Hello everyone! I look forward to reading and hearing your responses to this week’s readings, all summarized in one fashion or another below. I thought it might be good to just outline a few trends that I picked up on in the readings, just to prime you for conversation on Tuesday. I am slightly bothered by the readings of locative media from this week, though I enjoyed most of them. I notice a trend to discuss the great potential locative media has to deepen our experience of place in new ways, and yet, rarely are there accompanying descriptions of place or space.
(I will distinguish this a bit more on Tuesday, but I consider space to be the physical organization of things in space, where place is something which carries with it a sense of identity, or possibly even emotion—so “home” has a physical reality, but also undertones of cultural and personal associations.)
The authors all make note of place, they ensure us that many of these projects actually engender new experiences of place, but they do so primarily through social and historical means—that is making evident social or historical connections that one may not be aware of. And that is great! (Really, no sarcasm.) However, I cannot shake the feeling that there is a lack of attention to the real-time unfolding of experience—the physicality of space—that is being slightly ignored in these arguments, and I think to the detriment of experience. This seems rather vague to me, and I am having difficulty finding a clear way to describe it, or find a really good example of it. So, I will want to talk about that, land art, and technological frameworks of experiences of space/place on Tuesday. Please feel free to suggest détournements and dérives that alter that trajectory in the comments.
I will also make up for the lack of images with many pretty pictures during class. I promise.
Tuters, Marc, and Kazys Varnelis (2006) Beyond Locative Media: Giving Shape to the Internet of Things. Leonardo 39(4):357-363.
Marc Tuters and Kazys Varnelis detail the tensions embedded within locative art, tensions that come out of expectations for artists to be critical of both corporate and ideological frameworks seen. Emerging at the time that net art (arguably) began to wain in popularity, locative media seemed ripe to follow net art practitioner’s critical distance from corporate interests and practices (357). The authors see locative media closely aligned with geohackers, phsychogeographers (Situationist movement) and the free wireless movement—all movements highly critical of commercial interests. Thus, they see within locative media the possibility of “re-embodying” experience in the built environment as a response to capitalist forces of production that are diminishing our experiences of space/place (359). And yet, corporate sponsorship, technologies of surveillance and ideologies of mapping (ie. Cartesian models of understanding the world) all support the practices of locative media.
The authors boil down locative media into two major approaches: annotative and tracing. “Annotative projects…generally seek to change the world by adding data to it…tracing-based projects typically seek to use high technology to stimulate dying everyday practices such as walking or occupying public space” (359). Here, the authors align locative media most strongly with Situationism, where annotating the world with data is analogous to détournement practices, such as “adding a light switch to street lights.” While tracing is analogous to the dérive, or wandering the city. Here, Situationism is argued as “a series of programmatic texts” (359). This is yet another bridge to locative media, which the authors point out is almost exclusively indebted to computer software (and hardware too, of course) (359). This is perhaps the source of the identified tension, for developing software and technology for locative projects requires that practitioners “adopt the model of research and development wholesale, looking for corporate sponsorship or even venture capital” (360).
For example, Blast Theory and Proboscis, two locative media art groups, both accepted corporate sponsorship for different projects—projects which blur the distinction of art and public relations. Anne Galloway, an anthropologist, calls for a more “structured mechanism for accountability, professionalism and ethics” (360). However, while Andreas Broeckmann, director of Transmediale, said that practitioners of locative media “have a duty to address [technologies of surveillance and control] in their work” (ibid). Coco Fusco, a new media artist, goes even further, suggesting that with locative media practice over 40 years of critical theory have dissipated and that artists need to examine the geopolitical forces in which they are situated (360-361).
The authors seem genuinely amused at the simultaneous laudatory and disparaging views of locative media from different angles. They also suggest that neither view of locative media is capturing its full potential. Instead, they argue that we should focus not on the human subject of locative media, but on things. Using Bruce Sterling’s concept of “spimes”—context aware objects that convey “information about where they have been, where they are and where they are going” (362). This would allow for a nonhuman understanding of capitalist forces of production, “an awareness of the genealogy of an object as it is embedded in the matrix of its production” (362).
I really enjoyed the way that this article draws out the rich tensions across different ways of knowing space and place, the call for politically aware art, and the different ways that artists negotiate systems of capital. It’s a lovely, tangled knot of our contemporary world that goes beyond art into how each of us chooses to live in such a world. I also enjoyed the reference to nonhumans (down with anthropocentrism!), and yet, I was surprised by their sudden shift to the nonhuman. I am all for more nonhuman views of the world, but I am skeptical that spimes are necessarily going to describe more clearly the material processes of capitalist forces and the effects therein—at least not without a shift in human experience of such processes.
