Locative media art

A Yellow Arrow sticker in New York City. The project, in which uniquely coded stickers linked physical places to text messages, became an emblem of locative media art.

Locative media art is a form of new media art, prevalent in the early-to-mid 2000s, that used location-aware and mobile technologies—such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), text messaging, personal digital assistants, Wi-Fi, and the early mobile web—to make works tied to specific places in public space. Artists associated with the term used these tools to annotate the everyday environment with text, sound, and images, and to record the movement of people through cities. The work drew openly on psychogeography and the Situationist International, reframing earlier ideas about walking and mapping the city for an era of networked mobile devices.

Early practitioners often framed the work as an attempt to reclaim public space and to turn technologies developed for military and commercial purposes toward grassroots, collective ends. Although artists worked internationally, the movement is most closely associated with a community based in New York City and centered on the Glowlab collective and the Conflux festival. Its distinctiveness faded as location-awareness became a standard feature of consumer devices, particularly after the 2008 release of the iPhone 3G, the first widely sold smartphone with built-in GPS. As locating oneself became an ordinary function of everyday phones, the experimental novelty that had defined the work receded, and many of its concerns moved toward questions of data, surveillance, and the politics of place.

Terminology and scope

The phrase locative media was introduced as the title of a 2002 workshop hosted by RIXC, an electronic art and media center in Riga, Latvia, and was quickly adopted as the name for an artistic mode that moved networked art off the screen and into physical space. A report from the workshop described a practice in which inexpensive satellite receivers allowed amateurs to produce their own maps "with military precision," centered on the individual user and on the connections between places. Locative media is also used more broadly for any media bound to a geographic location, including commercial and consumer services; the compound locative media art refers specifically to the artistic practice discussed here.

An early statement of the field's ambitions was the Headmap Manifesto (1999) by Ben Russell, a set of fragments that imagined a near future of "location aware, networked mobile devices" in which "everything gets tracked, tagged, barcoded and mapped" and invisible notes could be attached to places, people, and things. The text was written shortly after the United States Federal Communications Commission announced its Enhanced 911 rules, which required wireless carriers to be able to locate mobile callers, and later writers on locative media treated it as a founding document.

In their 2006 essay "Beyond Locative Media," Marc Tuters and Kazys Varnelis sorted the work into two broad approaches: annotative projects, which add information to the world by virtually tagging places, and phenomenological or tracing projects, which record the movement of people through space. They linked these to the twin Situationist practices of détournement and the dérive.

Background

Artistic precedents

A mapped dérive through a city (2004). Locative media art revived the Situationist practices of the dérive and détournement.

Locative media art is most often traced to the Situationist International, the European avant-garde group active from 1957 to 1972 whose program joined art to a revolutionary critique of everyday life under capitalism. The Situationists developed psychogeography—the study of the effects of the geographical environment on emotions and behavior—and the practices of the dérive, an unplanned drift through the city, and détournement, the reuse of existing elements for new and often subversive ends. Locative artists adopted these ideas, along with the Situationist conviction that the organization of space is not neutral and can be contested. As Tuters and Varnelis observed, Situationism itself increasingly turned to instructions and code, a tendency that locative media extended through software.

This stance was reinforced by the influence of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose writing on decentralized, "rhizomatic" organization and on the society of control was widely cited in the field. Much locative media art was premised on the idea of appropriating infrastructures built for command, surveillance, and commerce—GPS had been developed by the United States military, and the related free and community wireless movement built do-it-yourself networks outside corporate and state control—and redirecting them toward bottom-up, collective use.

The work also has precedents in performance and conceptual art. In Vito Acconci's Following Piece (1969), the artist followed randomly chosen strangers through New York until they entered private space, submitting his own movements to those of others in a way that anticipated later art about tracking and being tracked. The Dutch artist Stanley Brouwn built much of his career on mapping and the recording of movement; in This Way Brouwn (1960–1964) he asked strangers to sketch routes through the city, and he later catalogued his own footsteps on index cards. The land art of Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt is cited as a precedent for site-based work that reveals hidden structures in a landscape.

The most direct forerunner of locative sound work was the audio walk. From the early 1990s, Janet Cardiff produced recorded walks—among them The Missing Voice (Case Study B) (1999), commissioned by Artangel in London—in which a listener followed a narrated route through real streets, with fiction, memory, and ambient sound layered over the physical surroundings. The art historian Miwon Kwon, in One Place After Another (2002), described a parallel shift in site-specific art toward itinerancy and indeterminacy.

