within the ensemble, the relation to the urban environment, and the aspect of playfulness.

In 2002 a writer in Japan, pen-named Yoshi, self-published the first novel known
to have been composed on a cell phone. It sold a hundred thousand copies, mostly to
young women in their teens and early twenties. Japanese publisher, Starts Publishing,
took notice, picked it up, and turned it into a series of novels that eventually sold 2.6
million copies (Halpert). By 2007, five of the ten top-selling books in Japan were print
versions of novels originally written on mobile devices. They sold an average of 400,000
copies each (Catone, “OMG, Japan Wages War on Literature”). Graphic novels, TV
shows and movies based on the most popular titles soon followed.

This essay examines the origins and cultural context of cell phone novels in Japan
and considers the literary value of emerging forms of digital fiction by reviewing a
sampling of novels written and read on networked digital devices and by exploring trends
in the academic and publishing communities that point to the relevance of this
phenomenon to writers for children and young adults.

This hybrid art-theory article discusses "Indeterminate Hikes," a smartphone app and performance created by ecoarttech, my interdisciplinary eco-art and theory collaborative. The work was originally conceived for a Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition and subsequently performed on the High Line in NYC and the M.I.T. Media Lab, among other places. My essay theorizes the ways in which "Indeterminate Hikes" contributes to discussions of new media art, environmental thought, and performance art, including its relationship to Fluxus "happenings." Excerpts from this text have been presented at the M.I.T. Media Lab, University of North Texas, Indiana University, and--forthcoming in 2012--at the annual College Art Association conference in Los Angeles.

Questions about what it means to locate and be located are being significantly reconfigured through the digitalization of urban life and space, and as computer processing becomes embedded or ‘pervasive’ in urban environments. With position becoming increasingly automatically monitored and tracked within a standardized space and time, some critics suggest that it becomes less consciously thought about than part of a ‘technological unconscious’. Emblematic in this regard is the global positioning system (GPS), which is often promised to resolve questions of location definitively. This paper focuses on efforts by artists working within the realm of locative media to appropriate, reframe and repurpose GPS so as to question aspects of positioning technologies as well as their targeting of locations and their subjects. Attention centres on how these practices are embedded within a context of urban militarization and securitization, and how they may be complicit with military and corporate interests. But asserting the need to move beyond generalized condemnatory or celebratory accounts of the kind that have characterized much discussion in the field, the paper focuses on specific cases to draw out their dis-locative dimensions whereby they unsettle, unfix and reimagine forms of locating and being located. If political claims on their behalf are not secured in advance, critical potential is nevertheless found in the ambiguities, disturbances and resistances they hold open.

"As an artist for whom both magic and landscape are major influences, the notion of the ‘genius loci’ or indwelling spirit of a place has always been a particularly appealing one. Yet it seems that with regard to the magical practices of early modern Europe, the genius loci is – at first glance – absent. There has been a tendency by many commentators to gloss over the relationship between place and ritual magic, often presenting the rituals of angelic or demonic compulsion as divorced from possible geographical contexts. This excludes what we might call embedded spirits, dwelling in the physical environment and writ large in the early modern psyche as fairies and elves, as indicated by Emma Wilby’s research (2005), as well as more ill-defined 'aerial powers'.

Agrippa and other intellectual occultists may have considered the genii locorum as Classical woodland gods, much in the spirit of what Joscelyn Godwin (2002) might call ‘the pagan dream of the Renaissance’. However, in the more practical realm of ritual magic, the genii dwelling within place became synonymous with treasure guardians and inherited folkloric entities such as elves, fairies and dragons as well as with demonic agents. This is apt considering the magical preoccupations of the age: as Keith Thomas (1971) noted there was a broad – and soundly reasoned – assumption that the landscape was riddled with treasure. This paper will examine the evidence for the relationship between place, spirits and the geography of ritual magic chiefly through a discussion of historical sources, including magical treasure hunting manuals (Folger MS vb.26, Sloane 3824), Agrippa’s magical typologies of place (1533), and Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft (1584/1665). As more than a historical curiosity, such occult philosophies also suggest new ways to interpret, encounter and re-enchant our immediate environments, notably when combined with new technologies such as GIS, GPS and locative media alongside sensitive artistic curation."

Este texto aborda trabalhos artísticos com mídias locativas (locative media art) voltados à crítica urbana. Analiso essas mídias e processos comunicacionais principalmente como suportes para possíveis criações artísticas cujo intuito seja subverter ou criticar a própria tecnologia e também suscitar questões a respeito do espaço urbano, suas divisões, a vigilância, o controle e a comunicação. É imprescindível uma postura crítica neste estudo por se tratar de tecnologias com origem de utilização no campo bélico. As discussões propostas partem principalmente da leitura dos textos publicados em “Nomadismos Tecnológicos dispositivos móviles. Usos massivos y prácticas artísticas” cuja organização é de Giselle Beiguelman e Jorge La Ferla.