PDQs:
Do you agree with the shift to a thing-centric locative media practice? Can that make for an opening up of productive forces to understand, critique and change them? Do you see spimes shaping our experience of space? How so? Is there still room to push locative media practices to reveal our own complicity and enfolded experiences of processes and systems of power, before jumping to to things? Are walking and occupying space truly “dying everyday practices”?
Hight, J. (2006). Views From Above: Locative Narrative and the Landscape. Leonardo Electronic Almanac, 14(7/8), 1-9
Jeremy Hight details his artistic practice and the potential of embedding narrative elements into the landscape via locative media. In this way, he argues that the viewer/participant is able to experience a much richer form of place. “The cities and the landscape as a whole can now be navigated through layers of information and narrative of what is occurring and has occurred. Narrative, history, and scientific data are a fused landscape, not a digital augmentation, but a multi-layered, deep and malleable resonance of place” (1).
Hight describes his entry into locative media as an attempt to deal with narrative of place. Beginning with experiments of overlaying text on physical locations, new technologies allowed for a more fully realized integration of narrative and place. “Narrative could be composed not of elected details to establish tone and sense of place, but could be of actually physical places, objects and buildings. It was as though the typewriter or computer keyboard had fused with fields, walls streetlights; the tool set was suddenly of both the textual world and the physical world” (3). Hight explains that the technology allowed for a new kind of “reading” of a place, an affordance that reveals hidden experiences drawn from the historical record of a place. Narratively, this unfolds not just through the triggers of information—where and how information is delivered through the technological infrastructures—but also how the narrative elements are selected “in relation to the properties of each location” (3).
34 North 118 West is a project Hight worked on with Jeff Knowlton and Naomi Spellman. A series of locations were tied to narrative segments. Participants were able to generate the narrative sequence by using an interactive map to guide them from one location to the next in whatever order they wanted, listening to the narrative via headphones. The narratives were pulled from the history of the site, thus participants were able to experience something out of the past in the present. Another project, Carrizo Parkfield Diaries used seismic data to generate the sequencing of narrative elements, thus the earth itself constructed the narrative sequence—if not the narrative elements. Hight calls this “Narrative Archaeology,” focused on revealing the historical changes of a site to the audience through a range of data. Historical, social, and scientific data can all be woven into the fabric of locative narrative. This integration of narrative and media into the landscape so that it may be “read” is only at the beginning stages, according to Hight. “The future of locative media lies in applications of ever-increasing variation fed by many kinds of data and generating narrative of any area where strutters may be read—the city, the subterranean, and the wild itself” (9).
I come away from this article with the sense that the attention Hight places on space pales in comparison to the narratives that he creates. What I mean by this, is that while we get glimpses of the narrative, there are few descriptions of the physical space that the narratives occur in. That is to say, there are no compelling points in the article that show how the physicality of place, or space, influence the narrative. I found this subtle lack of attention to space a running theme throughout many of the artistic projects described. Unfortunately, I cannot explain this more clearly (maybe by Tuesday I will have it down!), however I am curious if anyone else gets a similar vibe from this, or other articles.
PDQs:
Hight offers a new form of reading place through narratives derived from and organized by a range of data. However, there seems to be a lack of emphasis on the present experience of place. Does a historical archaeology of space allow us a deeper appreciation of what we are experiencing in situ? Or, does it only redirect our attention from what we are currently experiencing? It seems to me that, though interesting and engaging, Hight’s projects are not about reading the place as it is, but revealing the human traumas previously experienced. Thinking through spimes (Beyond Locative Media) offers a nonhuman critique of his, arguably, human-centric treatment of place. What are other ways we can think of space and place outside of narrative?
Rothfarb., R., Mixing Realities to Connect People, Places, and Exhibits Using Mobile Augmented-Reality Applications.
The Exploratorium in San Francisco details some of their work in locative media and AR in this article. The article covers a range of AR technologies including markers, and AR applications, examples of their work with AR, and even some guidance and best practices for other organizations looking to create AR experiences for their audiences. I found it extremely practical, and makes me want to go back to the Exploratorium, which I haven’t visited since I was a kid. Since we went over AR last week, and it appears we have a fairly good grasp of the technology, and in the interest of time (mine and those reading this), I am just going to cover one brief example of this app which is related to locative media. Specifically, I want to suggest that the Golden Gate Bridge Fog Altimeter is one of the few locative media applications focused on deepening the experience of space in real-time through technology. The authors do not go into great detail about the exhibit, writing only, “The exhibit becomes a virtual instrument that visitors can use to measure the altitude of fog in the bay by observation and to learn about weather phenomena that affect fog penetration into different parts of the city – a “take it with you” tool that can be used for personal investigation” (5).
