Ideology, obsolescence and preservation in digital mapping and locative art

Abstract

The city has long been evoked as an environment for critiquing traditional paradigms of place, space and urban dwelling. This article engages with two related forms of urban mediation that arose during the late twentieth century in response to the proliferation of networked, mobile and location-aware technologies: locative media art and digital mapping. These practices emerged by taking advantage of the widespread availability and dissemination of the global positioning system (GPS), geographic information system (GIS) and location-aware devices, and today increasingly figure as a means of urban information seeking and navigation. This article argues, however, that the celebratory accounts of these projects often overlook how they are shaped by institutional, as well as counter-hegemonic, forces. It is therefore important to recognize the way these projects are often subsumed by the static accounts and data that are left after they are completed; or become assimilated back into the institutional and commercial structures that produced them. The article focuses on four case studies – San Francisco <-> Baghdad (2004), Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies (2009), Mapping the Commons (2010) and WalkSpace (2010). In order to evaluate the impact of these projects on their users’ and participants’ experience of agency within the situated urban environment, the article argues it is necessary to examine how their political and artistic objectives are shaped by the ways in which they are documented and recorded after their ‘lived’, situated performance.

New Visualities of Space and Place: Mapping Theories, Concepts and Methodology of Visual Communication Research on Locative Media and Geomedia

“…The term locative media derives from two origins: Ben Russell's Headmap Manifesto (1999), delineating the socio-technical potentials of location-aware devices and stating that invisible, mobile, networked computers are recolonising the real world (de Souza e Silva & Frith, 2010;Zeffiro, 2012); and Karlis Kalnins's coin at the Art + Communication Festival in Riga in 2003 (Thielmann, 2010;Zeffiro, 2012). Moreover, psychogeography, the situationists and critical cartography are deemed antecedents of locative media (Jethani & Leorke, 2013;Zeffiro, 2012). 'After all, the innocent symbolic roots of the term locative media were to be found in an expressive practice that had not yet entered the halls of commercial exploitation' , 1031.…”

Space and place matters: A tool for the analysis of geolocated and mapped protests

“…The concept acknowledges two different origins: the artistic expression formulated by Kalnins in Riga, Latvia, in 2003 (Bilandzic andFoth, 2012;Lemos, 2010;Thielmann, 2010;Zeffiro, 2012) and Ben Russell's Headmap Manifesto (1999), according to which the invisible, mobile, networked computers recolonize the real world (De Souza e Silva and Frith, 2010;Tuters and Varnelis, 2006;Zeffiro, 2012). The literature also relates locative media to psychogeographic practices, the situationists, and critical cartography, as a re-signification of urban space and the integration of emotions and territory (Debord, 1955), and the dérive or flâner (coined by Baudelaire and elaborated on by Benjamin) are also considered to be antecedents of digital mapping (Jethani and Leorke, 2013;Tuters, 2012). The Voces25s case could be approached from these perspectives, but then the collective political and specific communicative conditions would remain invisible in the analysis.…”

“…Shirvanee (2006), for instance, notes that locative media "can have broad meanings, from a metaphorical expression representing a set of connections, to a descriptive term for information and devices that are associated with a physical location and/or with one another" (p. 1). For Jethani and Leorke (2013), "Projects amalgamate media content, data overlays and real-time location data with the aim of re-politicizing urban space and uncovering the hidden, layered subjectivity of urban spaces" (p. 488). And for Rizopoulos et al (2008), "Locative media are systems of technologically mediated interpersonal and group communication that allow for the augmentation of traditional urban environments with features and content accessible through the use of location-aware systems" (p. 1).…”

3D Puppets Animation for Encouraging Character Education and Culture Preservation in Surakarta

“…A solution is needed through various collaborative media so that the existence of shadow puppets can still exist throughout the era. The critical approach to projects as discussed here explores some considerations for how we can assess their potential in changing the paradigm of cities, space, and dwellings [2].…”