Assim como os movimentos artísticos, o ato de narrar, de contar histórias, também se transformou consideravelmente com os avanços técnicos. Os dispositivos móveis têm influenciado criações narrativas inusitadas e que investigam, entre outras coisas, a relação entre espaço e indivíduo. A presente dissertação discute as transformações que essa relação tem sofrido devido à disseminação da computação pervasiva, e de que forma essas transformações propiciaram o surgimento de novas tendências da estética tecnológica. Os dispositivos móveis de comunicação re-inventam espaços urbanos como ambientes de multiusuários conectados independentemente da posição geográfica e presença física, favorecendo o surgimento de espaços híbridos, ou seja, definidos pelo desaparecimento das bordas entre físico e virtual e criados pela constante mobilidade dos usuários que utilizam aparelhos portáteis. Como referencial teórico, a reflexão se fundamenta nos estudos de André Lemos, Lúcia Santaella, Milton Santos, Pierre Lévy, e artistas como Jeremy Hight e o grupo inglês Blast Theory por ser uma pesquisa de caráter multidisciplinar. O recorte feito visa introduzir um cenário estético tecnológico com dispositivos móveis com foco em espaços públicos e através de um estudo de caso apresentar a relação entre criação narrativa em espaços híbridos

"Throughout the 20th century, urban walking has been regarded as an aesthetic practice and critical tool with great potential. In the ever-changing city, socio-economical transformations indicate various changes in its emotional attitude as well. The emergence of mobility plays an important role in our everyday life with various terminals, platforms and thresholds becoming our new spatio-sensorial vocabulary, as in the case of the Tube. Can such spaces act as urban samples for further emotional consideration? Based on the concepts of flaneur and psychogeography and considering past metaphors of perceiving the urban, this paper investigates the potential of a hybrid artistic walking method in order to set the foundations for an exploration of emotional geography of Tube stations. To achieve this, it sets up a dialogue between metaphors, contemporary practices as well as it highlights the potential of such spaces of transition by reflecting on the spatial features, the sensorial and in-between experience. On the final section, this paper embarks on a speculative approach of hybrid walking in the London Tube, based on an author’s idea, in order to illustrate potential tactics of revealing the emotional geographies of these spaces.

Citation:

Psarras, Bill. (2013) ‘Hybrid Walking as Art: Art Practices and Approaches on Revealing the Emotional Geographies of Tube Stations’, Proceed-ings of 2nd Hybrid City ‘Subtle Revolutions’ Inter-national Conference, 23-25 May 2013, (eds.) Charitos, D., Theona, I., Dragona, D. Rizopoulos, H. and Meimaris, M. The University of Research Institute of Applied Communication, Athens, Greece. pp. 415-422. ISBN 978-960-99791-1-5

Within the last 15-20 years, digital technology has become ubiquitous as a component of how history is presented in the public domain. Within museums, for example, we find the presence of touch screen computers and the use of digital reconstructions. The online world presents us with diverse educational applications and archives, while, more recently, iPhone and Android apps have been released that are tied in with heritage and popular historical themes.

This dissertation explores the area of mobile phone apps in relation to oral history, particularly the potential that they have for further contextualising oral narratives by presenting them in the physical environments to which they relate, as part of a 'curated' sonic experience.

The focus for this work is largely technical and theoretical, since to also engage in further fieldwork, research and composition within the domains of oral history and sonic arts would likely extend this project far beyond the reasonable scope of a masters-level project. To this end, the work presented here concentrates on developing prototypes from existing work in the
domains of oral history and sonic arts as steps toward a more fully-fledged system for geolocative oral histories.

El amplio desarrollo de los medios locativos ha propiciado la emergencia de un fenómeno creativo cada vez más consolidado como formato: las narrativas espaciales. En este texto abordamos el estudio de las estrategias narrativas vinculadas al contexto espacial mediante telefonía móvil y planteamos una serie de elementos para su análisis. A partir del estudio de cuatro propuestas personales identificamos una serie de parámetros que nos llevan a plantear su clasificación en cuatro géneros diferenciados

The Everywhere Museum of Everything is a research and action proposal founded on the array of aestheticised online content, which can be purposefully and critically curated in order to create a meaningful territory of contemporary online culture, art and knowledge creation. This abundance of content is rooted in a culture of consumerism, blackboxed mobile applications and social networks. Individual experiences in the physical world have been transformed by onlineness, a combination of the pervasive use of mobile devices and applications over Internet access, used to share opinions and evidence through original and remixed media, often complemented by hashtagging. Even if the majority of this content quickly becomes irrelevant and forgotten, it can still be accessed through an augmented view of the world, as digital media is frequently anchored to locations through geotagging or referencing. This vast collection lacks systematization and classification, but presents multiple possibilities for artists, curators and scholars.