It seems to me that this is a deepening of active experience, one which goes in direct contrast to 34 North 118 West and narrative driven projects. The goal here is to provide understanding of what one experiences. Weather processes may not be noticed, or understood, but they clearly impact our experience of space and place. The fog in San Francisco is part of the lived experience and understanding what is happening in the moment can be just as meaningful as the hidden narratives of those who once inhabited this space. However, it is difficult to tell what, exactly, the experience of this exhibit is, as it is only briefly mentioned. I just wanted to offer it as a counter to some of the larger, art-based projects that, from my point of view, tend to emphasize historical or social experiences than environmental.
Elisa Giaccardi. Cross-media interaction for the virtual museum: Reconnecting to Natural Heritage in Boulder, Colorado
This article describes The Silence of the Lands—a locative media project focusing on the sounds of nature in Boulder, Colorado. Elisa Giaccardi details both the philosophical approach to the app, as well as a description of the supporting technologies. The specific technologies (already slightly outdated, arguably) are not as important as the general technological infrastructure and activities supported, at least in my opinion. Briefly, the project works in the following stages:
1. Participants go into nature with a GPS enabled PDA to record sounds in nature. Giaccardi likens the device to a “sound camera” and the experience to taking snapshots.
2. Sounds are loaded to a web server and participants can go online to catalogue their sounds. It is a process of engaging with the sounds through personal memory and the objective reality of what is recorded.
3. Public sessions invite community members (who may or may not have participated in the capturing of the sounds) to create ideal soundscapes via an interactive table with mapping overlays.
Giaccardi also references the ability to create soundscapes on the website, but she did not include it when describing the above scenario. It seems that her focus is on the communal aspect of the project, and the ways that the project supports a move from the individual to collective experiences. This is definitely still valid for the web based editing, but the emphasis on shared soundscape creation seems important.
The result is collage-like, both in the resulting artifact, as well as the individual and communal actions needed to create the work (recording, cataloguing, and editing/representation). It is a form of shared meaning making, through different levels of collaboration. Giaccardi acknowledges that simply providing the technological infrastructure is not enough to engender such collaboration, and details a series of “social infrastructure” initiatives to get the community involved. Namely by working with local municipalities to encourage participation in organized soundwalks and community workshops. Her goal is to use sound as a way to catalyze and understand the community’s perspective on and relationship to the surrounding natural environment through these technological and social infrastructures:
“The primary objective of this project is to encourage an engaged way of listening to the natural environment and to support a situated and narrative mode of interpreting natural quiet that may foster community building and contribute to environmental culture and sustainable development. What we envision is to connect the Boulder community and its land, and to cultivate their creative relationship by enabling inhabitants and stakeholders to look at each other’s experiences, connect with each other’s perceptions, and inform their actions upon the shared narrative that is unfolding over time” (115).
Giaccardi positions the project as fundamentally different from other virtual museum initiatives, which she claims focus on the archive. Instead, she offers the model of the “repertoire” to describe the intertwining of individual and communal experience and perspectives. Thus the experience of the mobile app is focused on allowing individuals to record and map their experience in nature and to share these recordings as “digital representations” that express “their different values perspectives” (115). By providing collaborative, creative tools (recording and composition), it is hoped that the participants’ artifacts will reveal their understanding of and relationship to the natural evironment. Rather than just being a “digital archive,” she says it is a “repertoire —meant to sustain the whole system of knowledge and reproduction as a living system” (118).” She argues that the difference is predicated on a continual actualization of the community’s relationship to nature, the virtual museum is the site of activity and action that represents an unfolding reality.
I think that this is a very interesting locative media process, one which attempts to capture the experiences in nature and creatively repurpose them. I am skeptical of some of the author’s language. She describes the process of going into nature to record sounds as “authentic, direct and intimate,” but she fails to look at any ideas of technological framing of the project, or the encounter with nature (122). Going out to record sounds, in my personal experience, is different than just going out to walk in the woods. Purpose can change the experience, and arguably create a goal-driven experience. Of course, there is nothing wrong with this! It is just different. However, I find the lack of philosophical attention to technology strange in this article, as it neglects the way technology informs the project, especially since the article itself is so philosophically savvy.
PDQs:
What do you think of this idea, repertoire vs. the archive? Is it a fair characterization of other digital initiatives? Does the strategy reflect a shift in stance, or is it just wrapped up in nice rhetoric? Could Fiona Campbell’s papers on enhancing multiple meanings of objects also be considered a strategy of repertoire? James Clifford’s zones of contacts?
What about the role of technology in this scenario? Giaccomi does not address the way that technology shapes the experience of being in nature, recording and editing sound, or even engender a specific kind of interaction between community members. Are there not systems of logic in place (i.e., the design of the app, editing tools, interaction table) that, like any museum display or other ‘programming’, shape the potential actualizations and conceptual frameworks through which participants make meaning?
