locative

As new ways of sharing stories emerge, how does this impact on our writing processes, the ways in which they are informed by previous practices, and the development of new possibilities? Technologies shape stories (Zipes, 2012, p. 21), yet as digital texts take on ever more varied forms – multimedia, sensor-driven, embedded in objects and located in landscapes – contemporary writing practices remain linked to the production of the printed book (Bolter, 1991, p. 5). This paper considers opportunities and challenges in shifting from using only chirographic and typographic tools in writing practice to utilising methods from the oral tradition and other practices.

(Source: Abstract ICDMT 2016)

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

This talk introduces Golden Days, Silver Nights, a new steampunk-themed, alternate-history locative adventure game designed to provoke critical thinking about political history and social progress. The game is designed around the life and writings of William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925), celebrated orator, infamous crusader against commercial monopolies, and the alleged inspiration for L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz. Bryan first ran for U.S. President in 1896 as the candidate for the fused Democratic and Populist parties, inspired in part by the socialist vision of Edward Bellamy's fabulously popular utopian fiction, Looking Backward (1888). But if Bryan began his career a progressive, he ended it a militant reactionary and notorious anti-Darwinian. By some accounts, his campaign permanently derailed the American progressive movement, and with it, the hopes and dreams of utopian socialists. Taking its cue from alternate histories by Robert Heinlein and others, Golden Days, Silver Nights begins with the counter-factual premise that Bryan won the 1896 election and went on to reshape America's destiny, though not in the image of Bellamy's technologically utopian socialist future. The game is built with our proprietary StoryTrek locative authorware, which allows authors to build location-specific narratives by layering multimedia assets over Google maps. As players explore the real space around them with a mobile device in hand, the story provides text, images, audio and video that gradually reveal the mysterious back-story of the game world. By unearthing a series of verbal and visual rebuses strewn about their physical landscape, players gradually sketch the hidden contours of a future-past based in the contradictions of Bryan's politics: an avowedly anti-plutocratic, anti-imperialist America that has in fact sacrificed racial and class equality for a false populism couched in xenophobic jingoism, idyllic pieties, and millenarian warnings against the transhumanist dangers of evolutionary science. While researchers at Carleton's Hyperlab have used StoryTrek to create everything from open-air museum exhibits to zombie survival horror games, the system's novel form of spatial play lends itself particularly well to the authoring of utopian and dystopian narratives. Utopia has traditionally been understood as the "good place" that is "no place." But where conventional literary utopias depict fictional elsewheres far removed from the world, Golden Days, Silver Nights unfolds only as readers navigate through the real world, continually forcing them to toggle attention between their actual and fictional contexts. A "diminished reality" interface, a.k.a. the "genoscope," strips away the user's actual surroundings to reveal the fin-de-siècle intolerances at work behind the facade of present-day reality, alongside lingering traces of utopian dreamworlds that never came to be. By providing a dialectical interface that taps into new embodied understandings of literary space, Golden Days, Silver Nights enables critical thinking around the legacies of American industrialism and imperialism in order to hint that the world not only could have been otherwise, but might still be so.