Notes on Locative Media
Sunday, December 14, 2003
Definitions of ontology, epistemology & semantics
http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/2002-10/msg00034.html
12. Previous notes: 'knowable communities'
I was considering whether there is anything in the idea from Raymond Williams, that 'knowable communities' are the issue here. He states that pre-modern communities where characterized by the fact that everyone knew each other. There was the possibility that you could and should know everyone's business. This is taken as both a positive and negative factor in people's lives. Williams claims that Modern society has a different sort of knowable community - it is less likely that you will know the people that you meet in the street: etc. [check source for exact idea..]
However, the wireless/locative media project seems to be reviving/restating a pre-modern, or post-modern notion of what our knowable communities are.
But projects such as Geograffiti seem only to work like real graffiti? They are broadcasts.
The collaborative mappings: are they communities of interest, or geographical communities? They seem to only have their desire to build an info sys as their common base.
Is this an extension of the 'submerged history' project? What are the intentions of those involved in locative media proijects? I suspect that some are in this for commercial ends. In the same way that the free wireless project attracted some very savvy businesspeople who know how to make a buck from 'social cohesion' work.
Still, ask the question: why is this precision important? Why mapping in this way? Why is location important, above all else? This is the mathematical imperitive again: whether this is an absolute or relative project, this is mathematical.
Where is the possibility for vagueness? For imprecision? Where is the space in between places? Where is the human agency? Abstract idea of 'location' is being substituted for the movement between things: people, places.
What happens when you walk? What happens when you are between places?
11. Previous notes: Which technology is being used?
at the moment, it appears that Internet and web technologies are the desired enabling technologies to be deployed. there are problems here however, in the degree of precision that can be achieved. both commercial and non-commercial participants in this endevour have proposed a very localized set of data 'tagged' onto physical objects in space. current thinking around this area has sought to locate items by means of triangulation - calculating the position of objects by measuring the distance between at least three fixed transmitters, for example. there are problems with this approach in that unlike the cell-phone network, the current technologies used for wireless LANs does not perform this calculation. (this may not be the case for Mesh Networks...)
for this reason, GPS is often used, capable as it is of using an accurate and globally accessible set of satellites to perform the triangulation.
this has to be set in contrast with those systems that use objects themselves as transmitters: the EU/ISI 'call for submissions' identified this scenario in 2001 when , for example, it was suggested that lettuces in a field could be implanted with a microprocessor and transmitter, cabable of making contact with a local area network, sending back data on precipitation, humidity, and the like from its precise location.
...
10. Previous notes: Why is location deemed so important right now?
I can tell i'm not in a specific location easily enough: if i watch the tiny symbols in the bottom left hand corner of my phone's screen, they're jumping about, turning from red to green to blue, displaying vertical bars of increasing length.
my phone knows that i'm moving: by the pace of change with which it is coping, it should know that i'm on a train, not walking.
it knows that i'm moving, even though, whenever i look up, i see the same retail units: curry's, uci, tesco, morrisons, blockbuster...
the same location smeared all over the place.
9. Previous notes: introduction
From my work in Venice, developing ideas of non-precision, vagueness, ill-definition of location. making devices to make sense of a place - to sense and make sense.
My current concern is with walking - revising my emphasis on place as such; much more concerned with how walking disrupts ideas of specific place: its more about being in-between that at. it's more to do with what can happen in this imprecise point (not even at a point equidistant from each location.)
Walking links locations. it helps you forget and makes you remember. it collides places together; rubs them up against one another. in effect, it makes the kind of link across real space that we recognize in the hyperlink from one webpage to another. only the physical labour in getting between is amplified - the duration of experience of that link is so much more apparent.
