Caseorganic: Created page with "===Publication Details=== ''Leonardo Electronic Almanac'', volume 14, issue 3 (July 2006): special issue on locative media.The call for papers was circulated in January 2005 ([https://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/leaauthors/2005-January/000032.html LEAuthors archive]); the issue was announced in July 2006 ([https://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/leaauthors/2006-July/000042.html LEAuthors archive]). ''LEA'' is the online companion to ''Leonardo'', the journal of the In..."

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Created page with "===Publication Details=== ''Leonardo Electronic Almanac'', volume 14, issue 3 (July 2006): special issue on locative media.<ref>The call for papers was circulated in January 2005 ([https://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/leaauthors/2005-January/000032.html LEAuthors archive]); the issue was announced in July 2006 ([https://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/leaauthors/2006-July/000042.html LEAuthors archive]).</ref> ''LEA'' is the online companion to ''Leonardo'', the journal of the In..."

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===Publication Details===
''Leonardo Electronic Almanac'', volume 14, issue 3 (July 2006): special issue on locative media.<ref>The call for papers was circulated in January 2005 ([https://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/leaauthors/2005-January/000032.html LEAuthors archive]); the issue was announced in July 2006 ([https://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/leaauthors/2006-July/000042.html LEAuthors archive]).</ref> ''LEA'' is the online companion to ''Leonardo'', the journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, published by MIT Press.

===Context===
The issue appeared at the high-water mark of locative media as a movement. Its immediate surroundings are worth noting: ''Leonardo'' 39, no. 4 (2006) carried Tuters and Varnelis's ''[[Beyond Locative Media|Beyond Locative Media: Giving Shape to the Internet of Things]]'', and ISEA2006 in San Jose that August had the Interactive City as a major theme. The term "locative media" itself had been in circulation only since around 2002, coined in the RIXC orbit in Riga (see [[Acoustic Space: Trans Cultural Mapping|''Acoustic Space'']]).

The special issue was therefore both a consolidation and, in retrospect, a marker of the point at which the movement's questions began passing to commercial location services.

===What Locative Media Meant===
The issue's contributors were working on a set of shared concerns rather than a shared technology:

* '''Annotation of place.''' Attaching text, sound, image or narrative to coordinates, so that information is encountered where it belongs. See [[Narrative Archaeology|narrative archaeology]].
* '''Tracing and mapping movement.''' GPS drawing, walking projects, trace visualisation, and the psychogeographic inheritance from the Situationists.
* '''Counter-mapping.''' Using location technology to produce maps that institutional cartography does not — see [[An Atlas of Radical Cartography|''An Atlas of Radical Cartography'']].
* '''Urban games and performance.''' Play as a method for investigating how a city is actually organised.
* '''Critique of the infrastructure.''' The recurring and largely unresolved discomfort that the movement's work depended on GPS, a military system, and on proprietary mapping.

===Why the Movement Ended===
Locative media did not fail so much as get absorbed. Within a few years of this issue, mass-market smartphones made location-aware applications ordinary, and the practices the movement had developed — check-ins, geotagged photographs, annotated maps, location-triggered content — became commercial products. What did not survive the transfer was the critical apparatus: the questions about who annotates, who is mapped, what infrastructure is depended on, and whose city is being described.

===Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology===
This issue is a useful primary source on a moment when the social and political questions raised by location-aware technology were being asked openly by the people building with it, before the answers were settled by default. Much of the vocabulary this wiki uses for location — including [[Geocloaking|geocloaking]] — belongs to the same period and the same set of concerns.

===Related Reading===
* [[Beyond Locative Media]]
* [[Narrative Archaeology]]
* [[Locative Feminism]]
* [[Acoustic Space: Trans Cultural Mapping]]
* [[Geocloaking]]
* [[An Atlas of Radical Cartography]]

===References===
<references/>

[[Category:Articles]]
[[Category:Time and Space]]
[[Category:Mobile Computing]]

Locative Media Special Issue - Revision history