mobile media

The Narratological Affordances and Constraints of Mobile Locative Media was a presentation held by Jeff Ritchie at the ELO 2012 conference under the category: Storytelling With Mobile Media: Locative Tehcnologies and Narrative Practices.

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.

The idea of walking as the practice of narrating the city constitutes the recurrent theme of Michel de Certau’s “The Practice of Everyday Life:” the pedestrian activity is repeatedly compared to or described as “enunciation,” “enunciatory operations,” “statements” and “stories”. According to the French sociologist, “[t]he act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered” (de Certeau 1988: 97). The story of spatial practices “begins on ground level, with footsteps” (de Certeau 1988: 97) and “the art of >>turning<< phrases finds an equivalent in an art of composing a path (tourner un parcours)” (de Certeau 1988: 100). It might well be said that walking in the city represents not only the very prototype of ergodic literature (Aarseth 1997) but also predates the notion of augmented reality in its technological sense. One of the practices which directly address narrative potential of moving across space is soundwalking: theorized both as the classic method of acoustic ecology (Westerkamp 1974, 2002) and its current re-examinations (Paquette & McCartney 2012, McCartney 2012). In my paper I would like to analyze the practice of soundwalking as narrating the city in “the augmented aur(e)ality” (Noll 2017), yet shifting the focus to its mobile media, touch screen-based version. My case study will be Udo Noll’s radio aporee platform and its most recent incarnation: miniatures for mobiles (a platform for sound-based, locative and spatial micro-narratives, including the phone app). Therefore, the practice of narrating the city through walking will be analyzed from the double perspective: as augmented aur(e)ality and as the embodied experience played out on two levels simultaneously (as physically moving the body through space and as interacting with touch screens of mobile media).

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.

Starting with Homer’’s Odyssey through R. Larsen’’s The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet literature describes journeys, wanderings and world-explorations in which spatial realms provide the basic dispositives for the series of narrated events. While theories of literature from G. E. Lessing’’s Laocoon to K. Hamburger’’s Logic of Literature had conceived of literature as a particular way of perceiving time, M. M. Bakhtin’’s theory of the ““chronotope”” made space into a central constituent affecting the perception of the models in literary scholarship.

In recent years, current electronic media have prompted wide-ranging considerations on the importance of space for socio-cultural processes (the ““spatial turn””). With the application of mobile media devices such as mobile phones, GPS and PDAs and the development of mixed reality environments in museums, galleries or research labs, new combinations of physical, virtual and symbolic spaces have been realized. Metaphorically, we might even say that literature, after having passed through the needle’’s eye of book culture, seems to be reverting back to the multimodal patterns of action and the forms of antiquity, of the Middle Ages, or of the Renaissance. This, however, is taking place on a completely changed media-technological level: texts, objects, bodies and spaces combine in a largely uncharted way; electronic media take ““body language”” to a new level since more and more often the whole body is involved in the media activity. Increasingly complex sensors (integrated into vehicles, clothes and environments) ““realize””——in other words: measure——the movements of the body, its mimics and gestures. This ““multimodal”” body itself then also exchanges information with the ““products”” of this kind of technology. Such medial couplings and framings enable the cooperation of non-symbolic activities, natural language activities and algorithmic processes of computer systems.

Of special interest for the analysis of literary developments today are environmental, exterior or urban projects, the so-called ““Locative Narratives”” using the previously-mentioned locative media such as GPS-tools, PDAs or others, aestheticizing each of them in a quite unexpected turn that inverts the traditional processes of literarization from the ““head”” back to the ““feet;”” they adapt literary patterns like travel-, adventure-, love-, or detective narratives, returning their imaginary movements into real ones again. Among these are projects like Jean-Pierre Balpe’’s Fictions d’’Issy, Stefan Schemat’’s Wasser, Gabe Sawhney’’s [murmur], works of the collaborative artists’’ group ““34 North, 118 West,”” narrative online journals like the Madison Avenue Journal (http://www.madisonavenuejournal.com), and also projects like Worldwatchers by Susanne Berkenheger and Gisela Müller (http://www.worldwatchers.de/) that study the growing intensification of social control via electronic systems of observation. This contribution attempts to outline an initial overview theoretically situating these projects.

(Source: Authors' abstract for ELO_AI).

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.