From Picassos to Sarcophagi, Guided by Phone Apps (New York Times, Oct. 1 2010)
This review article of a number of museum apps is a great continuation from last week’s AR/VR readings. It focuses on the museum experience while using apps and picks up on Barney’s article (Terminal City). It aligns with his broader critique that looking at one’s phone when standing in front of a piece of art is kind of missing the point. However, and I think more important to the museums and app makers, the author notes how bad the apps are for deepening the museum experience. Rothstein notes that there are a number of useful activities apps can help us with while in museums, but they mostly come down to way-finding techniques (Where is the bathroom? Which room can I find the Mona Lisa in?) or providing more information about a particular work of art.
The way-finding techniques are not yet widely implemented, and can be tricky. The best solutions seem to be museums who have installed wifi routers in the building and can triangulate visitor position that way. This is useful when available to receive information about specific exhibits or amenities. However, even when implemented as in the Museum of Natural History, the delivery of robust, deep content about the museum collection seems widely missing.
Rothstein laments that most of the apps are lacking content, providing only thin descriptions. What is best about this article, I think, is his vision for what these apps may provide in the future. Interestingly, I think it aligns nicely most of our readings thus far in the semester. “It is best to consider all these apps flawed works in progress. So much more should be possible. Imagine standing in front of an object with an app that, sensing your location, is already displaying precisely the right information. It might offer historical background or direct you through links to other works that have some connection to the object. It might provide links to critical commentary. It might become, for each object, an exhibition in itself, ripe with alternate narratives and elaborate associations.”
Townsend, A. (2006). Locative-Media Artists in the Contested-Aware City. Leonardo, 39(4), 345-347.
This article examines location aware technologies in a specific context-aware form, highlighting two distinct approaches of technological implementation: top-down systems and bottom-up systems. The author suggests that these two strategies will result in an ongoing power struggle waged through technological systems deployed in the built environment. Townsend offers a slightly different take on location aware media, moving instead to a “context aware” model enabled by new sensor technology. “These new technologies are characterized by their ability to gather information about their surroundings by sensing the physical world, understanding these data, identifying patterns and acting or reacting” (345).
Townsend states that the complexity of these technologies has engendered top-down and bottom-up strategies of design. Top-down strategies “use relatively simple sensing mechanisms, highly formalized vocabularies for describing and organizing sense data, and closed channels for communicating context” (345). Meanwhile, bottom-up strategies use “more sophisticated sensing mechanisms, very informal data vocabularies and open systems for exchanging context” (345). Top-down strategies are centralized control-driven designs—Townsend uses a toll system as an example. Control is strict and tied into various systems of tight control: identification systems, billing systems, etc. Bottom-up examples are the tagging system of del.icio.us and Flickr, they are often called “folksonomies,” tagging systems with open vocabularies (i.e., users can add new tags at any time).
These two different strategies are beginning to reveal different forms of context awareness, and on some levels clash against one another. For instance, he contrasts the universal presence of visual surveillance (top-down) to the (bottom-up) Open Street Map project that uses GPS logs of amateur surveyors “to create a free set of digital street maps” (347). In many ways, he pits artists and community organizations as bottom-up innovators in resistance to control-oriented top-down systems of governments and corporations. The two different strategies impact on how we experience place. “For the question being raised by context-aware systems are about more than just location, how we experience space and the meaning of place” (347).
There is an overriding technologic deterministic tone to Townsend’s article. One that has already given in to the inevitable integration of technologies and cities. “The artists of tomorrow with [sic] have to explore the meaning of perception in a world in which we will have our sourced many of our perceptive tasks to machines, to extend and augment our abilities” (347). The technological landscape, as he puts it, is determined at odds through the technologies mobilized. However, it is as if there is no room for change. I have a hard time with this view. Cultures change, and the privacy concerns he lists as one of the motivators for bottom-up technologies will undoubtedly shift with generations growing up on line along with technologies like Facebook. The dualistic approach Townsend takes seem likely in the short term, but I wonder how long this contest will really run for.
PDQs
Are these the only design strategies we can come up with for how we enable technological systems to be context aware? If so, must they automatically be contested? Is there no room for hybrid practices of middle-up-and-down systems that enable new vocabularies of experience? Is a context-aware environment really going to force us to offload our perceptive tasks?
Shirvanee, L. (2007). Social viscosities: mapping social performance in public space. Digital Creativity, 18(3), 151-160.
