Notes on Locative Media
Saturday, December 20, 2003
Contact & Biographical Details
simon@informal.org.uk
http://venice.ambulantscience.org/documentation/contact.html
Monday, December 15, 2003
New work, related to location-based services/media
I've been invited to make new work for a small-scale project in Cardiff, Wales. The exhibition and conference, Urban Drift, takes its cue from the annual event which runs in Berlin. Ideas and notes are compiled in response to both an 'Arts and Regeneration' and 'location-specific services' brief. The blog can be found at : http://sp-urbandrift.blogspot.com/.
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.
Friday, December 12, 2003
8. My notes prior- & post-Urban Tapestries trial
11/12/03
Venue
Victoria House, Vernon Place, Bloomsbury, London
12-2pm
Questions
think of the devices that could visualize the network/ontology
- how are the objects & spaces related?
- is this made explicit to the human-user?
walking between objects
- how is this handled by the system?
- are human-users static or mobile or both?
- how is movement recorded? [think of the degree of precision in masaki fujihata's work. how does it relate to this?]
- how could walking reveal the system's ontology
consider the density of information in specfic place of trial
- how would this work with different densities and areas?
-----------
feedback
conversations with rachel baker, alice angus and pete gomes.
proboscis have a very thorough design methodology - they have developed particular techniques such as 'bodystorming' to visualize the system to participants at early stages of the project - and have based their practice in some form of participatory design schema.
evidence of this process is pushed to the fore in this project - a scale model of the 'bodystorming' map is installed on a table in the ut workspace/reception area.
following a 45min induction into the use of the system, we were let loose into bloomsbury.
the trial
rb and i conducted the ut trial together - and soon ran into the limitations of the client device and infrastructure.
the client proved very slow - prohibitively so - the text input in particular being in lag of our need to make immediate notation of our location.
our expectation was also of a device that could work-out where it was in the world. we often had to guess where our location was - the map in the GUI being without street names. we projected ourselves into the system - our avatar being a circular 'target' icon - only to find that it was always in lag of our actual movement. we had to simulate the labour of our walking in dragging the icon around, as if behind us.
the core concepts of the system are the 'pocket' and the 'thread'. pockets appear at locations on the map and threads as lines between pockets.
the action of following 'threads' is called 'drifting' - which intimates situationist practices central to the psychogeographic project - that of sensing the borders of areas of similar character and of points of flow from one to another. 'drifting' in this case is more deterministic, as our overview map has already sensed the presence of 'Pockets' in our locality and draws lines directly between those in a specific thread. these threads are in effect desire-lines and do not find an analogue in our bodily experience of our journey between locations. this disjuncture is really marked - the system seems to want me to ignore, or find less-significant, my movement between locations. it prefers me to be stationary - a static user. in a sense, the knowledge that i can upload to the system is sedentary there is something of a paradox - which may in turn be all the more interesting - as we are using mobile devices to access what is actually sedentary knowledge. although an accretion , it is non-the-less fixed to a location. knowledge arranged in this way should be familiar to us - libraries and universities embody this: and as metaphor, so does the story of the 'memory palace', an architectural metaphor used to aid memory recall.
nowhere is there 'ambulant' knowledge - knowledge neither here nor there. between locations - more or less smearing one place onto another, in greater or lesser degrees. this knowledge is caught on the hop - it stumbles up a curb, it falls into a rut. what it doesn't do is assert itself in one location.
neither is it aimless drift - it does not sniff-out a localities ambience as a pass-time (sic).
driven by a desire to make sense, to give it time, to come to terms, it is always somewhere in negotiation.
extending this idea of the 'becoming in love' as the process of one ontology opening to another - rachel reckons that this is an important tactic of resistance at a personal level and shouldn't be revealed to, let alone expected from, the RDF project. this is entirely correct of course - and my intension is to point-out the inadequacy of this technology in this respect.
rb also talked about ideas for a conference, or collaborative mapping/sEmantic web exercise. hard outcomes are needed it seems. ie. some use-value will have to be found in the exercise, preferably applicable to more than the closed group of participants
with pete gomes
p had just also finished the ut trial and we headed out for a coffee nearby. pete was a participant in the 'locative media lab' in riga earlier this year - feb 2003 i think - and has an inside-track on things.
i asked if the ut project could be considered within the widEr lm field - it seems that many of the other proposed projects draw on RDF as a standard and hence have their emphasis on ontology and subsequent potential to link to the wider semantic web project.
in my view, the spacenamespace project in particular hits the mark in this respect, conscious as it is of the process of classification of spaces that has to be performed. i've yet to meet jo walsh, but i need to pursue the why, how of this study in classification.
the semantic element would appear to operate as salve to the obvious problem of trying to define an unequivocal world-view just from the construction of an object-hierarchy. even if synonyms can be found across ontologies, the challenge will be to keep-up with the full-range of dodgy practices that will change the meanings of those spaces and open them to constant re-interpretation.
