Locative Media Special Issue

Publication Details

Leonardo Electronic Almanac, volume 14, issue 3 (July 2006): special issue on locative media. 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: 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).

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.
• 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.
• 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 — 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