Last evening Marc Tuters and I hosted a discussion session. The intention was to spark the creation of the manifesto/policy/common practices document that the group here at Makrolab hopes to create.
The discussion was long and fruitful, and began with simply showing case studies of the following projects:
->Amsterdam Real Time A map of Amsterdam emerges as people traverse the city with GPS receivers
->Elephant Paths Mapping of paths that people make that stray from paved/marked paths
->[murmur] Cellphone-driven, site-specific archival audio project
->Teletaxi GPS-triggered video clips playing in the backseat of a taxicab
->HP’s Cooltown HP’s sanitized vision of the smart future
->BioMapping Track your emotional reaction to the city by wearing body sensors
->Trace Mapping Wi-Fi zones in SF
->One Block Radius Obsessive mapping of one block in NYC
->PDPal Track your “emotional GPS” with the Urban Park Ranger in Times Square
There were a few main points that were raised in the discussion after the show and tell of case studies that really resonated with me.
Money and time are constant problems for creators to confront unless they are affiliated with a research lab/corporation/institution. This leads grassroots creators and artists to become opportunistic, that is co-opt the systems made available to them by institutions/corporations (witness Teletaxi’s co-opting of a failed advertising medium, and the widespread use of GPS which was developed as a military technology, etc.) Visionary practice, on the other hand, would involve attempting to author our own vision of the future, instead of just accepting “bones” thrown to creators from large institutions.
Governmental and corporate decisions drastically impact opportunistic creation practice (as opposed to “visionary” practice, which would try to forge out on its own and have some degree of autonomy). Do creators really understand how beholden they are? Do they really know how GPS works? Do they just use these technologies without a deep understanding? But that begs the question: how deep do you need to grasp the technologies you use? It’s one thing to understand GPS and satellites, but shall we also take it as far as understanding where the electricity that powers your laptop comes from? This understanding is obviously informative and in some cases necessary, but does it ultimately matter since there are usually ways to sidestep a system should it be shut off (ex. tomorrow the United States decided to turn off GPS.) Refer to Chris Heathcote’s 35 ways to find your location (PowerPoint file) for a good summary of alternative processes to determine location.
Also, are we interested in making Swiss Army knives or a really great absinthe spoon? Specialization vs. generalization is an old problem. Schuyler showed an example of a very minimalist driving directions map that reduced the path you are intended to take to a nearly context-less line. This is an example of an elegant and perfect absinthe spoon. It only has one function, but that is all it needs.
The full notes are online at the workshop wiki, as are the developing manifesto notes.
3 replies on “Makrolab Discussion Session”
"Psychogeography and locative media are about understanding and relating to the present, to where you are, to your immediate space."
–> This needs to be reconciled with an understanding of psychogeography as memory, hallucination, drift. I like the manifesto/notes because they acknowledge that these are old issues (not a new thing). And that a vision is needed. Perhaps this vision needs to also move away from Futurist presentism and think of the past?
"Visionary practice, on the other hand, would involve attempting to author our own vision of the future, instead of just accepting "bones" thrown to creators from large institutions."
I dunno- plenty of visionary stuff is possible with off-the-shelf components the interesting part is that- often the visionary use becomes the default mode- consider the electric guitar, the hammond organ, the technics 1202. A GPS and a laptop will cost about as much as an electric gutar and amp…consider them bones, or just as raw materials.
As long as there is excitment of some kind generated about a specific location, i don’t care about manifestos or visions.