July 07, 2006
Marc Tuters and Kazys Varnelis
Beyond Locative Media
"Locative media has been attacked for being too eager to appeal to commercial interests as well as for its reliance on Cartesian mapping systems, yet if these critiques are well-founded, they are also nostalgic, invoking a notion of art as autonomous from the circuits of mass communication technologies, which we argue no longer holds. This essay begins with a survey of the development of locative media, how it has distanced itself from net art, and how it has been critically received before going on to address these critiques and ponder how the field might develop.
At the 2004 Transmediale festival in Berlin, a locative media project titled .walk (dot-walk) received an honorable mention in the prestigious festival's Software Award. Developed by Utrecht-based arts collective Social Fiction, .walk combined computer code and "psychogeographic" urban exploration. Participants of .walk left the doors of the gallery to follow a randomly generated path through the city, thereby, according to Social Fiction, "calculating" the city as though it were a "peripatetic computer." The success of this simple project is representative of a larger event taking place in the media art world, in which, having left behind net art, locative media escaped the bounds of the screen to enter the city at large." Continue reading Beyond Locative Media by Marc Tuters and Kazys Varnelis.
Posted by jo at July 7, 2006 03:57 PM
