The Locative Commons: Situating Location-Based Media in Urba
Envoi de locative.net le 04 Mars 2004 11:04:13:
The Locative Commons: Situating Location-Based Media in Urban Public Space
At last month's Transmediale festival in Berlin, the Utrecht-based
arts collective Social Fiction received the festival's prestigious
prize for Software award for their .walk (dot-walk)
project, ayers computer code with the streetwalking of
psychogeography. During the walk, real streetwalkers carry out an
algorithmic series of instructions derived from computer code,
exchanging generated numeric values with other walkers as they
"calculate" the city as a giant "periapatetic computer." It may seem
amazing that such a simple idea can even be considered software, but
the concept behind it is the clever part, based, as it is, on a
metaphor for how order emerges from chaos, borrowed from the ant
colony, which generates maps through the brute force, random
exploration of a territory.=20
Dot.walk could be said to be significant of a general tendency that
has been emerging amongst artists to consider the space of the city as
a site for public art projects.1 Of particular interest here has been
the concept of psychogeography, developed by Guy Debord and the
Situationist International (SI) as a way to "drift" through urban
landscapes [35], has become an object of contemporary artistic
practices (such as .walk). As the name
"psychogeography" suggests, artists are once again interested, via
technology, in the connection between the so-called internal
("psychic") and external ("geography"). In practice, psychogeography
brings the art installation and its public (although the distinction
often begins to blur here) from the contained space of the gallery
into the body of the city.=20
The central trope of psychogeography is the "drift" or
"d=E9rive" [35], =A0a kind of meditative walking
practice, or fl=E2neurie, through the urban landscape.
The walk encourages the drifter to "get lost" in order to break with
ingrained patterns of routine. According to the SI, the d=E9rive
reveals the landscape as a source of endless possibility in
which a multitude of paths open for remapping the city.=20
The psychogeographic d=E9rive is contiguous to the
political tradition of urban theory --from liberals like Jane Jacobs
(1961) to radicals like Henri Lefebvre (1961)- which claims that
random encounters in public spaces are essential to the
functioning of a democratic society. Psychogeography encourages
encounters from outside our of own contained and carefully constructed
realities. As Immanuel Kant (1790) proposed, it is not be through
received norms that we develop "judgment", the critical foundation of
cosmopolitan ethics--but in the confrontation of new ideas. Today, we
network these ideas to the surface of the globe.
The canonical literature on public space identified the Parisian
coffee houses of the 18th C as playing an important role in social
change, housing the raucous debates that gave rise to age of democracy
--Habermass (1964), Sennet (1974). While this is debatable, it is true
that the role of public space for conversation is a primary
requirement for contact with one's neighbours. By
contrast today's ubiquitous Starbucks cappuccino bars offer the
digital, mobile class a place of introspection and refuge from the
pace of city. Offering pay-access to wireless Internet on site, and
even sending text messages to the mobile phones of potential customers
when they pass close by a location, Starbucks, and other branded
"destinations", like Riga's recently completed Coca Cola Centre, form
an archipelago of pseudo public spaces throughout the world's cities.
Particularly in the post-911 world, the function of these places to
provide random encounter is practically eliminated in these insulted
pay-access locations under the operative logic of 'risk aversion'.
Based on these observations, sociologists and urban theorists have
developed a narrative of loss and decline in the contemporary
literature on public space --Zukin (1991), Sorkin (1992), Hannigan
(1998), in which contemporary public spaces are characterized theme
parks, or walled gardens.=20
Situationism proposed a critique of Capitalism, particularly in
relation to urban planning and architecture that identified the latter
as handmaids of State power and found them guilty of contributing to a
fragmentation of the public. According to Guy Debord (the group's most
influential figure), in his 'Society of the Spectacle' thesis, popular
culture recycled authentic experience as spectacle and, in the
process, interpolated the individual into a passive consumer. Debord's
theory would form the basis of the postmodern critique of so-called
hyper-reality by a younger group of French intellectuals, also
involved in May '68, namely Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio.=20
For Virilio, hyper-reality was not so much an effect of ideological
manipulation, as Debord had claimed, as it was the product of speed,
instantaneity, and interaction of images. Formerly an architect,
Virilio believed that the impact of real-time telematics on the city
is that the bricks and mortar of architectonic space have become a
"Monument Valley... of some... dead past society whose technologies
were intimately aligned with the visible transformation of matter"
(1991, 20). Accordingly, in conceiving of a public space of the 21st
C, we should consider the immaterial realm of communication
technologies.=20
The digital city has emerged in the last two decades as a significant
phenomenon impacting how we understand urban life. Traversed by the
flow of communications, the city is re-ordered by technological
systems and networks establishing a considerable digital architecture.
