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A critical reflection on issues facing curators and creative producers working with mobile media and in the intermediate zones between wireless cells. One of the most compelling responses to the emergence of mobile media has been the field of locative media. This is here understood to refer not just to digital media that has been spatially tagged, nor 'location based services,' or the interest in collaborative digital mapping. Rather it is understood to refer more broadly to a response to the migration of computing beyond the desktop and office into the world around us. It may be distinguished from related fields such as pervasive media, ubicomp, and so on by the clarity with which it captures a particular truth of mobile media. At the moment the cable was torn from the socket, we began to look to the place we stand. With mobile telephony you are free to roam, hence location can no longer be taken for granted, and instead has emerged as a technical and artistic focus. Combined with this, intentionally or as a side effect of the protocol, we are all being mapped, all of the time. Locative media encapsulates both the hope, and the fear, that this generates, without closing off any of the ambiguity so implied. The view that if net art is the art of the Internet, then locative art is the art of mobile and wireless systems was developed by the author through participation in a number of key projects and events. In the course of these activities, a taxonomy of locative arts was developed, one which was first proposed in Leonardo (39:4, 2006). This sought to draw together related interests in location and proximity, mapping and mobility, etc., and proposed three main categories of locative art: mapping, ambulation and geoannotation; each of which is further subdivided into: documentary, expressive and social. Dr. Drew Hemment has recently taken up a post at Imagination@Lancaster, a new interdisciplinary research institute at Lancaster University. Artistic Director of the Futuresonic festival, which he founded in 1995. Director of Future Everything, a non-profit creative 'Community Interest Company.'' Member of the collaborative Loca group, which he developed during an AHRC Research Fellow in Creative Technologies at Salford University. Founder member of PLAN, The Pervasive and Locative Arts Network, funded by EPSRC. Curator of numerous exhibitions on media art, mobile culture and locative media. DJ and event organiser at reggae blues, warehouse parties and clubs in the early UK dance scene in the late 1980s. Completed a PhD at University of Lancaster, and an MA (Distinction) at the University of Warwick, when he was a participant in the Virtual Futures events. |
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