Lily Shirvanee writes about locative media practices that “address a social consciousness” (151). She coins the term “social viscosities” to describe the “dynamic spaces of flow between people that emerge as collective activities begin to form in mobile social groups” (151). Locative media can bring forth unnoticed, and instigate new forms of, collective activities. She covers a range of artworks that attempt to do just that through a few key strategies:
Narratives in time and space—Focuses on project like 34 North 118 West. Here Shrivanee focuses on how social practices inform the production of space, and how narrative can shift the social experience of space. It creates a “resonance” between the participant and “others who have inhabited the same space” (153).
Mapping Social Histories—In Amsterdam RealTime participants were tracked via GPS in an attempt to visualize the traces of real-time activity in the city. “Locative mapping as personal expression can become interesting to individuals as a reflection and as a narration of their experience” (154).
Mobile Gaming Culture—Botfighters allows players to track one another in the city. GPS data allows the proximity of players to be determined and “indicate when another is close enough to tag or hit…In the complexity of the urban context, this game becomes a tool for mediation—a tactical device that not only enables strangers within a locative range to communicate with each other, but also has the potential to create a shared narrative between individuals that may create ripples of familiarity across a society of gamers” (155).
Surveillance and Social Spam—Films like Minority Report and Blade Runner as dystopian visions for advertising run amok. Projects like Personal Telco Project, which were providing free wireless to the public have recently been shut out of the social space by corporate wifi by Starbucks and T-Mobile signals that overpowered the independent, free service where “the potential for a new urban storytelling is surprised by commerce” (157).
These themes are analyzed through Shirvanee’s Social Viscosity project, which seeks to create a “storymapping project that tracks ‘social viscosities’ in Cambridge, UK” (158). Building on the themes above, Shrivanee expects that her project will bring forth community voices in active disruption of “political and commercial control” of public space. Her project, and the ones detailed in the article are all enabled through locative media, and she argues that these projects have the potential to create a connective space through such technologies (159).
Speed, C. (2010). Developing a Sense of Place with Locative Media: An “Underview Effect.” Leonardo, 43(2), 169-174.
Chris Speed works off of the “Overview Effect”—the reported experience of astronauts when seeing the earth from a distance feel an overwhelming sense of connection to the entire planet—to develop his own idea of an “Underview Effect”: using locative and social media to present an altered experience of place that “supports a sense of place” over a sense of time (169). His view is that technologies of navigation and mapping make our connection to place difficult to maintain. The “Underview Effect” is the author’s attempt to reinvigorate a sense of space while being on the planet, which he argues is difficult to maintain due to the Cartesian models of space and time. “[W]ith the development of the map and the marine chronometer that allowed seafarers to navigate places safely, space was split from our sense of time, making it very difficult for any future technology based on thiese systems to convey any actual sense of place—any sense of “here” or “there…Digital systems have proceeded to capitalize upon the use of the split system to an increasingly extreme extent, which at its peak posited the idea of virtual realities; spaces that promised an extreme lack of place and embraced a form of homelessness” (170). This split model of space and time is still prevalent in the map, according to Speed, and locative media needs to “be sensitive in the way that it adopts Cartesian and abstract ways of describing a sense of place” (172). In his own work, Speed and collaborators tried to do jus this when they created Digital Explorations in Architectural Urban Analysis.
They recorded GPS data from 17 people to create a simultaneous mapping of space through the group of people. The time stamp was removed from the GPS data He writes, “This apparent geography is unusual because it is the result of a social process. It is a landscape collected through the movement of groups of people working together to explore a specific place. In many ways, the topology describes knowl- edge of that place because it documents their movement across, around, over and through it. Traditional use of the same data depicted the lines of each of the 17 GPS devices over time and would have required a base map of Dundee for a user to understand the geography” (173). While I find his description of this lacking—I am honestly unable to make sense of how social mapping could be made to work “simultaneously” without reference to the time data—I nonetheless enjoy the goal of his work, a poke at the rational, Cartesian models of understanding space and place through a distributed “body” of multiple individuals.
However, once again, I find here a lack of attention to the experience of space/place as it unfolds. It focuses on processes of analysis after the experience of place.
Kabisch, E. (2010). Mobile after-media: trajectories and points of departure. Digital Creativity, 21(1), 46-54.