Technological context

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Animation of the GPS satellite constellation. The end of Selective Availability in 2000 sharply improved the accuracy of civilian GPS, making artistic use practical.

Several technical developments made the work possible. The early 2000s saw mobile phones become widespread consumer items, and text messaging, introduced commercially in the 1990s, grew into a mass habit over the same years, putting a programmable, always-carried communication device in millions of pockets. In May 2000 the United States government disabled Selective Availability, the intentional degradation of civilian GPS signals, improving the accuracy available to consumers from roughly a hundred meters to a few meters. The Enhanced 911 mandate pushed location-finding into mobile networks. Together with camera phones, personal digital assistants, and the grassroots wireless movement, these changes gave artists a set of inexpensive, widely held tools.

The work also emerged amid a sense that net.art, the screen-based internet art of the 1990s, had exhausted its initial momentum. When the 2004 Whitney Biennial dropped its dedicated "Internet Art" section, the critic Ben Sisario wrote in The New York Times that the net art boom had ended. Locative media moved into the space this left, claiming the city rather than the browser as its territory, and the term entered general use in media-art venues over the following two years.

Emergence in New York

A distinct community of locative media artists formed in New York City in the early and mid-2000s. In 2002 the Brooklyn artist and curator Christina Ray launched Glowlab, a web-based arts lab in Williamsburg that produced exhibitions, events, and an active blog devoted to psychogeography and the experience of the city. Glowlab presented psychogeography as a living practice for a moment in which the paper maps of the original dérives had been joined by mobile phones, Wi-Fi, and GPS.

In 2003 Ray and Dave Mandl, of the Brooklyn Psychogeographical Association, co-founded the Psy-Geo-Conflux, later known simply as Conflux. The first event was held in May 2003 at ABC No Rio, a punk-associated arts center on the Lower East Side, and the festival became an annual gathering in which artists, writers, technologists, and the public spent several days exploring the physical and psychological landscape of the city through walks, drifts, installations, and lectures. Conflux was reviewed in The New York Times, the Village Voice, and other publications, and a 2004 Utne Reader article, "A New Way of Walking," described its program of altered maps and "algorithmic walking." The festival served as a meeting point and public face for the wider community.

Other New York institutions supported the work. The New Museum commissioned Glowlab's One Block Radius (2004), a web-based "psychogeographic portrait" of a single block of the Bowery assembled from contributions by artists and the public. The Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in Chelsea provided studio space and fellowships to artists in the field, and the online organization Rhizome helped circulate and discuss the work. The combination of a festival, a collective, and supporting institutions gave the community an identifiable center, even as its participants and influences were international.

Forms and notable works

Annotation and mobile storytelling

Annotative works invited people to attach messages, stories, or media to particular places and to retrieve what others had left. Yellow Arrow (2004), created by Brian House, Christopher Allen, and Jesse Shapins, used uniquely coded arrow-shaped stickers. A participant placed an arrow, then sent a text message containing the arrow's code and a short message to a central number; whoever later found the arrow could text the code and receive that message on their phone. The arrows were eventually distributed in more than thirty countries, and the project functioned as an ad-hoc social network created before Google Maps, Flickr, and Facebook. It was covered in Wired, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and other outlets, and the image of a coded sticker became an emblem of the field. A related work, Grafedia (2004) by John Geraci, then a student at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, turned handwritten words into hyperlinks: a word written in public and followed by the suffix "@grafedia.net" could be "clicked" by emailing it from a phone to retrieve linked images, video, or sound.

Other projects used mobile phones to tie stories to specific sites. The Canadian project [murmur] (2003), by Shawn Micallef, James Roussel, and Gabe Sawhney, began in Kensington Market in Toronto. Signs marked with a green ear and a telephone number were installed at particular locations; a passerby who called the number heard a recorded oral history about the spot where they stood, and the project later expanded to neighborhoods in several countries. Hundekopf (2005), by the artist duo Knifeandfork, was a mobile narrative set on Berlin's Ringbahn, the circular railway whose shape on the map resembles a dog's head, or Hundekopf. Riders received a story by text message as they traveled the line, tying a fictional narrative to movement through real space; the critic Rita Raley discussed it as an example of sited mobile storytelling.

