Acoustic Space

Publication

Acoustic Space is a peer-reviewed journal published by RIXC, the Center for New Media Culture in Riga, Latvia, since 1998. Each issue is themed and functions as both a journal and an exhibition catalogue for the associated festival. Trans Cultural Mapping is one of the issues in the series, produced during the period when RIXC's programme was organised around mapping, networks and locative practice.

If the exact issue number and year for this volume can be confirmed, they should be added here.

RIXC and the Origins of Locative Media

RIXC is more central to this history than its size suggests. The term locative media was coined in the RIXC orbit around 2002 — commonly credited to Karlis Kalnins, in the context of a Riga workshop — and the "Locative Media Lab," an informal international network, grew out of the same setting. A substantial share of the movement's early activity ran through Riga rather than through any of the larger media-art centres.

The name Acoustic Space comes from Marshall McLuhan and Edmund Carpenter's term for the sphere of simultaneous, all-directional, centreless perception characteristic of oral and electronic cultures, as opposed to the linear, directional "visual space" produced by the alphabet — see de Kerckhove. RIXC took the term first for its radio and sound-art work and retained it as the journal's title as the programme widened.

Trans Cultural Mapping

The theme addresses mapping as a cultural and political practice conducted across borders rather than as a technical exercise. Its concerns, shared with the wider RIXC programme of the period, include:

• Mapping from the periphery. The perspective is explicitly Baltic and post-Soviet, and the question of who maps whom carries a specific regional history — of borders redrawn by others, of territories mapped by occupying powers, and of a network culture built without the resources or assumptions of Western Europe.
• Networks as terrain. Treating radio spectrum, data networks and physical geography as a single mappable field, which was RIXC's founding interest through its wireless and radio projects.
• Cross-border and translocal practice. Collaboration between artists and researchers working across cultural and linguistic boundaries, with mapping as the shared method.
• Alternative cartographies. Maps produced by artists and communities rather than by states or platforms, in the tradition later collected in An Atlas of Radical Cartography.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

The RIXC material is a useful corrective to an American and Western European account of locative media. It documents the same period from a place with different infrastructure, different funding and a different relationship to being mapped — which is precisely the comparative evidence that arguments about "what location technology does" usually lack. Compare Horst and Miller on the same methodological point in a different setting.

Related Reading

• Locative Media Special Issue, Leonardo Electronic Almanac
• Beyond Locative Media
• An Atlas of Radical Cartography
• The Skin of Culture: Investigating the New Electronic Reality

External Links

• RIXC