Eric Kabisch describes his project Datascape in terms of an after-media practice—”an approach toward media that sets itself in opposition to that which came before it” (47). Pulling from Benedcit Anderson’s idea of imagined communities, Kabisch describes how cities and communities are bound also by “shared visions and stories through witch their constituents identify both personally and collectively” (46). “Datascape is a geographic storytelling platform that enables artists, researchers, community groups and other individuals to narrate their local communities through geographic data” (ibid). He explains that his project began with the goal of exposing the use of consumer and demographic data to develop narrative descriptions of city blocks by marketing companies. Using a modular system of software, Kabisch will work with communities to incorporate technologies to enable communities to create the narratives they want to tell. Some examples of the projects using Datascape are: “graduate education majors who will be using the system to enable ecological and historical education around Newport Bay for high school students; artists and atmospheric scientists who will be using atmospheric data to illustrate correlations between changes on Earth and on Mars as a lens toward the importance of the issue of climate change; researchers who are collecting community information through cell phone users in order to highlight local community issues; a cultural anthropologist who is mapping the social geography of local Native American groups and how it has changed over time; a department of Cultural Affairs preparing interactive and interpretive experiences for visitors and residents; and a youth-artist-mentoring community group that enables disadvantaged youths to tell stories about their local communities” (49). Kabisch’s work is a response to mapping technologies and this informs his practice. He writes, “locative media as an offshoot of the underlying technologies of GIS is quite bound to previous modes of representation. I suggest that the requisite geodata ontology is typically carried through to the level of representation. A place—in all its richness—becomes a static marker on a map, a journey becomes a line, and a community becomes a polygon outline.” (49-50).
Kabisch nicely cycles through the various tensions and critiques inherent to locative media that we have seen in the other papers: an association with commercial interests, not being political enough, reliant on Cartesian models of space, and so on. His view of an after-media practice is interesting in that it works as a way to understand all of these issues. However, he does not explain how these elements manifest themselves in his work, how one practically addresses the deep tensions of an art practice through the ‘materials’ of the medium. So, his article, while interesting, and clearly delineating the critical issues surrounding locative media, does not explain how after-media works as a practice—it appears much more like a theoretical tool.
Tyler, hi! One more great seminar post added to our class blog…thanks so much for this!
I share many of your concerns and observations about locative media in this week’s readings. Specifically, there is this tendency in this week readings to use a florid rhetoric about “making and sharing narratives” through technology that is only supported by…the florid rhetoric itself. Ahhh, reality vs. language…Sometimes, I experience this with irritation.
My favorite “irritating” article was Giaccardi’s (2008). Admittedly, I have not experienced the tool she describes (the Silence of the Lands “virtual museum”). But, in my opinion, the way she lauds the merits of the technology cannot possibly be matched by its performance. Why? Because, the promises of any technological tool, whether a paint brush or a locative media toolkit, is of no value whatsoever without human inspiration, creativity, sensitivity and skill. The way Giaccardi writes about the Silence of the Lands, it sounds like anyone can create natural soundscapes that will communicate their innermost experience of a place, emotions and all. Now how realistic is that? Most artists I know practice their craft 6 hours a day over every day of their lifetime just to be able to communicate a small portion of the art and artistic vision that animates them. Whether in music or in painting or in film or in any other art form. They would say, and so would many people who consume their art, that this magic happens only with a great deal of work and only in special moments when the chemistry between audience and artist(s) is just right.
Why is it that scholars who write on technology so often make the assumption that anyone can use technology to make something that will actually EFFECTIVELY communicate to others? That those who listen to those soundscapes will hear something that will touch their heart, not just their ears? Why is there an assumption in scholarly research that “anything goes”, “everything is good”, “communication is easy”? Why is there so little concern for aesthetics and appreciation of HOW technology is used? How effective it is in certain circumstances and ineffective it is in others?
Think of how often you have been to see an art show or a film expecting to at least walk away with a little bit of something, to be filled a little bit with someone else’s vision and instead you walked away feeling empty because nothing came through, nothing was communicated. This happens all the time with art, but when it comes to new technologies, and especially scholars talking about new technologies, I am always amazed at how they make it sound like the magic is always happening. When in fact, it is not.
I don’t want to sound mean or insensitive, but as I was reading Giaccardi’s article, I was thinking to myself that if I were to listen to most of the soundscapes produced in the Silence of the Lands, I would probably NOT feel anything at all except an incredible nostalgia for the real thing. Were this technology used by someone who has great sensitivity and training and skill with soundscapes (like for instance, someone who creates soundtracks for motion pictures and who is good at it), then yes, I probably would be transported to their soundscape and share and be moved and feel life moving inside me.
But the promises of technology sung by the scholars require more than just having and doing. They require Promethean skill and talent. It’s not a matter of being elitist about using technology. It’s a matter of cultivating aesthetic judgements and critical thinking.
I did not experience the Silence of the Land, 34 North 118 West or Carrizo Parkfield Diaries, so really, I am just shooting my mouth off at this point. But, in fact, this is exactly what I mean. We are reading descriptions of these tools and how magical they are and are asked to accept this at face value. We have no way of arguing elsewise, because we have nothing to argue with. No experience of these tools that would offer fodder for thought (excuse the pun).
