Hemmet, Tuters and Varnelis; “34 North 118 West”
Hemmet, Tuters and Varnelis Articles
In “Beyond Locative Media: Giving Shape to the Internet of Things”, Tuters and Varnelis define locative arts and explain its newfound popularity today. Its name having origins in a Latvian electronic art and media center, the word comes from a Latvian word meaning location. Today locative arts have come to be centered around the individual viewer. It focuses on the “cartography of space and mind, places and the connections between them”. This new art form emerged from our modern do-it-yourself culture and as a rejection of the net art movement. It morphed out of the net art movement because it encompasses many other media forms, other than the internet. Locative media includes software art, performance, sound art, data visualization, technology-enabled social sculpture and video, among other things. This new type of art is so different from net art because it doesn’t try to prove its art status. Net art had an elitist audience, whereas locative arts target a mass audience through their use of consumer technologies. In addition, locative arts hold large potential business opportunities and commercial applications. In fact, many locative media artists are collaborating with industry and government now. Tuters and Varnelis classify locative media projects under two types of mapping: annotative and phenomenological. Annotative mapping is generally concerned with virtually tagging the world, whereas phenomenological mapping traces the action of the subject in the world. Under these two classifications of mapping, many locative performers are attempting to change the world by providing it with more data. The data that these artists present offer people with the opportunities to make future choices with the data in mind. As successful as the locative media movement sounds, there are some critics today that think that these mapping forms of art are actually endangering us instead of enlightening us. One critic, Brian Holmes, thinks that because the US Army controls GPS satellites, and most locative arts projects use GPS as a main device, we are “allowing ourselves to be targeted by a global military infrastructure and to be ‘interpellated into Imperial ideology’”. Other critics think that locative media is enforcing a loss of privacy in the participants lives. I think the benefits of locative media outweigh the potential criticisms. Locative arts make us more aware of the world around us by providing proven data that we can interpret for ourselves and apply to our decisions every day.
In “Locative Arts”, Drew Hemment categorizes the types of locative arts and provides many examples of each. He defines locative art as the art of mobile and wireless systems that is more focused on the preconditions of moving or being able to move than positioning. There are three main categories of locative arts: mapping, geoannotation, and ambulant (walking or moving about). Mapping is usually done by GPS systems and people moving through the physical environment. Some examples of mapping projects are GPS Drawing by Jeremy Wood and Amsterdam RealTime by Ester Polak. Geoannotation is the making of data to be geographically specific or placing a digital object in space. In this type of media, the individual person is the tool that drives the project forward. Uncle Roy All Around You, by Blast Theory and Radio Ballet are some examples of this type of locative media. One thing that is has been appealing to fans of locative arts but also addressed by critics is locatives arts characteristic of being “of the world” but not “in the world”. This speaks to the fact that the way these arts are performed is through the use of people and technology and often times the finished product is not displayed in a gallery setting. This is what makes locative media so much different than other types of art forms that we see today.
Jeremy Hight, Naomi Spellman, Jeff Knolton
Narrative Archaeology
“34 North 118 West”
Jeff Knowlton was the head preparitor at the Orlando Museum of Art for five years where he worked closely with curators in both exhibitions and education. He attends conferences and participates in panels and lectures on interactive media and technology. He is a recipient of a New Forms Initiative Grant funded by the NEA and the Rockefeller Foundation. He currently is teaching at UC San Diego in the Interdisciplinary Computing Arts Program.
Naomi Spellman is a transmedia artist and educator. She has exhibited works including networked art, video, computer-based interactive works, and graphic prints. She has over twenty years of experience in commercial work, including art direction, graphic design, photography, illustration, and internet content development. Today, she teaches in the Interdisciplinary Computing Arts Program at UC San Diego and in the Design and Media Arts Program at the Orange Coast Community College in Costa Mesa.
Jeremy Hight is an internationally published writer and poet who has created numerous works for multimedia and for exhibition. He wrote a paper titled Narrative Archaeology that was presented at a conference on writing at the MIT. Now, he teaches Visual Communication for Multimedia at Mission College in Los Angeles.
The team of Jeremy Hight, Naomi Spellman, and Jeff Knolton are currently putting into practice this idea of locative media. Their project, “34 North 118 West”, is an interactive experience that takes place in Los Angeles, California. They use technology and the physical navigation of the city simultaneously to create a layered atmosphere for the participant. As you walk through the city, you are given a GPS unit attached to a lap top computer and a set of headphones. On the computer, there is a map that tracks your movements through the streets. When you walk to certain locations (some are shown on the computer’s map and others are left for you to discover) a narrative is read to you through your headphones. The headphones appear to only have sounds in them until activated by your position in the city, then the written narratives are read to you by voice actors. This generates the sense that everything in the city is agitated and alive with unseen mysteries that you have yet to discover.
The purpose of this project was to create the feeling of being in two places at once. As you pass through the city, a story is read that juxtaposes the sight you are observing. What you are left with is a sort of virtual reality in which the world is completely contradictory to what you would expect. They wanted to create a dual city in which the world is split into being “connotative and denotative” at the same time. The denotative city is the one that is seen and navigated on the literal level. The narrative archaeology part of the experience is the connotative aspect. This is considered a form of narrative archaeology because as you walk through the city you peel away layers of culture in the stories you are hearing, as if you were digging for artifacts through layers of dirt.
Questions to think about:
1. Do you think the narrative archaeology concept used in this project would have the same effect on participants if it wasn’t set in a busy urban setting?
2. How can being in two places at once cause you to look at your surroundings differently?
3. Do you think narrative archaeology is a valid form of locative media?
If you want more information on this project, visit http://www.34n118w.net/
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