Locative Media: Futures for Web and Cinema

Singapore.
We had the closing ceremony last night already, but there's still a final day of ISEA 2008 papers to go. The morning session this Wednesday starts with Tristan Thielmann, presenting on geomedia as a potential Web 3.0. He describes this as a shift towards WWWW (who, what, when, where), and points to Google's shift towards a more strongly map-based service (which on Google Maps itself combines photos and Wikipedia content with map information, for example). Flickr, too, has announced that it will georeference all its content in the future.

So, this could be the third great wave of modern digital technology. This is aided by the vast untapped reservoir of geolocated content in the form of publicly funded, publicly accessible, free GIS data. Additionally, paradoxically, other geo information is scarce (which opens up business models that can support development). Further, there is an increasing sophistication of geosemantic systems, enabling a more effective linking of content and geo information - location data can already be embedded into many file formats, for example. All of this adds together to increase the quality and clarity of geo information.

Geomedia can be characterised as either annotated or phenomenological media - annotating places in the world, or tracing the movement of objects through the world. This is prominent for example in Japanese mobile phone culture which has embraced geolocation-based services. This also indicates, at the same time, that the separation between annotative and phenomenological data will not be able to be upheld - and this is especially the case as more objects have RFID tags and IPv6 addresses are distributed to such objects (leading to the Internet of Things, as it's been called by some).

What emerges as 'neogeography' today, then, has sometimes a very strong connection to what Tristan calls Nazigeography - a history that stretches back to military technology and a sense of changing geography during World War II. While media and cultural theory is focussed on representations, actor-media theory is focussed around inscriptions - tracing the histories of technologies and the historical influences of their developers.

Tristan notes that historically, major media developments have either induced or resolved major crisis (the printing press ultimately kicked off reformation, etc.). Locative media technology, he says, may be able to address the crisis of climate change - by tracing the actions of actants, by making mediation processes transparent, by visualising the logistics of artefacts, by placing people in the position of individualised instead of mass mediatised media users, by taking a local instead of a global perspective by supporting a relavistic instead of a functionalist ethic, and so on.

Tristan notes the conflict between climate change alarmists and denialists in analysing the correlation between atmospheric CO₂ and temperature changes (which precedes the other?), for which most average people can only form an opinion based on the material they access through the media. Locative media, he suggests, can be used to bypass this mass mediation by making visible in more clarity the actions of individual participants and their effects.

The next speaker is Scott Hessels, whose background is in filmmaking. He's recently developed a project called GPSFilm, and notes the increased range of capture technologies which go beyond capturing sound and image - we can now also capture tilt, speed, altitude, and other aspects. One project called Mulholland Drive did this by driving that road in LA and recreating this drive with nothing but movable lights in a foggy room; another called Brakelights played prerecorded lines from a conversation as driven by the intensity of brakelights on an LA freeway. A further project was Celestial Mechanics, which tracked the hardware (planes, satellites, etc.) above the earth and plotted their observation footprints on the earth.

Further, Scott notes the long history of navigational technology since ancient times, and its increasing use in media art. He's less interested here in annotative works which require participants to move from one 'virtual post-it note' to another to piece together a story (based largely on databases and hypertexts, and largely following an 'a day in the life of...' logic that is often less than compelling). GPSFilm will instead engage with the environment and provide a more cinematic (rather than hypertext) narrative; the ultimate aim here is to set it loose on an open source model, too.

The system is designed not to work with precise coordinates by to focus on the neighbourhood in which a participant is located (focussing on context, not location); the metaphor here is a house in which every room one enters reveals more about the family which lives there. This combines database and narrative aesthetics, providing an emotional, cinematic journey. The first film to come out of this was Nine Lives, which begins with the film's climax (or trigger event); the system then recognises the location of the participant and flashes back to an earlier point in the story depending on where the user is located. The GPSFilm system underlying this can be translated to any location or story - and that's the motivation for making it available as open source.

Technorati : GPS, GPSFilm, ISEA 2008, Web 3.0, locative media, mobile, mobile cinema
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