Exploring Spatial and Geospatial Art

Singapore.
The day five session at ISEA 2008 continues with Greg Giannis. He presents his work through a mapping interface he's been working on for some time; the aim here is to engage in subjective mapping - which maps media objects (texts, images, sound, video) captured live while moving in the physical work onto a map operated through an experimental Website. Display on the Website uses what Greg calls semantic zooming - more information from captured objects is revealed as the user focusses on them by zooming in.

Such mapping aims to investigate our sense of place, and there is currently something of a crisis in the cartographic community, Greg suggests, driven by changes in approaches to mapping; the community is looking towards artists to help them develop new approaches to cartography, and this is similar perhaps to the crisis in art as it emerged with the advent of photography. What's especially interesting here is the possibility of collective mapping (which can also serve as a form of collective resistance against the increasingly engineered sense of individual subjectivity).

Walking practices are enhanced by mobile devices, Greg notes: they may enhance the reach of performances to take place over dispersed spaces, for example. Similarly, they may make it possible to better communicate the experience of walking in aesthetic form - and Greg now points to a number of examples of artists whose work is based on walking and documenting such walks - with documentation traditionally often generating major headaches for such artists. Such problems have lessened somewhat through mobile devices, but there also remain significant usability issues, and the mobile device also creates a disengagement from places as much as it enables better location-specific documentation.

Greg's work attempts to make this task of documentation as convenient as possible. (He also notes the relatively limited use of MMS in comparison with SMS and other functions as an indicator of usability issues in this context.) The software he's been developing acts as a kind of cultural intervention and critique, then. One project took place in Townsville and allowed the local community to MMS in their photos which would be placed online in an experimental interface that allowed users to move around images on screen; another project focussed on laneways in Melbourne which were once creeks, were gradually covered over and became back lanes (and are now being sold of as private property).

Up next are Sala Wong and Peter Williams, whose interest is also in image geotagging. They note the role of digital image files as objects which can hold emotional or nostalgic weight or memories (especially if they are personal photographs), and point to the role of camera miniaturisation in generating more such material. Additionally, through geotagging and geocoding Earth itself has become an inscription surface, intertwining the visual with the vernacular.

However, geocoding is ultimately a form of scientific data, augmented to the image, and the degree of relationship between image and data can vary greatly depending on context (at its extremes, geodata may be more important than the exact photographic qualities of an image, or may be only an unimportant adjunct to the strongly emotional content of an image, for example). Ho can the geotagged photographic object be united with the vernacular content in a way that makes sense? This could be done by using image, sound, or image + sound, the presenters suggest.

The image-based approach could compare images from the same location at different points in time, for example. Here, data and image remain in a fairly raw state, and relatively disengaged. In sound, context and artistic direction frame the experience; with image and sound, the aim is a dichotic relationship amongst images, sounds, and geospatial data.

This is what Sala and Peter have worked on in the context of a project in Prague last year - building on historical information from the Prague Spring in 1968, they retraced the movements of Warsaw Pact troops through the present-day city. This connects the absolute location of a site (established through GPS) with the instability of socioeconomic structures and the memories associated to a site. Additionally, the two interviewed tourists and locals about their knowledge of the history of key locations (especially the central Wenceslas Square).

This was eventually presented as an installation in Prague, with found sounds from present-day Prague on the left channel and interviews on the right channel. Participants were also able to speak into a microphone, which would dampen the sound from the speakers and bring more historical images into the stop-motion animation of current and historical images from around Prague.

Finally we move on to Eunsu Kang, presenting on her project Entanglement. She begins by highlighting the idea of streams in nature (rivers, creeks, but also sound streams); her project set up a sound stream between institutes in Seattle, and now between Seattle and Singapore (and further extended to take in Seoul and Hawai'i). How can such a symbolic acoustic line be drawn between two distant locations, and how may the acoustics between such distant locations be aligned? How may visitors disturb this, and how could this create an entanglement of visitors in these sound streams and locations?

In the first place, this involved simply setting up a sound stream between different spaces, transmitting the sounds of one space to another and vice versa on a continuous loop - using a directional speaker to create a very narrow sound beam that can be disturbed by participants interacting with the space and is recorded for retransmission to the other site at the other end of the room by a directional microphone, and six speakers to create an immersive sound environment.

Remotely, the presence of a participant in one space is therefore perceived in the other as a kind of sound shadow - the body shapes the sound space. This is a kind of tele-absence (rather than tele-presence) - what is transmitted from one site to another is the absence of sound as determined by the participant's body. Additionally, through very dim lighting the space is constructed primarily as a sound space - as participants' eyes adjust, the quality of their experience is actually reduced.

Technorati : ISEA 2008, Prague, geospatial data, mobile media, new media arts, sound art
Del.icio.us : ISEA 2008, Prague, geospatial data, mobile media, new media arts, sound art