A location of one’s own: A genealogy of locative media

Abstract

In this article, I confront locative media not as a technology or thing, rather, as a field of cultural production, that is, as a field of forces, regulated by both power relations and symbolic struggles, which sustain or subvert the reproduction of a specific social order. The intent of the piece is to expose the manner in which the field of locative media is constituted through multiple forces and struggles. I trace its emergence through a genealogical lens, and revive and reintegrate older debates, so as to include these tensions in the ongoing conceptualization of locative media. In tracing the discursive events of the field, which encompass both formations and tensions, it will be made apparent that locative media is not happenstance. Rather, it is a field of cultural production that is perpetually evolving and continuously reproduced vis-à-vis struggles between technological interpretations and different visions of future use.

The Rough Mile

“…A relevant body of work in this context is locative audio [44], a two-way engagement with constructed audio in a realworld environment [29]. Examples include Teri Rueb's sound walks exploring loss triggered as participants moved through a national park in Canada (Trace 1999), Blast Theory's audio guides prompting participants to record their own sound files in hidden places around London (Rider Spoke 2007), and Janet Cardiff's surreal audio walk in search of a fictitious missing person (The Missing Voice (Case Study B) 1999).…”

FCJ-216 ‘Know Your Place’: headmap manifesto and the Vision of Locative Media

“…The headmap manifesto is cited by some theorists (Lenz, 2004;Tuters and Varnelis, 2006;Zeffiro, 2012) that these devices became popular.' As a result, GPS technology was made 'much more accurate, allowing users to locate specific places and objects on the globe's surface.'…”

“…Hemment's (2006) article in the widely known LEONARDO special issue on locative media gives a useful breakdown of the different types of projects, while other theorists provide taxonomies and histories of the movement and the multitude of projects it produced (see in particular Drakopoulou, 2010;Tuters and Varnelis, 2006;Zeffiro, 2012). It has also produced an entire sub-discipline of mobile media studies focused on locative media, led most prominently by American-based scholars like Jason Farman (2012), Adriana de Souza e Silva (2006) and Jordan Frith (2015), but encompassing theorists from many other (albeit mostly Western) countries.…”

Dis-locative arts: mobile media and the politics of global positioning

“…Practitioners deployed the term 'locative media' at the time to distinguish from military and commercial applications an arts-based movement concerned to exploit new mobile, wireless and positioning technologies. Advocates saw these technologies as 'opening up a manifold of different ways in which geographical space can be encountered and drawn, and presenting a frame through which a wide range of spatial practices may be looked at anew' (Hemment 2006a;see especially Hemment 2006b;Tuters and Varnelis 2006;Zeffiro 2012).…”