Notes on Locative Media
Tuesday, December 09, 2003
4.Who to ask?
I've asked a few people about what 'Locative Media' might be/is.
Sometimes they're within the scope of the self-defined 'Locative Media' group; othertimes, they're interested parties involved with other types of new technologies. Often they are all working with the same technologies, just using different terminology.
Some of those people are:
- Nicholas Maleve from Constant VZW, Brussels
- Tom Collins from Kode, Cardiff
- Julian Priest from Consume & Informal, London & Copenhagen
This week I hope to meet Pete Gomes, subscriber to the locative.org mailing list, and representatives from 'Urban Tapestries', who should be able to help me further.
3. Several Questions
There are two main questions i want to ask of Locative Media:
- what happens when you walk through such an information system?
- what happens at the moment that two RDF Ontologies meet?
Walking is the primary focus of my current research activity - to investigate walking within fine art practice - and its use as a research tool opens up some interesting areas for me, suggesting that walking can be part of a research methodology.
2. Some Method
I'd usually set a hypothesis before i start on a project like this - i've developed a (bad) habit of writing from a point-of-view - starting with a supposition and looking for the evidence to support the 'hunch'...
for this work, i'm going try to be a bit more even-handed (even though i have my strong suspicions about what's out there.) However, this will still be a situated investigation - i'll not claim any objectivity here - i'm writing this from a very specific context and am entirely partisan in my choice of how to find things out.
so as to bring this work into the realm of my current research activity, i'm going to use walking as a mode of enquiry. to put it simply, i'm going to see what happens when you walk through location-based information systems. This may seem trivial, but i have a suspicion (here i go again) that it is the movement between locations that will be the way of finding the gaps and cracks - usually the most productive form of engement with an information system...
1. Starting this Blog
OK, so i started out with the intent to write an essay so as to try to come to terms with 'locative media'. I'd been to the DMZ in Limehouse Town Hall last month, (November 2003) and realized that something is going on which has an energy about it, has a committed group of people driving and building the discourse and is starting to have tangible outcomes on both corporate independent fronts.
Having spent a couple of weeks full of good intent and with a horde of mis-fired rants sitting in the shadows on my PDA, i thought i'd buck my usual way of working and just get something out there.
I'm currently undertaking some research into 'walking as an art practice'. As a consequence, and as part of the job of context-setting, i've been concerned with finding the various orthodoxies around this, in particular, those of psychogeography, definitions of place & space and the increasing prevalence of location-specificity.
