locative media

Spaces Speak is a panel presentation to raise awareness and enlist participation in (RE)VERB an Audio AR ‘zine for e-lit writers/artists. (RE)VERB is an audio augmented reality zine dedicated to spatially conceived electronic literature projects that explore the aesthetic possibilities of sonically delivered language engaging with the physical and corporeal experience of the environment. As a publication (RE)VERB was inspired by the Emerging Spaces for E-Lit Creations initiative to expand works that engage with popular social media spaces. 

Spaces Speak will consist of five presenters including editorial board members, the guest curator for issue one and artists who created work for the first issue. The artists and curators will discuss the challenges and rewards for producing site-specific work and the concepts driving their creative decisions. 

The panel will also feature an overview of the goals and artistic vision for the ‘zine. A discussion of the first issue, with a sneak-peak/advanced listen to excerpts from the forthcoming ‘zine to be released in June 2021. Other details discussed will include the release schedule for future issues, explanations for how listeners can access content, integration with social media platforms and how e-lit community members can participate in upcoming issues. 

In addition, Spaces Speak will highlight the partnerships with organizations the ‘zine will be pursuing to participate in its open calls and curation (Eyebeam, NEW INC, AFROTECTOPIA, the New Media Caucus, Rhizome, Harvestworks, and AudioAR.org) for E-Lit to reach new audiences in related fields like new media art, internet art, sound art and audio AR. 

The last segment of the panel discussion will be an open dialog with the ELO community to hear the directions they would like the ‘zine to pursue, what might be compelling thematic topics and locations, what other organizations should we include in our outreach and who they would suggest for international curators and artists for future issues as we continue to expand the global reach of the ‘zine. 

In relation to the conference themes, the (RE)VERB ‘zine can be seen as a case study of a third space, instead of a large corporate behemoth platform siloed from the content or individualistic artist vision, (RE)VERB is a partnership between publication and platform, working in dialog with the Gesso, an AR platform dedicated to spatially conceived projects, to create a sustainable E-Lit creative space. 

Taken as a whole, (RE)VERB enables electronic literature writers to engage with the sensorial experience of place, the granularity of the human voice and chance occurrences in the environment to provide an expansive opportunity for aesthetic experimentation and a vital co-mingling of creative communities. Spaces Speak provides an opportunity for an open exchange of ideas and an exploration for how all community members can be involved on any level of the project.

Since the early 2000s, media artists have explored the potentials of location-based technologies, developing locative media projects “in which geographical space becomes a canvas” (Hemment 2006). Artists both within and without the locative field, such as Teri Rueb (USA), Blast Theory (UK), Jeremy Hight (USA), Janet Cardiff (Canada), Chris Caines (Australia) and Paul Carter (Australia) have developed creative works involving narrative, textuality and place-based storytelling within a site-specific context. In many of these works, real world spaces are annotated and augmented with a range of artistic contents – primarily audio and/ or textual – and mediated by mobile devices.

Certain earlier, pre-digital practices also involve the augmentation of real world spaces with cultural contents, such as various pilgrimage and walking practices involving the spatialisation of narrative and the virtual annotation of the world. These highly embodied and imaginative site-specific practices involve landscape operating as an interface to “an enhanced, symbolic world” (Czegledy 2005), involving “stories we can trace with our feet as well as our eyes” (Solnit 2001) and resonating with contemporary techniques of spatialisation, annotation and augmentation within digital contexts.

The paper will discuss my 2013 locative media work Notes for Walking (the space in-between time), a locative narrative / augmented reality work that was exhibited in the Sydney Festival 2013, a major Australian arts festival. Notes for Walking annotated 13 video notes (comprised of text, sound and moving image) to an abandoned naval fort at Middle Head on Sydney Harbour by using locative and AR technologies, and was experienced as a walked, locative work by audiences using their own smartphones and a free, downloadable project app. The project drew audiences of over 5000 people to Middle Head during the Sydney Festival period in January 2013, and was downloaded to over 2,600 mobile devices in this time.

Notes for Walking emerged from extended research into pilgrimage and related walking practices; in particular the 88 Temple Buddhist pilgrimage of Shikoku, Japan where the 88 temples ringing the island of Shikoku operate as a large-scale spatial narrative. The research revealed a complex, multilayered system of narrative spatialisation and annotated, augmented landscape within the Shikoku pilgrimage; including a straightforward annotative level in which temples are associated with miracle tales via oral history, and a more participatory, imaginative level in which haiku-like poems or go-eika – written in second person, present tense – act as specific textual triggers at each site, mediating the participant’s live experience of the landscape as a poetic and highly embodied technique of participation.

This research – and especially the discovery of the poetic device of the go-eika – provided a textual and creative framework with which I approached the conceptualisation and development of Notes for Walking. Given the large audience numbers and high level of participation in the festival, the approach appears to have proved engaging for contemporary audiences and may have relevance in a broader locative media and locative narrative context.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

