Locative is a verb

Recently I attended the Creative Crossings workshop, hosted by the Finnish Institute in London and organized by the British Arts Council, m-cult and the Banff Centre. A spectacular array of artists, intellectuals and entrepreneurs were in attendance. Afterward, a good number of us travelled to Manchester to participate in the Mobile Connections series of events at Futuresonic. Both events focused mainly on the particular virtues and challenges of working with what might be called “locative media”. ({{popup locative.jpg locative 400×400}}What is locative media?)

I’ve been back in Canada for nearly a week and left blogging about the events in England until now on purpose. It would be impossible for me summarize every insightful comment or relevant question that was put forth at these meetings. By now, most of the things discussed that didn’t resonate with me have fallen away, and this leaves me thinking of a few persistent themes.

\\Performativity of spaces\\
This phrase was floated during several conversations, and as a performance artist, I found it to be an engaging idea. Performance artists are acutely aware of the bearing that context can have on a performance – think of the simple example of the difference between a performance in a black box theatre versus a performance in a public square, hospital, shopping mall, etc. I recently did a site visit to an old ship docked on the Thames where I may be having a performance, and thought “Interesting… but how am I going to work with this?”, because sometimes the context is extremely heavy. “Generic” spaces may be easier to create entire imaginary worlds within, but living up to the challenge of resonances already within a space can be more appealing.

This is not just a question for artists, but for users of locative technologies and tools, as well. Can they perform the space? And by that do we mean that they can customize their space with meta-data? Or something else? I think the cases of geocaching and smart mobs are both compelling examples of users “performing the space”. Sometimes the parameters are loose, self-architected, or quite rigid. These two examples beg deeper analysis as performances. (which I will save for another post…)

\\Annotation of time\\
Related to the idea of performing a space, which implies that an event occurs over time, the question or problem of implementing a way to annotate not just space but time, while upholding visualization standards that would make Edward Tufte proud, is a massive puzzle. There are some tested ways of tackling this. Christian Nold spoke about this at Futuresonic, and showed his “Crowd Compiler” software, which by layering images of people using a space, decodes ways that they flow through it and use it (which sometimes reveals flaws in the design of a space). Christian also showed Charles Joseph Minard’s excellent map of Napoleon’s march, which effectively maps both time and space. The next frontiers for locative media involve a shotgun marriage to time, I think.

\\“Forgetting” location\\
There are cases where being tethered to a specific space or lat/long can be restrictive. Sometimes the content should be as mobile as the user. In that case, thinking of things in terms of states, tracks or paths may be more useful. Take for example the Teletaxi project. Artists created videos that played on a touch screen mounted in the back of a taxicab, and the videos were triggered by GPS locations. This enabled the artists to make some interesting pieces that reflected on the locations that the cab moved through. The “media window” in the cab and the cab windows themselves provided a double delight of visual experience. However, one of the most interesting uses of GPS in this initial presentation of Teletaxi involved viewing GPS as a pure number – either the number is changing or it is static. And when the number is static, it means that you are stopped. The state of motionlessness was used to trigger a piece called “Gridlock”. This highly effective use of the technology is a good argument for thinking in terms of states. States in addition to proximity to locations is an interesting next step.

The discussions I had in England with the many fascinating people that I met will continue to inform my thoughts on these and other themes. I’ve tried to link up as many of them as possible on psychogeography.net.