[i can foresee a moment when someone will think that it's less bother to crack-down on possible re-interpretation of space than develop an inter-ontological, semantic web.]
p and i walked over to the Architecture Association to check pete's parkbenchTV site -- he's about to get his new plank , etched with wi-fi details, inserted into the seat of the bench.
I bought a copy of 'The AA Files' #44 which includes p's piece on location specific media and free networks.
Feedback notes from Urban Tapestries blog
i came to the UT trial with a partiularly loaded set of questions to ask of it: i'm interested in how location-based information systems such as this accomodate the mobile user - that is, me, walking and talking with rachel baker - with information tagged to specific, static locations.
i use an ipaq as part of my everyday note-taking activities and am also very aware of their potential resale value. for this reason i rarely use one *openly* in public, just in case someone takes it for a next-generation phone.
so using an unfamiliar (and slow - ok you know this...) software application on this device in the street was unnerving to some extent, but we persisted nonetheless.
we took jean-paul's advice and headed north over bloomsbury square to look for less densely pocketed locations. Somewhere along the way my machine 'fell-over' - i tried to log-in but failed. this was the first time that i was aware of the network infrastructure on which the system depends and i really *wished* that the ipaq could tell me whether there was any 802.11 in the ether. (i guess it would have, but it was difficult to drop from one app to another through the the 'start' menu as i would usually have expected to do.)
being made so aware of the network infrastructure made me think of the continuing issues of ownership of wireless networks - this will continue to be an issue for projects such as UT. from what i can gather, it's 'access' that is the angle being pushed - this could as easily mean access to corporate/telco provision as it could local council/public service provision. either way, there will be implications for the conditions-of-use of any public authoring system using this technology.
back to my main, and loaded question of the mobile user: ok it seems obvious, we are carrying a mobile *device*, but we have a system (possibly any/every location-based system?) that privileges *static* locations above the movement between them. The user is asked to annotate single locations (and these will be classified into a strict object-hierarchy with RDF, or so i understand) - the demand is made for sedentary knowledge to be recorded, rather than ambulant knolwedge that finds itself between, on the way towards - neither here nor there..
following form this, i also felt some mis-match between the way that 'threads' are represented in the GUI and the actual bodily experience of moving through the physical environment when using the system. the labour of walking is almost entirely erased from the system. So our being diverted around fenced-off areas of park, stumbled down curbs, dodged traffic or got progressively more hungry didn't get noted until now. All that's left is a node and an arc on map.
A few comments on the project overall : i think there's some really good work being done through the design methodology that's been adopted/developed.
the participatory design methods - in particular the 'bodystorming' device, look as though they are really valuable in communicating both the concept of the project and in generating actual 'pockets' of information.
[http://diablo.proboscis.org.uk/MT/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=23http://diablo.proboscis.org.uk/MT/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=23]
Wednesday, December 10, 2003
7. Jumping ahead a little… XML, Ontology and Love.
I met Nicholas Maleve of Constant VZW at the Maison de Peuple in the Saint-Gilles district of Brussels last week. They had just held the latest in their series of Jonctions conferences and workshops and had had some time to think through some of the issues facing those who are currently concerned with mapping and of collecting and classifying location-based information.
I have known Nicholas for around three years I think, having been introduced at the CODE 'open source/free software' conference in Queen's College, Cambridge in the UK. We both have a track record in thinking and working through data-visualization, information systems, free software and its interface with art and activism in some form or another. This made a chat with Nicholas all the more important, as I wanted to know what someone else, in a similar situation to myself thinks about this (for me) relatively new phenomenon of Locative Media.