A further group of projects took the form of shared platforms for public authoring. In London, the studio Proboscis ran Urban Tapestries (2003–2004), an experimental system that let participants author and retrieve location-based content on PDAs and phones, conceived as a "public knowledge commons" and drawing on the Mass Observation movement of the 1930s. It depended on partnerships with universities, the mobile operator Orange, and the British Ordnance Survey, an arrangement that later figured in debates about the field's relationship to commerce and government. Tactical Sound Garden (2006), by Mark Shepard, was an open-source toolkit that used Wi-Fi positioning to let people "plant" and "prune" sounds in urban space, modeled on the culture of community gardening.

Tracing movement

Glowing GPS trace lines forming the shape of a city on a dark background

Amsterdam RealTime (2002) by Esther Polak with the Waag Society rendered the GPS traces of about seventy-five volunteers as bright lines on black, depicting a city made of movement rather than streets.

Tracing works used location technologies to record movement through the world, often rendering the data as drawings or sound. An important precursor was Laura Kurgan's You Are Here: Information Drift (1994) at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, one of the earliest artistic uses of GPS. A receiver on the gallery's roof fed live position readings onto screens inside, where the signal appeared as scattered points that only approximated a fixed location, foregrounding the gaps and corrections in satellite mapping.

Amsterdam RealTime (2002), by Esther Polak with Jeroen Kee and the Waag Society, tracked about seventy-five volunteers as they went about their daily routines in Amsterdam over two months. Each carried a custom unit linking a PDA and a GPS receiver, and the accumulated traces were drawn as bright lines on a black ground, producing a portrait of a city composed not of buildings and streets but of the movement of its inhabitants. Polak described the result as having the feel of psychogeographic experience rather than precise cartography.

Teri Rueb's Drift (2004) was a GPS sound walk on the tidal flats of the Wadden Sea near Cuxhaven, Germany, in which custom software running on PDAs delivered meditations on wandering and being lost as listeners moved across a shifting landscape. The British group Blast Theory, working with the Mixed Reality Laboratory at the University of Nottingham, made a series of mixed-reality games in which online players and participants on the street pursued one another through the city, including Can You See Me Now? (2001), Uncle Roy All Around You (2003), and I Like Frank (2004).

In It takes 154,000 breaths to evacuate Boston (2007), the artist Catherine D'Ignazio, working as kanarinka within the collective ikatun, ran the entire length of Boston's official evacuation-route system while wearing a backpack that recorded and broadcast her breathing, attempting to measure the routes in breaths and drawing attention to uneven access across the city.

Coordination and collective action

A large street protest with crowds and banners

Protesters at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York. Thousands used the artist-built TXTMob service to coordinate and to track police movements.

A third strand used mobile messaging not to annotate or trace a place but to coordinate bodies within it. The practice overlapped with the flash mob, a form originated in New York in the summer of 2003 by the Harper's Magazine editor Bill Wasik, who used email and text-message chains to summon crowds for brief, absurd gatherings—most famously a sudden assembly around a rug in a Manhattan department store—as a commentary on scenester culture and the dynamics of the crowd.

The most consequential artwork in this vein was TXTMob (2004), a text-message broadcast system built by Tad Hirsch with the Institute for Applied Autonomy. TXTMob let people send a message to everyone subscribed to a group, allowing decentralized "swarms" to share information in real time. Thousands of demonstrators used it to coordinate movements and report police activity during the protests at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston and the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York. The system later became the subject of a subpoena from the City of New York seeking records of the messages and their senders. By turning consumer messaging into an instrument for collective action in public space, TXTMob extended locative media's interest in the city from the experience of the individual to the movements of the crowd.

Critical reception

Locative media artists often positioned their work as an avant-garde capable of changing both art and everyday life, and the field attracted sustained criticism on those terms. In "Questioning the Frame" (2004), published in In These Times, the artist Coco Fusco argued that mapping- and network-based practices too often substituted an abstract sense of "connectedness" for real engagement with people, and that they ignored the experience of women, the poor, and disenfranchised communities along with the imperial history of the technologies they used. Andreas Broeckmann, then director of the Transmediale festival, called locative media the "avant-garde of the 'society of control,'" arguing that because the work relied on technologies developed for surveillance, its practitioners had a duty to address that fact. The critic Geert Lovink dismissed parts of the movement as a "shopping-driven locative spectacle," and the writer Brian Holmes argued that depending on GPS, a system controlled by the United States military, implicated artists in a military infrastructure.