In the digital city, technology often seems to outpace our ability to
chart its effects, however, with networks articulating a
transformation of the concept of urbanism. Take, for example,
networked interactive games where populations of players equivalent to
small cities simultaneously interfacing with the same virtual
environment. Here it is arguably the case that we are witnessing a
transformation of the historical notion the "city" a notion held since
the surplus of agriculture delivered to accumulative centres, some 10,
000 years ago, led to the construction the communal living spaces.
that we have held for 10,000 or more years. Today, the imagination of
programmer, with her coded control of the virtual's interface with the
real, is the =A0architect and engineer who constructs a consensual,
urban reality shared by millions worldwide, a virtual reality that
forms a meaningful part of their real existence. Here, games like
Second Life [32], which allow players to collaborate on creating these
VR worlds, are creating models for what we might call open source
urbanism.=20
Ironically, however, with mobile and wearable technologies new
technologies are emerging to connect these virtual environments with
architectural and urban space, so that, as one noted technologist
claims "as the processing power and graphic frame rate on
microcomputers quickly increase, portable, personal virtual-
environment systems will also become available. The possibilities of
virtual realities, it appears, are as limitless as the possibilities
of reality. They can provide a human interface that disappears--a
doorway to other worlds."11 (footnotne). At last year's
ART+COMMUNICATION festival in Riga, for example, one guest
demonstrated a system for playing the popular online video game Quake
in urban space, as opposed to behind a desktop
computer. Developed at the University of South Australia, this
so-called 'augmented reality' device actually used a computer, mounted
in a set of glasses, to project the 3D space of the video game over
the landscape of 'the real world', and coordinate the two via GPS
(Global Positioning System) technology.=20
Having paid multiple billions to purchase sections of the spectrum for
wireless data transmission, cell phone companies have been
anticipating a boon to the industry with the arrival of a low-tech
version of this augmented reality technology for cell phones. Already,
in some European countries, it has been possible for some years now to
receive maps based on ones location, and more recently service have
become available that allow one to locate friends nearby. Since the
cell phone system is locked up by corporations, a critical uncertainly
exists regarding the fate of this technology. While the noted
technology journalist Howard Rheingold believes that these
technologies will be fundamental to urban life in ten years from now,
he has identified two possible futures, one open system like the
Internet, where "entire populations of city-dwellers create, use, and
exchange information and media associated with geographic locations",
and the other, a closed system for "passive consumers of pre-packaged
content fabricated by a few dozen synthetic superstars" [24].
While we tend to associate the notion of a public spaces with an
aspect of the built environment, mobile communication technologies,
may have introduced a kind of mutation into the body of the city that
requires us to re-asses our idea of a "public space" in the 21st C.
While telephony made it possible to be vocally present while
physically absent, the mobile telephone has brought this paradox into
a more active engagement between the body and the city. In Helsinki,
for example, the city with the greatest saturation of mobile phones
(some 90% of the population), groups of teenagers are synchronized
while apart, able suddenly to form a gang and just a suddenly to
disperse, a technique that has been compared to the flocking of birds
[6a]. In the past several years mobile phones have been extensively
used for a new kind of urban warfare with emergence of a set of
tactics reminiscent of the clashes between nodads and Romans.
Beginning with the famous Battle of Seattle, the mobile phone has been
used in countless soccer riots to coordinate the ranks of gangs to
outmanuver [sic] the police, the latter being rigidly organized
through instructions broadcast via CB radio. The same phenomenon was
observed during the series of FlashMobs which began
in New York [36], where anonymous text messages spurned a series of
mass, brief gatherings where silly actions were performed before
dispersing. These events signify a new type of public space made
possible through mobile technologies. It seems that the
mobile-networked city is, in fact, porous at its core.
As the mobile may be secretly transforming the potential of social
relations in the public spaces of the city, it is also involved in a
redefinition of the public/private distinction. For teenagers in Asia
and Europe where domestic space is at a premium and most homes only
have one land-line, the mobile phone (particularly with regards to
text and multimedia messaging) allows users to maintain open channels
for intimacy regardless of the context, making public spaces the site
of countless one-sided conversations. Accordingly, despite the
imaginative uses to which they have been applied, in the context of
urban public space, the issue of mobile networked connectivity is
problematic. I would argue that this, however, is arguably largely a
design problem.
