Locative Media

Locative media refers to a mobile media movement (i.e. a digital art movement using Geolocation tools) in which location and time are considered essential to the (art?) work.

"new practices of information technology begin to open up the practice of mapping to civic society. A great number of projects beyond locative media are working to make the flows of Networked Society more visible and transparent."

Citation source and more commentary at [1]

Description

The state of the locative media movement is discussed here at http://networkedpublics.org/locative_media/beyond_locative_media?q=locative_media/beyond_locative_media

"The related free networks movement is similarly interventionist. Here any distinction between artist and hacker disappears in an attempt to create wireless networks that would provide free connectivity while also eluding both government surveillance and commercial control on the Internet. Emerging out of a Do-It-Yourself punk culture, projects like the London-based "Consume the Net" sought to build a nation-wide peer-to-peer infrastructure of free wireless nodes throughout the United Kingdom. Similar grassroots projects helped catalyze communities of artists globally from Berlin to San Francisco. In suggesting that ubiquitous Internet access would change our relationship with place by overlaying a second virtual world over the physical one, the free wireless movement was a seminal source for locative media's ambitions. Moreover, in the United Kingdom, the government's ownership of virtually all geographic data encouraged participants in free wireless, who sought to make information freely accessible, to move into more mapping-based practices when these became available. It was in this context that much of the initial locative media work emerged. Since its inception, then, locative media's practitioners have claimed an avant-garde position, insisting that their work is capable of not only creating a paradigmatic shift in the art world, but also that it can reconfigure our everyday life as well by renewing our sense of place in the world.

We suggest that locative media offers a conceptual framework by which to examine the certain technological assemblages and their potential social impacts. Unlike net art, produced by a priestly technological class for an elite arts audience, locative media strives, at least rhetorically, to reach a mass audience by attempting to engage consumer technologies, and redirect their power." (http://networkedpublics.org/locative_media/beyond_locative_media?q=locative_media/beyond_locative_media)

Typology

"Broadly speaking, locative media projects can be categorized under one of two types of mapping, either annotative—virtually tagging the world—or phenomenological—tracing the action of the subject in the world. Roughly, these two types of locative media—annotative and tracing—correspond to two archetypal poles winding their way through late 20th century art, critical art and phenomenology, perhaps otherwise figured as the twin Situationist practices of détournement and the dérive.

Annotative projects generally seek to change the world by adding data to it, much as the practice of détournement suggested. The paradigmatic annotative work is the Urban Tapestries project by Proboscis.

In adopting the mapping-while-wandering tactics of the dérive, tracing-based locative media suggest that we can re-embody ourselves in the world, thereby escaping the prevailing sense that our experience of place is disappearing in late capitalist society. For examples of this type of work we might look to Christian Nold's 2002 Crowd Compiler." (http://networkedpublics.org/locative_media/beyond_locative_media?q=locative_media/beyond_locative_media)

More Information

See our entry on the Geospatial Web, the Internet of Things, Spimes

Beyond Locative Media] is an in-depth review of the movement.