geolocative

Collaborative project on the WWW shown at 25 São Paulo Biennial. The idea of Plural maps: lost in São Paulo is to use cyberspace to create a multidimensional cartography of São Paulo. This cartography will be constructed by the choices sent by netcitizens and some other points like webcams showing traffic avenues and cultural centers. Based on an open structure, Plural maps: lost in São Paulo will incorporate the received material in order to create a big rhizomatic labyrinth. Each element sent by the netcitizens will be a knot, a link that will contribute to the creation of this organic, subjective and collective cartography. (Source: Author's description)

The project ‘Folgen’ looks at the publication of personal archives and the tension between the public and private experience. This is explored by the personal experience of what it is like to follow somebody, first by monitoring the videos people put online, then following this information to actual physical addresses within the city where these videos were produced. Staged as a performance and installation, Folgen draws on the existing narratives of amateur video makers found on YouTube to build a multi-layered media landscape of Berlin. A subjective approach combines fragments of images and sound from the videos with the artist’s own narration, using the traces video makers have left in the public sphere of the internet to follow people throughout the city. The videos are self-representative acts, performances and depictions of the everyday, which together form a relation with the city spaces where they transpire. The geographic locations encoded in the videos become waypoints for traversing an unofficial, unintentional map of Berlin. Through this process, the city becomes a place to be inhabited and experienced through an other’s narrative — stepping into somebody else’s shoes.

[Murmur], a documentary oral history, records aural stories and memories and geolocates  them exactly. Now in its ninth year, this ample, well-curated archive features stories from twelve cities on four continents and loads quickly on mobile device.

(Source: Description from the Electronic Literature Exhibition catalogue)

Cartographies are alway imprecise. An important aspect of 2346, created by LAT-23, is discussing the impossibility  of  showing  everything  about  a  place  in  its map.  The  act  of  cartography  implies  in choosing  perspectives  about  spaces  (on  the  optimistic  scenario  of  shared  and  collective maps)  or inscribe marks  on  territories  (on  the  pessimistic  scenario  of  classic militaristic  approaches).  Even overlaying ways of seeing the street, 2346 only shows Augusta in fragments of an incomplete mosaic. Histories that interweave describing particular or generic days and nights, useless or surprising facts and  data,  visceral  or  unnecessary  things  and  thinkings.  By  fictionalizing  testimonies  and  selecting statistics  in  arbitrary ways,  2346  tells  as much  of  its  savvy  narratives  and  spicy  stories  as  of  the impossibility of showing a place in its specificities. What is the relation between how high is the rent of a building and the altitude in certain parts of Augusta street? How many liters of alcohol are sold in a bar on the corner? How many condoms are used on a full-house night in a ship hotel on the area? How many cigarettes were sold on a newstand? How much is a taxi from on end of the street to the other? 2346 present this and other data, in QR-Codes available in bars at Augusta, and also compiled on a printed / online map, available for the audience to share its own experiences. 2346 completes a trilogy of maps about São Paulo in which LAT-23 aims to deconstruct traditional cartography.

(Source: Description from the Electronic Literature Exhibition catalogue)