Only very recently come collaborative research and development
projects between artists designers and technologists, have begun to
address the problem of designing an interactive urbanism aware of the
potentials and problems of a mobile networked connectivity. In Latvia,
for example, last summer, an international group of artists (your
author was amongst them) gathered at the K@2 media space in Karosta,
Liepaja for a workshop to explore the idea of associating digital
media with location. Having paid multiple billions to purchase
sections of the spectrum for wireless data transmission, cell phone
companies have been anticipating the arrival of location-based
services as a boon to the industry. Already, in some European
countries, it has been possible for some years now to receive maps
based on ones location, and more recently service have become
available that allow one to locate friends nearby. In the UK, the
Urban Tapestries project, for example, has done a great deal to
develop and publicize the notion of community knowledge sharing
through location based mobile telephone, producing large-scale public
demonstrations of open-source software applications, developed in
affiliations with Hewlett Packard and Orange.=20
The Locative Media Network seeks to marry the interests of the
psychogeographer (whom we may frame as a "city hacker", after Hou Je
Bek) with those of the online community networking enthusiast, to
develop the model for what we might call an universally accessible, or
open-source public space [31]. Weather consciously or
not, the majority of efforts in the area of location-based media,
however create and store data centrally managed servers (see, for
example, Urban Tapestries [17]). The Network's researcher are not only
politically opposed to this as a 'walled garden' approach to a public
space, but moreover believe that such approaches destined to made
obsolete by emerging methods for data creation and storage, namely the
semantic web. A kind of Esperanto for the Internet, the semantic web
constitutes a set of protocols for structuring your data online,
semantic web grammars allow authors to index their sites, so as to
make them machine readable to the entire Internet. Semantic web
grammars like RSS, used in weblogging, are machine readable by free
softwares applications, allowing publishers to syndicate their data as
'feeds', to which readers can selectively subscribe. The semantic web
permits a reader to receive a customized real-time compilation of the
Internet. With the incorporation of location data, blogging can be
seen as the model for authoring an augmented public space. Bloggers
who publish their posts to RSS feeds can now incorporate geo-locative
semantic information, thereby setting into motion the actual,
real-world contact between virtually separated databases. Examples of
this have been developed here by Blogmapper [28], SpaceNameSpace [27]
and Social Fiction [29].=20
The beauty of the sematic web model for when applied to networked
urban space is that it is truly decentralized, allowing for authors to
leave data on their own servers rather than on some centralized
server. The semantic web makes authors responsible for their own
content, freeing the system designer from any concern about providing
access or managing content, calling for a new global responsibility in
managing information and knowledge--virtual democracy in the 21st
Century. As the system is decentralized like the architecture of the
Internet itself, it furthermore makes it virtually impossible to
eliminate all trace of memory from a location, the semantic model of
networked urban space thus becomes a weapon against 'urbicide', the
deliberate denial or killing of the city [30].
Ben Russell's Headmap Manifesto, a foundational piece of literature in
the discourse on "locative media", proposes a set of tactics for
applying semantic web ontologies, to the mobile location-aware
technology thereby transforming the latter from a means to push
location-based content (a la Starbucks), into the basis for new kind
of mobile networked presence. Russel argues that FOAF (friend of a
friend) networks, applied to locative, mobile telephony, would allow
for the emergence of an economy of exchange based on trust. Comparing
urban infrastructure with that of the open-source software development
community online, he suggests that there exists an unused abundance in
the city, the key to which is trust. Russell envisions a future in
which networks of friends could exchange personalized,
location-encoded maps to access a network of friend of friends.
Inspired, in part, by anecdotal observations from the Burning Man arts
festival in Nevada, where 25,000+ people gather in the desert to form
a temporary city based on a gift economy, Russell envision locative
media as facilitating a kind of portable temporary autonomous zone.
Like the ants colony that creates an orderly map of territory from its
random exploration, there are allusions throughout Russell's writing
to possibility that a collective urban form can potentially emerge
from the collective action of essentially selfish actors, coordinated
though an intelligent system, perhaps even the basis for a new social
contract of selectively accessible self-centered utopias.=20
One might frame the ideas of Ben Russell and those of the Locative
Media network of researchers as software art, but to give some more
historical context, I would compare them with 60's utopian
architecture groups such as Archigram and Superstudio --as the
Supermodernists as the radical architecture critic Reyner Banham
called them. Sheltered by academies such as the AA in London (where a
Locative Media media lecture series was recently organized by locative
artist, and film-maker Pete Gomes) and inspired by Situationism, these
groups often framed themselves as anti-architects expressing their
oppositional political stance to the State and the compromised
integrity of their field in relation to the latter, by designing
fantastical landscapes --based on what a member of Superstudio called:
"the instinctive right that every individual has to create his own
environment" (Banzi '84).=20
The Italian group, Superstudio, for example, is best known work is the
Continuous Monument, a featureless Euclidean space, that was intended
as a refutation of the consumer world's 'system of objects' (as
Baudrillard called it in his early work on design).