Nicholas is also a programmer, and has a good understanding of the applications of XML. This is particularly useful at the moment, as much of the location-based information systems use this mark-up language as a way of defining properties of objects in the world and references to them on the Web, for example.
Nicholas described for a while the idea of Ontology in this context. I'd seen this as a keyword in several documents around the DMZ event and had only an inkling what it was about. An Ontology in this sense is a file structure or namespace that provides the 'world view' for a particular document. In this case, Ontologies are important when thinking about the namespace of objects in the world. For example, in the spacenamespace project, Jo Walsh begins to describe some of the possible types of space that could be classified. An ontology is of course the product of a study which aims to define a system of classification, so this is going to be important is Locative Media is to build-up a file structure within which objects can be located.
Nicolas reckoned that the interesting part comes when two ontologies need to be merged – and this is where RDF comes on from what I can gather. In another conversation with Tom Dixon of Kode in Cardiff, he mentioned that there is a concerted effort to build meaning into the information systems that we use, so that imprecise definitions can be weighed-up and matched across ontologies.
This appears to be the basis for the Semantic Web project that Berners-Lee is promoting and draws on the idea that semantics are the attempt to resolve problem in finding similar meanings within different wordviews.
Nicolas mentioned that it was corporations that are interested in this idea as they are increasingly faced with having to deal with different 'worldviews' embedded within the databases of merged or partnered businesses. This attempt at 'understanding', so gentle and forgiving, seems so distant from the public perception of how businesses undertake mergers, take-overs or even internal downsizing ventures. (At another level, the idea that differing 'worldviews' are allowed to co-exist is hard to believe on the record of the governmental behaviours.)
All of this aside, it appears that the techno-determinist liberal-academic voice of the World Wide Web Consortium is persisting with the development of such systems. In an equally optimistic moment, I spent some time thinking about the idea of the interactions between Ontologies and where and how we experience this in other parts of our lives.
One example of this is when we feel whatever it is that we call Love. I figured that at that moment, when we let our guard down, we open our 'worldview' to change. It becomes open change through interaction – there is a chance that change will occur in our Lover's ontology too – and I guess that would be the proof that we would be looking for.
This process is apparent in Breathless – the film, featuring Richard Gere, as ti careens through Jerry Lee Lewis' breakneck, wayward lyrics and Goddard's Bout de Souffle towards that moment of vertigo, violence, confusion, obsession and wrecklessness.
I wonder whether there's room for that moment in the development of these file structures? Whether there will be a similar embodiment of the profound change that occurs when one worldview opens to another?
6. What is locative media?
Taking a look through the Locative.org website and mailing list archive, it becomes obvious that the terms Locative Media and Location-based Services are synonymous. While one appears, at first reading, to be defined from within new media art and activism, the latter feels quite at home within the corporate Geographic Information Services sector. Starting where many people do – chasing some keywords through Google, you can see equal weight given to the concern with location and information within both factions.
So it looks as if, as is often the case, to define Locative Media only in terms of technology is going to miss the point.
As evidence of this, it might be worth taking wireless local area network technology as an example. Used at once as a way of extending the reach of telecommunications companies, while also being taken up for free, open use by maverick groups of hackers, geeks and activists. The real and discernable difference between these factions is in the matter of ownership: some activists go as far as bringing the ownership back into the public realm through effecting policy – wireless network infrastructure as public service rather than private enterprise; others go even further and advocate radical cooperative models which take the responsibility and ownership beyond both state and corporation. At the extremes, these are fundamentally differing ways of understanding how communications networks could or should operate.
Drawing from this, I'd hope and expect to see similar fundamental differences in the approach to ownership and use of location-based services.
At one extreme I expect to find information systems that enable corporate retail interests to team with the largest mobile communications providers. Of course I lie here – I know that these are teamed-up already, and have working examples of such systems in place right now.
Following from this, I'd hope to see radical models of ownership and control being developed, outside of commercial application, but possibly within the reach of public policy.
I also expect to see the orthodoxies of psychogeography brought to bear somewhere along the line, providing as it does, interaction with both location and a mystical radical art-activism.
Let's see where to go from here…
5. Where to start?
Some objectives to be getting on with - to identify:
- What locative media is, or might be;
- Who is involved in its development;
- Why locative media is deemed important right now;
- What the context is - the network of standards, disciplines, organizations, people, discourses, funding;
- What method might be used to engage with it.
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.