Such is my answer to your question, “What do you think of this idea, repertoire vs. the archive?” I think the “repertoire” is a great little academic concept but in real life, not everyone would successfully make a “Silence of the Lands” repertoire. Most of them would probably sound like “archives”. To my ears anyway…
It fascinates me that people assume that when we communicate something, others understand what we are feeling and thinking. Most of the time, as I can see from my own observations, people understand something completely different, and if we are lucky, maybe they do understand a little bit of what we feel and think too. But for this to be so, we have to be quite vigilant and practice the art of communication with deep devotion.
One of the other salient points in this week’s readings is this ongoing celebration of narrative and multiple voices, etc. After having done the readings, I asked myself if maybe technology and narrative are mutually constitutive of one another. They are the two faces of a totem. Indeed, James Carey (1990) has described technology as a totem, a talisman of the cultural self, yet he also sees technology as our nature when he writes, “…it is a view that characterizes technological artifacts, at least in a provisional and hypothetical way as homunculi: concrete embodiments of human purposes, social relations, and forms of organization…it serves not merely as a template for producing social relations but a template for producing human nature as well.” (p. 247)
Can technology exist without narrative? Can narrative exist without technology?
I will end my post here for fear of boring everyone. But I was also interested, Tyler, in the questions you raised in relation to spimes and thing-centric locative media practice (Tuters and Varnelis, 2006), as well your remarks on more than one article about the sense of place vs. space and capitalist driven paradigms around technology uses. Would be happy to engage on these topics on Tuesday.
Additional reference used in this blogpost:
Carey, James. (1990). Technology as a Totem for Culture, and a Defense of the Oral Tradition. American Journalism 7 (4): 242-251.
Thanks Claude! I can see your point on the Silence of the Lands project, it would be surprising if every soundscape was aesthetically pleasing, or even capable of conveying the communicative experience Giaccardi writes about. I think you’re right to point out that this isn’t going to happen without at least a little tutoring. (By the way, the site is here: http://www.thesilence.org/research.html but I couldn’t find any sounds on it.)
However, I think by repertoire the author was referring to the project goals of creating an engagement between the individual, community and landscape through which prevailing attitudes of nature and experience can be shaped and shared—what she refers to as actualizing. So, I suppose that this is possible to do, arguably, whether or not the soundscapes created are “good” or not. It would be a lot easier to argue if all of the soundscapes were interesting.
As for narrative, I think narrative is always there, waiting for us to pick it up. So, I see the narrative potential within our technological interactions. With a background in video art that is predominantly non-narrative, I’ve always been a wary of narrative as an overriding artistic framework. But, I recognize that when I make a video, regardless of whether or not I see a narrative thread, someone in the audience will pick one out—sometimes there are more narratives than viewers. I think this is true with the narratives of technology, and the ways it is shaped and shapes its users. I would always err on the side of a potential multitude of narratives within that relationship.
Looks like a good conversation on Tuesday.
Hey everyone,
Great post, Tyler…very clean and thorough prose there.
You have us well-prepared for Tuesday.
As you probably have noticed, I tagged you on Jer Hight’s wall on Facebook.
He is a buddy of mine…would you be comfortable with him checking out your post here?
I am a few minutes away from posting about Hight’s work.
I will comment directly as a reply for the other readings but I might not get around to that tonight
Claude, 6 hours a day on art? Whoa, now I feel like a slacker 😉
Oh wait, I USED to do that amount of art-work prep before I had school and a kid…heheheheheh.
Hi Jeremy,
Please share away.
Yeah, I agree, 6 hours a day? Maybe when I was in my MFA program. Most artists I know are more like 6 hours a week. ; )
hahahaha…good point, Tyler.
My son has drained my lifeforce this evening but I will see if there is any spark remaining to post comments about at least one other reading before I go to bed.
Hi again,
I decided to focus on the Rothstein NY-Times article as my 2nd required reading since Tyler rightly noted a link between the content of this article and Barney’s essay about the VUEguide in Vancouver.
Content itself is indeed a theme that comes to mind for most of these articles.
In fact, the classic form vs. content debate seems to circulate throughout the writings.
In the case of Rothstein, he is complaining about today’s technological expectations for depending on the form of the experience rather than the content, per se.
As the cliche goes, “there must be an app for that!”…
With the reliance of apps, “the looking – for which museums were created – become a memory before it has even begun”. This reminds me of virtual performances where the performer (including myself) becomes more obsessed with the documentation/archiving of the live performance than with the immediacy of the experience – supposedly the reason for wanting to perform live and in real-time in the first place, rather than just make more temporally static and fixed artifacts (i.e. videos and paintings etc.).
So with Locative Media and with AR and VR, we see a more complex version of the form vs. content debate where the debate is really something like, “form for content vs. content-as form”.