Our sense of the self and its relation to its surroundings is being increasingly reshaped by telematic prostheses that expand our felt sense of inhabiting and interacting with the wider environment. Geotagging, Google Earth, biomapping, telepresence, augmented reality (AR), and distributed intelligence are creating new locative sense-perceptions, unprecedented narratives, and new feelings (and praxes)
of agency-at-a-distance in the extended environment. The paper considers methods (and effects) of enhancing connectivity and efficacy between a person and his/her surroundings via mapping techniques, storytelling, and social and artistic projects using telecommunication and locative media. Roy Ascott’s question Is there love in the telematic embrace? (1990) underpins others: How might new media platforms
potentiate the creative force of the imaginal to produce a measurable change in the world? Can locative media deepen our sense of embeddedness, recreating those ancient reality-maps where selfhood was co-extensive with community and Nature? Might this spur us to address today’s urgent social and ecological challenges? Or will these media further abstract our actual relatedness to the environment, narrowing it to more quantifiable and qualifiable instrumental operations?

With the proliferation of the iPod and related audio mobile technologies in our daily experiences, Shuhei Hosokawa’s “The Walkman Effect” (1984) gains new significance. While exploring the locative aspects of these technologies for media art, I elaborate on Hosokawa’s idea of a “secret theatre” by paralleling it to some compelling concepts in audio (culture) studies, such as Michael Bull’s “auditized looking,” Elisabeth Weis’ “écouterism,” Denis Hollier/Jean Paul Sartre’s “auditory gaze,” and Steven Connor’s “modern auditory I.” As case studies, I focus on three performative audio walks that all took place in train stations around 2012-2013: Janet Cardiff’s Alter Bahnhof, Dries Verhoeven’s Niemandsland, and Judith Hoffland’s Like Me. Each in their own right reconfigures the urban experience by means of locative features and interactive relations with their environments. These art works help to see Hosokawa’s “secret theatre” in a new light of highly individualized yet relational aesthetic experiences that open our ears and eyes to an outside social context and reality rather than shut them off.

In this essay, I propose an approach which, dismantling some of the (often implicit) representational assumptions that have proven inadequate to account for the performative aspects of locative media, articulates representation differently. For my considerations, I draw on the non-representational turn that has emerged in recent decades in the field of human geography and which transversally involves the social and hard sciences as well as the arts, trying to reconnect bodies and geophysical worlds at the interface between matter and information.
I start by reconsidering the artistic genealogy of the definition of locative media so as to foreground the performativity of locative practices and the “creativity” of the material-informational continuum. Then, to explain how representational binaries work, I give some examples of the ways space and representation have been conflated while space has been put in opposition to a series of other concepts which are considered to be more dynamic, such as place and time, and devalued accordingly. I focus specifically on several examples of performative mapping, not only because maps have been historically treated as privileged objects of representation in the visual arts, but because, prior to the widespread accessibility of geographical information systems (GIS), mapping was primarily employed to support and “prove” representational thinking.
I continue by taking into account the fruitful consequences of adopting a relational notion of location when approaching the “exceeding” performativity of locative media environments, which requires that we “address” rather than understand media and their networks of mediations “not as if they were logical systems or structures but as if they were environments where images live, or personas and avatars that address us and can be addressed in turn.”

Facilitating and supporting various modes of social
interaction has been part of Mixed Reality (MRx)1
design experiments and discourse over the past twenty
years. But what vision of social interaction is sought
and advanced through Mixed Reality environments?
In this paper, I identify two dominant ways that social
interaction is envisioned in MRx designs, broadly construed
as material and political, and illustrated through
a series of examples. I further draw on them to highlight
the potentials, boundaries, and limitations of each with
regards to the kinds of social interactions that are
sought and cultivated through the integration of digital
media on physical space. I suggest that as MR
becomes mainstream, it is important to go beyond
these visions to consider whether and how MRx
environments might connect with the economic,
social, and cultural specificity of local sites to meaningfully
serve the always evolving social needs and purposes
of their communities.

Transborder Immigrant Tool, cuerpos en tránsito, racismo y migración en la performatividad fronteriza.

Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT) es un proyecto artístico que propone, a través del uso de una aplicación Global Positioning System (GPS), auxiliar a los migrantes para ubicar estaciones de agua en su tránsito por el desierto. Se concentra en el acto de instruir para caminar como una práctica artística que alude a la frontera, la migración y la localización. En este artículo me enfocaré en mostrar la manera en que este proyecto visibiliza el fenómeno de una objetualidad excluyente a la que se enfrenta el migrante como cuerpo en tránsito, lo cual está determinado por la performatividad de la frontera y su inteligibilidad escénica.

