Before, I start mentioning some aspects of Jeremy Sr.’s paper, please check out my official interview with him from last year.
I am also hoping to bring him to SIAT to lecture about Locative Media one day or curate a show of Vancouver-based Locative Media artists…any suggestions for museums or galleries with funding that might interested? Also in the summer, I just had an idea to ask him to collaborate with me on a tiny locative Augmented Reality project using the Aurasma app (he did not know about this until probably now – as in, the time he read this blog post).
Anyway, I am going to let Tyler go into detail about Jer Sr.’s work…I have just read his blog now and I look forward to discussing his questioning more in class. I am guessing that Tyler will also go into detail in class about the pioneering “34 North 118 West” (2002) project (3-5), the “Carrizo Parkfield Diaries” (2005, 6-7) and how the “end-user in locative narrative is the movement and patterns of the person navigating the space.” (Ibid:3). This is an opportunity to remind myself to ask a question in the seminar about ways in which geo-located end-users themselves can function AS nostalgic “patterns” of identity (based on Ibid:4,8). I am thinking about how one’s “aesthetic bias” (i.e. personal preferences for navigation and attention) (Ibid) can be mapped archetypally -or perhaps even more idiosyncratically – as both the augmented site-pattern under scrutiny and the avatar-pattern. Such patterns, therefore, can be merged into a symbiotic gestalt.
In the meantime, here are some more casual (i.e. bloggable) impressions from reading his paper…
Although we correspond all the time on Facebook chat and feel as if we have known each other for a long time; from my perspective this Jeremy is from an alternative universe. Jer Sr. is almost like an “imaginary friend” without an authenticated geo-location tag except what Facebook provides me.
He talks about the power of historical overlays where through mediated GPS-enabled devices we can view the history of previous places as if they actually existed (Ibid). This idea of recording historical traces from the same simul-locative site reminds me of Zbigniew Rybczynski’s “Tango” (1981) – a fictional film where pre-recorded segments from within the same space provide multi-linear plot-augmentation through the placement of overlays.
Jer Sr.’s mention of how listening to a blues recording can act as a soundtrack that connects one nostalgically to the exact geo-locative place where it was once recorded (Ibid:1) reminds me of the fact that while writing this blog entry, I am listening to Brian Eno’s classic “Music for Films” (1975-78) album on vinyl.
Inspired by Erik Satie and John Cage, Eno saw these hypothetical soundtracks as “imaginary landscapes”.
Eno also uses aesthetic augmentation to provide a soundtrack for imagined geo-locative landscapes and/or films etc. However, no affordable geo-locative tech was enabled during Eno’s time. Eno’s ambient music induces nostalgia for places that may or may not exist in empirical reality,
In either case, one can use all sorts of media to activate narrative associations (based on Hight 2006:2) with a real, virtual or imaginary landscape.
The main difference between Hight’s locative media projects and Eno’s music is that Hight is using empirical (i.e. scientific and historical data, 2-3) phenomena to validate the authenticity of particular cites for the purpose of “narrative archaeology” (2, 5-6). In Eno’s case, there is no particular site in mind as the music is merely meant to bring the geo-evocative landscape to life only in the listener’s imagination.
In both cases, Hight and Eno seem interested in the dialectic of Site/Non-Site that was prevalent in the “Land Art” (2) or “Earthworks” of Robert Smithson and Robert Morris II (Robert Morris I was a similar artist and architect working in England in the 18th century). In the 1960s, site/non-site works served as historical and scientific augmentations not just for a neutral white-cube gallery space (non-site) but also for the original landscape from whence the aesthetic speculations first occurred.
More so than even Eno though, Hight would like to see the gallery and museum methodology of historical contextualization move beyond the gallery space and into the natural and built environment outside – contextualized as culturally valid Contemporary Art.
…Ok, that is all for now..I will prepare my comments from at least one other reading and look forward to Tyler’s discussion on Tuesday.
Fantastic post Jeremy, I will incorporate some of this into my presentation!