New mobile technologies shape the way, in which people communicate and perceive the reality. Our basic position is the nomadic cockpit (expression coined by the author of this paper) in terms of being armed with many of navigating and controlling mobile screenic devices (from cell phones and tablets to consoles, cameras, and various players). When we move around in our surroundings armed with such devices we perceive the data shown on the screen of such a device, meaning that both the visual and aural interfaces are integrated in our experience of walking or riding environment. Virtual data approaching from the remote context on the screen are related to and coordinated with our basic, non-mediated perception from the physical here and now, meaning that the digital technology, provoking one’s hands on controls activity becomes incorporated in the experience and understanding of our being-on-the-move. This paper aims to explore the way in which the present mobile culture enters some movements in new media art and e-literature that presuppose the interactions between the moving bodies and the words and images on the move. We are witnessing various projects in mobile and locative media that deploy mobile phones in order to broaden the presence of new media textual and non-textual contents and its experience. In this paper we refer to some examples of e-literary projects shaped for mobile screenic devices (e.g. Bauer's and Suter’s AndOrDada) as well as for new media ones, such as EDT’s The Transborder Immigrant Tool. The comparison between the use of mobile and locative media in e-literature and in new media art demonstrates significant differences between them with the regard to their tasks and applications. Rather than foregrounding the pure artistic (aesthetic) features the new media art refers first and foremost to activism, hacktivism, repurposing, tactical media, tactical biopolitics and to the use value of its projects as persuasively demonstrates The Transborder Immigrant Tool, which was created with the task of reappropriating wordily available technology to be used as a form of humanitarian aid. The Virtual Hiker Algorithm installed on the simple mobiles guides border crossers in the hostile desert condition toward the nearest aid sites (e. g. to the water and first aid points). When new media art project is displayed on the screen of one’s nomadic cockpit, we need to look at it not in terms of aesthetic practice but as the production of goals for the nomadic user to solve, puzzles that require it to enact its kinesthetic and proprioceptive features, in unusual conditions. On the contrary, e-literary projects formed in mobile and locative media are often about the demonstrations of technical advances in this field; they revolutionize the means of production, they invent the new genre in which the textual creativity is deployed (e. g. Aya Karpinska’s zoom narrative), they gain the importance in terms of avant-garde of the medium, but their tasks are not so transgressive and radical in terms of the social interventions. Unlike the new media art ones they do not enter the not-just-art (term coined by the author of this paper) in terms of an activity that seeks to change the very condition of life.

Rita Raley's presentation focuses on the use of IRC and SMS in multimedia installations, net-based projects, and street performances. Projects discussed will likely include "Listening Post" (Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin), "RE:Positioning Fear" (Rafael Lozano-Hemmer), "Urban Scrawl" (Sushma Madan and Neil Noakes), "TXTual Healing" (Paul Notzold), and "Simple Text" (Family Filter). While the chat messages used in "Listening Post" are datamined rather than solicited, the other projects are instances of user-driven media. One clear tension to explore, then, will be that between surveillance and participatory culture. Other themes and issues will include public vs. private space, locative media, and electronic English.

The underlying idea of this paper can be expressed as follows: mobile information technologies have enabled new means of communication and sociability based on what I call “information territories.” What is questioned here is a new relationship between information technologies and the dimensions of place, territory, community and mobility. I will argue that, under the label of “locative media,” the new mobile technologies are creating new forms of territorialization (control, surveillance, and tracking) and new meanings of space, place, and territory, contradicting the theory of “non-place” or “no sense of place.” Moreover, this impels us to discuss the ideas of anomie and isolation with the emergence of new forms of sociability and community bonds created by location-based services.

This paper examines the way literary practice in digital media illuminates traditional literary processes that otherwise remain unremarked, and conversely, what the literary concept of ‘address’ might contribute to an understanding of the way digital media are reinventing literary agency. It explores handwriting as an embodied praxis linking thought with corporeality through the medium of gesture, and its transformations in text-based new media art. Handwriting (and especially signatures) has long been thought to make personality traits manifest. Its expressive gestural and kinematic aspect can be illuminated by Werner’s theory of physiognomic perception in which two-dimensional diagrams are shown as consistently corresponding to and eliciting a small number of categorical affects (happy, sad, angry) in viewers. Diane Gromala’s ‘Biomorphic Typography’ (2000 onwards) in which the user’s keystrokes generate biofeedback input which combines with the behaviours assigned to typography to animate text in the present time of writing draws on these conventions and complicates them in the process. By contrast, John Geraci’s locative media project ‘Grafedia’ (2004-2005), in which, as he says, ‘walls are made into websites’ handwriting signals the public discourse of graffiti with all its connotations of haste and illegality. In this work, users can write by hand on any of the various physical surfaces of the world and link this graffiti to rich media content that can be accessed by others as they come across the texts, appropriates the live dimension of handwriting as graffiti into the memorialising and communicative functions of a larger textual work that might also be collaboratively elaborated over time. The handwritten graffiti (in blue and underscored) mimics the default HTML hyperlink, which makes it visible as a piece of Grafedia, also signals the complex reciprocity between handwriting and print in new media work.

(Source: authors' abstract)

The starting point for this essay is William Gibson's image of locative art in his latest two novels, Spook Country (2007) and Zero History (2010). In these books Gibson creates a very clear and comprehensive picture of the term 'locative art'. The essay compares this purely fictional image with the appearance of locative art and poetry in reality.

Experiments with new technologies, such as mobile networks, Wifi and GPS for mobile and internet devices use and open urban data spaces for any digital application. It has become easy to trace users of these devices, and one is constantly tracked by GPS-satellites, surveillance cameras and other kind of signals and devices. Locative and adaptive poetry makes use of the interplay of urban space and transmitted data and renders it tangible for the player. Doing this makes the player aware of being under constant surveillance by "Big Brother" from outside and inside his gadget.

The essay reviews projects including "Objects of Desire" (2008) by Ludic Society, AndOrDada (2008) and Sniff_jazzbox (2008) by AND-OR and the very constricting project "Constraint City. The pain of everyday life" (2008) by Gordan Savicic. The project "BeforetheSatelliteDetectsYou" (2010) by AND-OR works with similar premises and makes the player aware of being constantly tracked: He has to hide in house entrances, under bridges, roofs and in the signal-shade of bigger buildings on his path through town. These projects show the dangers of an electronic data space that offers possibilities to ammass personal data and set up a tight control via satellite and other networks.