"Mobile landscapes. City in motion or motion in a city?"
An article is an analysis of modes of representation of urban landscape in photography. I state that though a city space formally is still we perceive it as movable in time. We can also share the mobile experience with others. The article is parted into five sections: the introduction reflects briefly on the meaning of the term „mobile landscape” and four short interpretations inspired by four photographs, representative for shifts in history of photography are presented in subsequent parts. These are: city views by Charles Marville and by Polish photographer Karol Beyer, photomontages by Edward Steichen and by Harry Callahan, mobile photography by Polish group „mobilni” and finally – a project based on mobile app (Amsterdam REALTIME). Brief reflection proposed in the article is not a comprehensive survey on mobile landscape,
but rather – can suggest a direction of such study.

This paper examines the emergence of increased hybridity in our experience of spatiality, in physical and virtual space. I argue that locative media acts as a cognitive extension of our mind and this realm of the so-called " extended mind " purported by Andy Clarke affords an extension to our body into the virtual realm. This reciprocal function between the extended mind and extended body allows for self-correction and self-consciousness in space and can be understood as a kind of feedback loop. Our interaction with locative media is perpetuated by this feedback loop that allows the body to adjust its operation according the interconnectedness between the actual and virtual. This synchronous feedback loops between three spaces: (1) mind or the mental space, (2) reality or the physical space, and (3) virtual space. My aim in this paper is to provide a new context in which to interpret the notion of geophilia – the love of the earth, by examining the geographical proximity of locative media. We shall then see wider aesthetic implications of the hybridity in locative art.

Locative narrative can be defined as storied audio experiences that are heard on headphones in existent locations. Recent findings on imaginative simulation and auditory illusions within cognitive psychology and neuroscience (Denham et al 2012, 2012a) inform the design strategies for spatial sound within the locative narrative smartphone app, 'LociOscope: The Letters'.

This paper discusses the use of environmental sensors, wireless networks and mobile media as technologies of sensation in the city. While these devices enable a “digital city,” in many respects they appear to be immaterial, operating beyond sense. Drawing on two case studies presented by the Digital Cities project in Montreal, the paper considers how applications of environmental sensors and mobile media give rise to new conditions and questions for how we configure sense in the “digital city.” The paper ultimately finds that sensors direct us toward new sites, assemblages and practices of sensation within the urban sensorium.

Audio Nomad is a three-year art/science research collaboration on the creative and technological potentials of location-sensitive, mobile spatial audio. The first Audio Nomad productions were two versions of Syren – a ship-based multi-speaker installation using the ship’s position from a GPS receiver to render a two- dimensional soundscape. New work including Virtual Wall (Berlin) will create a personal location-sensitive spatial soundscape on headphones using a portable computer, GPS receiver and digital compass. The technological intent is to enable the artist to augment real world objects and spaces with sounds perceived to emanate from them. It is important to know the maximum perceivable accuracy of the intended augmented reality effect, given human and technology limitations, even if soundscape design doesn’t always require maximum precision. Ultimately, authoring software features will inform the artist of afforded perceptual quality, enabling better utilisation of the medium’s potential. Few similar projects have been produced to date and fewer have published quantitative perceptual evaluation research. This paper reviews the field and describes present experimental results and future work on the perceptual evaluation of binaural spatial audio for mobile augmented reality, especially Audio Nomad artworks.

DOI 10.24917/20837275.9.4.6W artykule analizowane są sposoby reprezentacji miejskiego krajobrazu w fotografii. Stawiam tezę, że chociaż przestrzeń zasadniczo jest nieruchoma, to można mówić o postrzeżeniu jej jako ruchomej w czasie oraz środkami fotografii można podzielić się z innymi doświadczeniem mobilności. Tekst składa się z pięciu części: z wprowadzenia, w którym analizuję znaczenia terminu „mobilny pejzaż”, oraz z czterech interpretacji, zainspirowanych fotografiami reprezentatywnymi dla przemian zachodzących w obszarze fotograficznego medium. Są to kolejno: widoki miast Charlesa Marville’a i Karola Beyera, fotomontaże Edwarda Steichena i Harry’ego Callahana, fotografie mobilne (portal Grupamobilni.pl), oraz projekt oparty na aplikacji mobilnych (Amsterdam REALTIME). Proponowane tu refleksje nie dostarczą wyczerpującej wiedzy o mobilnym pejzażu miasta, lecz, mam nadzieję, mogą stać się początkiem takiej analizy.Mobile landscapes. City in motion or motion in a city?An article ...