Rothstein is right to note that when we focus on the form for content, it takes more cognitive effort to engage with the technology than by “just walking around and looking”…
Hight seems focused on a content-first approach to locative navigation…This was evident when he discussed the desire to map identity and observational patterns for the purpose of shaping the narrative affordances of such a technologically mediated experience.
In this sense, Hight is focused on content-as-form while most institutions (and their institutional critics, such as Rothstein) often discuss the issues with the form rather than thinking about how the content of its collections could help select the best kind of technology to showcase particular artifacts.
Part of the problem is due to the museal imperative to ensure that adherent and didactic information is part of the whole institutional experience. This will lead to a focus on expedient content-delivery rather than letting the phenomenological element of the content-driven experience come into play.
p.s. I am not sure if I am coherent anymore…I just wrote the above after being completely brain-drained by my kid….
Thanks Tyler for providing these great summaries and questions,
I personally found Shirvanee’s paper very interesting and very related to my own research, and project doing for this course, she investigates different dimensions in social and narrative space through locative awareness technology, while exploring new trends of studying the collective social activities through mapping and visualization systems, new social interaction based on social mobile gaming, and investigating the potential problems and concerns of locative devices, mainly the privacy issue, Finally, she devise a project which address the explored spaces either by solving the raised concerns or enriching the social and narrative dimensions.
My main concern about her proposed project is that, whether her solution for privacy, and reliable social interaction can guarantee to avoid the aforementioned surveillance problems or not,
In my perspective, having access to data centers either through authorized people or internet hackers can be considered as main challenge for her design. I noticed, there was no specific question for this paper, so I tried to share my view on this topic.
Thanks Tyler!
This is great! I want to focus back to your initial question around space/ place and the perception/ experience of it (*or lack thereof!)
First off, I have totally been reading (and writing) way too many technical papers- but the main trend that really bugged me in all these writings was the lack of description about the actual experience of participating in or viewing locative media projects. Though Giaccardi provides a short description of a woman named ‘Diane’s experience for the Silence of the Lands project, it all sounds too good to be true. Everything is wonderful, people love going out sound-catching, tinkering with compositions (collaboratively, mind you…) and creating a social experience of sound ‘memories’. A project is never THAT good, and as you astutely pointed out Claude: we’re sure the compositions aren’t anything worth listening to (and nice work looking Tyler – too bad there aren’t any examples online either!)
With Giaccardi’s initial description of the project, I envisioned what my own experience would be like. In Boulder, Colorado I would most likely be rock climbing at the Flatirons (a section of rock outcroppings). The sounds would be of the ‘natural quiet’, aside from my communication with my partner. However, I would be experiencing the sounds very differently while climbing than while sitting under a tree. I would be looking for the sounds to tell me something, to help me stay safe, to be more alert to the environment than I would be if safe on the ground. This ‘aggressive activity’ (as Giaccardi calls it… I’m really not making a comment on her stand which I don’t know anyways) activates me to engage in the ‘natural quiet’ or soundscape of the environment. While I could capture this sound file and use it compositionally, I’m not sure that gps location and tags could convey they way I was feeling when I wanted to capture the sound. Hence, how could another person experience the sounds in any way that means something to them, out of context, in a mediated environment, alone.
Claude: for you: (and Jeremy, I’m sure you know this:)
Xenakis Concret PH
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsOyxFybxPY
my favorite Xenakis composition: he recorded a fire crackling on tape, cut it up into pieces and remixed it. To me, this conveys an experience compositionally (of course, just being reminded of sitting next to a fire might a bit as well.. whoops).
I also wonder about the space in Hight’s article. While it is possible to just ‘absorb’ the natural environment and take in a story and get something out of it, isn’t it much more excited to weave in actual sensory experiences of the space? It seems a bit like going on one of Victoria’s Ghostly Walks in the daytime.
Non-technology locative media:
http://www.discoverthepast.com/gwalks.htm
I wonder if exploring space alongside place is key to activating the viewer? By physically engaging in space either by visually focusing on line, shape or color composition or by physically squeezing through a throng of people while walking along an old foundational wall, maybe a narrative focus on place would be more resonate.
A reverse PDQ: can space exist as thing-centric? do we have to map space into a thing in order to experience it, relative to ourselves? if so, what separates a thing, or a component of a thing, from other components/ things? if not, how not? (because it seems really easy to be confused about the line between space and thing)
I love the Xenakis piece, Kristin. And it’s all the more fascinating to me that it has been manipulated…another reminder that technology can only recreate non-technological experience when it is behind highly manipulated…
I am also interested by your comment in your question, Kristin, “Can space exist as thing-centric?” That is going to have my mind buzzing for a few weeks if not months, I think…
Grad school can be better than drugs sometimes…