Site-Specific Storytelling, Urban Markup, and Mobile Media was a presentation held by Jason Farman at the ELO 2012 conference under the category: Storytelling With Mobile Media: Locative Tehcnologies and Narrative Practices.
“All Hands Meeting” is a live performance that uses aestheticized speech to engage conceptually with human/ machine entanglement. The piece consists of a monologue delivered by a semi-synthetic boss to an audience of interns. Three new strategic initiatives are presented: an app, a poem, and a political movement. This version of “All Hands Meeting” is site-specific to ELO 2017.
(Source: ELO 2017 Book of Abtracts and Catalogs)
Kjell Theøry will be a site-specific mobile Augmented Reality poem mapped visually to geo-spatial coordinates in a public outdoor space in Bergen. The work responds to historical and fictive narratives of Norway as a landscape for exile and escape in conjunction with writings and memories from my residency as a Fulbright Scholar in Bergen last year. It will be accessible for viewing with internet-enabled smart phones and tablets throughout ELO 2015 and will be activated by a brief live event in which I manipulate and read from the virtual space and generate additional material by scanning augmented tattoos on the body of a local male performer. This work evolves out of my AR installation in June 2014 at the Bergen Bibliotek, The Empty House, but will be a substantially new iteration. (Source: ELO 2015 Catalog)
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)
This article explores how a new generation of smartphones, social software, GPS and other location-based technologies offer the ability to create new cultural spaces and publication models. These technologies allow us to digitally superimpose information on the physical world which, in turn, allows for the re-imagining of places and even identity. In this article a locative and social media art project is presented that engages with Melbourne’s status as the second UNESCO City of Literature. The project brings poetry into the street while, at the same time, occupying the floating worlds of social media. By pinning community-generated poetry to site-specific spaces on Google Maps, the article argues that a layer of narrative can be added to the readers’ perceptions of their immediate surroundings when viewing the site-specific poems through their mobile phones. Finally, the article considers the implications of Web 2.0, smartphones and location-based technologies for creative writing and arts practices.
Source: authors' abstract
My work involves making marks with a rhythmical distribution of signs on a surface. Not just drawing on a surface but also physically changing it.
The work 2 sides/2 lados is a mixture of drawing, laser cut, wall drawing and book art. Passing from one technique/material to another the invented script undergoes transformation. The initial drawn script is digitally manipulated and cut from the paper to leave voids – the marks appear by their absence. The same marks are then transferred manually to a corner wall.
My current practice is concerned with finding a way of synthesizing the duality generated by site-specific works to produce work which involves a site-specific element and a broader element, but whose elements are integral – there no longer being an original and a copy or a site-specific version and a documentary version. Each is part of the work in its entirely – yet each is independent.
With the move from personal computing to pervasive computing, electronic literature has inhabited physical sphere of ubiquitous computing. This study analyzes examples of narratives that employ mobile technologies (from cell phones to GPS receivers) to interact with site-specific electronic literature. Drawing from examples such as [murmur], PETlab’s Re:Activism project, and Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke, this paper argues for a spatio-temporal embodiment that is produced in correspondence with the mobile interface. [Murmur] is an oral history project utilizing mobile phones is currently running in 11 cities worldwide. Signs posted throughout the city prompt mobile phone users to call a specific number and record a narrative about that site. Other passersby are able to listen to the recorded narrative when the number is later called. Similarly, Re:Activism is a mobile phone story-game that has players restage scenes of contestation that occurred throughout New York City, led by SMS messages about the site. By reclaiming the social history of these locations (and chronicling it through mobile phone cameras in a scavenger hunt manner), the players revived the community history through story-game. Community narrative is also explored in Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke. This project had participants ride bicycles around the streets of London with a handheld computer along for the ride. With headphones plugged into the computer, the voice of Ju Row Farr guided participants through broadly constructed actions (such as “Find a place your father would like and record a message about it”). As participants found particular locations that corresponded to the broad directives, they would record their own narrative or description about the place and its relation to specified categories like family, taboo, and solitude.
Glitch is a fictional, site-specific, mobile media narrative based on the campus of the University of Maryland. Readers follow the story of a student named Alice, who experiences a series of strange glitch-like events that she cannot explain but works to understand. Users walk through various sites on campus based on provided coordinates, finding geocaches and solving riddles that utilize location- based knowledge to explore Alice's personal journal pages and digital blog entries.
(Source: Description from the Electronic Literature Exhibition catalogue)
Note: This work was featured in the 2012 Electronic Literature Exhibition on the computer station featuring Future Writers--Electronic Literature by Undergraduates from U.S. Universities--Mobile Works
"Re:Positioning Fear" was the third relational architecture project. A large scale installation on the Landeszeughaus military arsenal with a "teleabsence" interface of projected shadows of passers-by. Using tracking systems, the shadows were automatically focused and generated sounds. A real-time IRC discussion about the transformation of the concept of "fear" was projected inside the shadows; the chat involved 30 artists and theorists from 17 countries and the proceedings can be seen at the project web site. Source: Author's website.
in absentia is a site-specific web-based writing project which addresses issues of gentrification and its erasures in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal, where the author lived for seventeen years. J. R. Carpenter writes, "Faced with imminent eviction, I began to write as if I was no longer there, about a Mile End that was no longer there. I manipulated the Google Maps API to populated "real" satellite images of my neighbourhood with "fictional" characters and events. in absentia is a web "site" haunted by the stories of former residents of Mile End, a slightly fantastical world, a shared memory of the neighbourhood as it never really was but as it could have been. in absentia was created with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. It was presented by DARE-DARE Centre de diffusion d'art multidisciplinaire de Montréal. It launched June 24, 2008. New stories were added over the summer, in English and French. A closing party was held in conjunction with the launch of my novel, Words the Dog Knows, (conundrum press), at Sky Blue Door, November 7, 2008"
What traces do people leave behind when they leave a place? What stories spring form their absence?
uses the Google Maps API, requires an internet connection