Tuters and Varnelis (2008) Beyond Locative Media
From Inventiopedia
Tuters, Marc and Kazys Varnelis (2008) "Beyond Locative Media" in Varnelis, Kazys (ed.) Networked Publics. The MIT Press.
(Freely available from the book's webpage).
This article presents an review of 'locative media' as an art movement. It's explanation of the concept is admirably clear:
Locative media emerged over the last half decade as a response to the decorporealized, screen-based experience of net art, claiming the world beyond either gallery or computer screen as its territory. Initially coined as a title for a workshop hosted by RIXC, an electronic art and media center in Latvia during 2002, the term is derived from the "locative" noun case in the Latvian language which indicates location and vaguely corresponds to the English prepositions "in", "on", "at", and "by." A report produced during the workshop outlined the scope for locative media: "Inexpensive receivers for global positioning satellites have given amateurs the means to produce their own cartographic information with military precision... As opposed to the World Wide Web the focus here is spatially localized, and centred on the individual user; a collaborative cartography of space and mind, places and the connections between them."
The report mentioned is located here: http://locative.x-i.net/report.html.
Tuters and Varnelis also refer to the vision by Ben Russell in his headmap manifesto, calling it "the ur-text for locative media".
However, their main concern appears to be the problematics of locative media as an art movement, and how it relates to global capitalism and social power relations. They state a tension in which:
Locative media has been attacked for being too eager to appeal to commercial interests as well as for its reliance on Cartesian mapping systems, yet if these critiques are well-founded, they are also nostalgic, invoking a notion of art as autonomous from the circuits of mass communication technologies, which we argue no longer holds.
The authors relate locative media to the free wireless movement, and state that:
Since its inception, then, locative media's practitioners have claimed an avant-garde position, insisting that their work is capable of not only creating a paradigmatic shift in the art world, but also that it can reconfigure our everyday life as well by renewing our sense of place in the world.
Locative media starts out in opposition to net art, aiming to bring art out of the computer space and out of the gallery space and out into the streets of the city. "Unlike net art, produced by a priestly technological class for an elite arts audience, locative media strives, at least rhetorically, to reach a mass audience by attempting to engage consumer technologies, and redirect their power."
The authors sketch two main categories of locative media projects: Annotative and tracing.
Broadly speaking, locative media projects can be categorized under one of two types of mapping, either annotative — virtually tagging the world — or phenomenological — tracing the action of the subject in the world. Roughly, these two types of locative media — annotative and tracing — correspond to two archetypal poles winding their way through late 20th century art, critical art and phenomenology, perhaps otherwise figured as the twin Situationist practices of détournement and the dérive. Annotative projects generally seek to change the world by adding data to it, much as the practice of détournement suggested. [...] Similarly, in adopting the mapping-while-wandering tactics of the dérive, tracing-based locative media suggest that we can re-embody ourselves in the world, thereby escaping the prevailing sense that our experience of place is disappearing in late capitalist society.
Finally, they turn to the ideas of "the internet of things" and Bruce Sterling's "Spimes", suggesting this to be the most pertinent challenge for locative media:
As an art practice, to date, locative media seems fundamentally tied to discourses of representation centered on a human subject, privileging the experience of the human in space (tracing) and time (annotative). To turn Fusco's argument on its head: in both locative media and much of the criticism launched agains the movement, it is as if more than four decades of postmodern critique of the humanist subject had suddenly evaporated. [...] If, in the Enlightenment, we learned that nature—in its role as background to human activity—had been replaced by human second nature, then today we are perhaps at the threshold of a machinic third nature. It is the task of whatever remains of art after the locative turn to get involved in the messy business of this new world of objects, even if the Utopian and critical moments that can emerge as a result are only temporary and contingent.
--Anders Sundnes Løvlie 02:25, 16 October 2009 (UTC)