A related concern was the field's closeness to industry and government. Tuters and Varnelis observed that, unlike net.art, locative media often embraced commercial application and collaboration, and several prominent projects depended on corporate sponsorship or proprietary geographic data. Some artists addressed these criticisms directly in their work. The Institute for Applied Autonomy, an anonymous collective, made iSee (2001), a web tool that mapped surveillance cameras in Manhattan and plotted a "path of least surveillance" between two points, turning the techniques of locative mapping back on the apparatus of control. Marc Tuters later described a strand of "dislocative media" that used the same tools to make hidden infrastructures visible rather than to smooth navigation. A parallel critical framework took shape outside the field under the name experimental geography, a term used by the artist and geographer Trevor Paglen and surveyed in a 2008 touring exhibition curated by Nato Thompson for Independent Curators International, which treated the making and mapping of space as a contested cultural terrain.

Mainstreaming and legacy

By the late 2000s the technologies that had defined locative media art were no longer unusual. The iPhone 3G, released in 2008, brought GPS to a mass-market smartphone and moved location-based media from speculation into everyday use. The same year, the Museum of Modern Art exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind brought work of this kind into a major museum, including Yellow Arrow alongside data visualizations such as the MIT Senseable City Lab's New York Talk Exchange. Commercial location services followed, as the check-in application Dodgeball, founded in New York in 2000, anticipated the later success of Foursquare, and what had been a participatory practice for small audiences became, in effect, a game that many people played. As Jessica Thompson put it, locative media "lost its operative power when all media became locative."

The ideas and personnel of the field flowed into the commercial platforms that overtook it, often with their origins obscured. The most direct line ran from TXTMob to Twitter. After the 2004 conventions, Tad Hirsch discussed the tool with a group of activist developers who worked at the podcasting startup Odeo, among them Evan Henshaw-Plath; when Odeo changed direction, a team presented TXTMob at an internal demonstration day, and the group text-messaging service that grew out of it became Twitter. The company's widely told origin story, built around a flash of inspiration by co-founder Jack Dorsey, makes no mention of this lineage; Hirsch and the scholar Sasha Costanza-Chock have described Twitter as a case of a tool created by artist-activists being absorbed into a commercial product and stripped of its origins. A related path led Jesse Shapins, a co-creator of Yellow Arrow, to become director of public realm and culture at Sidewalk Labs, the urban-technology venture of Alphabet.

Public awareness of constant tracking grew sharply with the 2011 "Locationgate" controversy, when researchers discovered that iPhones were storing detailed logs of their owners' movements. In response, the New York Times Research and Development Lab, where Brian House was a member, released OpenPaths, a platform that let individuals collect their own location data, keep it under their own control, and choose whether to share it with researchers. House used the platform for Quotidian Record (2012), which pressed a year of his own movements onto a vinyl record, with each place assigned a musical chord and each rotation standing for a day. By rendering personal location data as a piece of music to be played at home, the work treated the same information that corporations and states collect for tracking and prediction as something intimate and authored, a deliberate counter to its ordinary extraction.

Artists continued to work with location and personal data, but the emphasis shifted from the novelty of the tools toward the politics of the data itself. The artist Lauren McCarthy restaged Acconci's premise for the era of social media in Follower (2016), an app through which a person could request to be followed for a day by a stranger—McCarthy herself—who shadowed them and left a single photograph as a record. Her later performances LAUREN (2017), in which she installed cameras and microphones in participants' homes and acted as a human version of a smart-home assistant, and SOMEONE (2019), which reversed the arrangement, extended these concerns into domestic surveillance and automation. Others used geographic data to address questions of justice and inequality directly: Julian Oliver's Border Bumping redrew national borders from the points at which mobile phones switched between cellular networks, and Mimi Onuoha's Missing Datasets drew attention to the things that go uncounted in otherwise data-saturated systems. In popular culture, location-based games such as Pokémon Go (2016) brought the basic premise of locative media—play and discovery tied to physical place—to a mass audience, realizing predictions made in the Headmap Manifesto more than fifteen years earlier.

See also

• New media art
• Psychogeography
• Locative media
• Public art
• Internet art
• Counter-mapping

References

This article "Locative media art" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Locative media art. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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