Freed from the fragmentary space of the modernist
tower-block, the inhabitants of Superstudio's hypothetical structure
were nomads who could plug-in --this was pre-wireless- at any point
and spontaneously materialize a minimal domestic fantasy life --a
technological utopia of object-less nomadism, in which the body became
the vehicle (rather then the car, for example). An architect himself
in the 60's, Paul Virilio developed a somewhat similar vision of
urbanism also based on putting the body in motion. In what his group
"Architecture Principe" called the Function of the Oblique, floors and
walls were built with curves and at angles, which Virilio felt forced
the body back into an active relationship with the environment. =20
Dismissed in subsequent decades totalizing theories by postmodernists
(Jenks) and post-structuralists (de Certeau), the Supermodernists have
enjoyed a renewed interest as of late. The postmodern style, which
emphasized a vernacular architecture of flourishes "quoted" from other
styles, has to some degree passed from interest, and the
post-structuralist critique, emphasizing the micro-politics of
difference, has led to a frustrating fragmentation of interest groups
often without an over-arching plan --leading back to a dull
functionalism. Due in part to a technological advances designs which
would have been impossible to construct with materials available in
the '60's, some of the Supermodernists have become like a reservoir
for a new architectural renaissance, that has had a particularly
dramatic impact on museums throughout the world (what some call the
Bilbao effect). It is mostly, however, only at the level of
aesthetics that the Supermodernists are being copied, by a
c0707,0505,0404abal of super-achitects (Gherry,
Foster, Rogers, Liebeskind, Koolhaus, Grimshaw). By whom the political
projects of the former have, for the most part, been set aside as
quaint relics of a bygone era.
"The city, yes, let=92s keep talking about it. But architecture, it=92s
finished, over. Curtain." Paul Virilio (03)
It is perhaps no longer in the domain of architecture, which
Virilio considers to have been poked full of holes telematic networks,
but rather in that of open-soure, social software development , and
perhaps even more specifically softwares that deal with questions of
urbanism and utopia (the theme of this past year's Transmediale).
Groups of wireless community activists such as the London-based
Consume, for example, are exploring nomadic urban environments similar
to those proposed by Superstudio (although without the nice collage
sketches), by building an open-access wireless Internet cloud --a
wireless Commons- across parts of the UK. Similarly through a
patchwork toolkit consisting of community oriented mapping
applications and texts such a Headmap, the Locative Media network
propose a Locative Commons. Both are involved, to some degree, in a
recuperation of aspects of the Supermodern project, warts and all. =20
While mobile telephony arguably goes some way towards bridging the
digital divide --cell phones being the most accessible form of
communications technology invented so far- yet the visions of a
wireless or locative Commons still tend to require more complex
hardware than your average person has access to or understands. In
addition to developing an propagating memes about open-source
urbanism, the role of digital communities such as the Locative Media
network thus becomes to create systems that avoid the obsolescence by
implementing popular publishing systems (i.e. the semantic web), that
keep the technology available and accessible for non-technically savvy
groups.
Echoing Russell's Headmap Maifesto, recent literature on mobile
location-aware networked connectivity has focussed on its
transformative potentials on community, positing something akin to the
emergence of a spatialized Internet. However, unlike the early
Internet, which relied on public funding and open standards to foster
innovation, the vast majority of the spectrum of mobile networked
connectivity belongs to corporations, who also have controlling
interests in the delivery systems (both at the level of hardware and
software) creating vertically integrated, walled garden, model that
discourages third party developers to generate content.
However, there exists a vast untapped reservoir of geo-located
content referring to every part of world that has been publicly funded
through tax moneys, in the form of GIS, or the Geographical
Information Systems. While some countries have begun to adopt
a policy of open public access to GIS, generally speaking, this data
is only ever used by professionals. Groups like the Locative Media Lab
must thus take on another role as lobbyists of the GIS industry and
state geographers, in order to allow for some of this wealth of
knowledge to flow into the fields of new media research and urban
studies, as well as to become the basis for a open framework for
shared spatial knowledge.
At stake is not only setting the terms for public access to the vast
databases of open source information but constructing the sustaining
architecture to do so. If in the construction of the public nation
state, the 19th Century was defined by railroads and early
tele-communications networks and 20th Century the development of the
social safety nets, then the 21st Century will be recognised for
making available the digital domains to the public at large in the
tradition of furthering our concept and implementation of democracy.
Endnotes
1 During the past year alone several notable events and festivals have
been organized around the theme of psychogeography, notably the
PsychoGeoConflux in New York City, PreAmble in Vancouver (and that
thing in Riga?).
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