Locative Media

Locative Media

Pensamentos, reflexões e projetos com mídias locativas. Primeiro, reflexões sobre o projeto do Eric’s Blog buscando dar sentido ao local onde vive: “Starting in the neighborhood where I lived when I was in Los Angeles. As I map this area, I recall the places I passed through, the buildings I saw, the moods of the neighborhoods. Using OpenStreetMaps, with the assistance of ariel imagery, I will draw buildings and recall my personal experience with the places on the map. The unexpressed psychology of the landscape unfolds as I map places I’ve been, remembering my passage through these areas.”

Alguns projetos interessantes como Field Works, buscando recriar memórias coletivas com vídeo e localização por GPS: “Field-Works is a series of projects which reconstrust collective memories into cyberspace as a kind of video archive by using position data captured by GPS and moving image captured by Video. The project started from 1992. In 2005, two projects launched in Graz, Austria and Geneva, Swiss. Both are interview projects and discuss the identity of the city. Contents focuses the place and border between country and language and video interviews are ordered according to the geographical positions which collected by GPS.”

Hybrid Playground cria novos sentidos a um lugar bem conhecido das cidades, os parquinhos infantis. O projeto transforma o lugar em um videogame para crianças. Cria-se aqui um espaço de jogo eletrônico no parquinho fisico. Vemos um exemplo concreto de territorialização informacional do parque e como os lugares não desaparecem mas são ressignificados. Vejam a descrição do projeto de Clara Boj e Diego Díaz:

“El proyecto Parque Hibrido consiste en la creación de un nuevo entorno de juego para el desarrollo de experiencias lúdicas interactivas en el escenario de un parque urbano. Mediante un sistema de sensores de fácil instalación e invisibles para los niños, los elementos del parque se convierten en elementos interactivos que nos permiten obtener datos que son analizados y transformados para formar parte de la dinámica del juego. Estos datos, asi como las instrucciones de juego, se presentan mediante unos dispositivos adaptados a un brazalete que los niños llevan mientras juegan.(…) El objetivo último de esta propuesta es el de acercar las experiencias de juego interactivo (que normalmente ocurren delante del ordenador o la consola en lugares privados) al espacio público y de esta manera animar a los niños a jugar en la calle, disfrutando de los beneficios vinculados al aire libre, el ejercicio físico y el contacto con otros niños.”

Resumo de uma artigo interessante sobre o tema: Locative Media and Artistic Practice: Explorations on the Ground:

“The term locative media refers generally to the communication technologies involving location; ie, those providing a link or information relating to a specific place via devices such as GPS, mobile telephones or PDAs, laptop computers or wireless networks. These media are now fully integrated into our daily lives and lead to a whole series of social, professional and cultural routines. Likewise, they have catalysed a certain level of curiosity and concern both in terms of artistic practice and academic study. In this issue of Artnodes, we want to contribute to the academic debate on locative media. We focus specifically on artistic projects that use these media for distinct aims, from political activism to games, or the different ways of appropriating these technologies. This allows us to see, from a conceptual perspective, that all these projects share an idea of the notion of space: how it is ordered, how it is represented, or what kind of social interaction takes place there. These are the underlying questions in each and every one of these locative media projects.”

Outro porjeto interessante já bem conhecido é o Nomadic Milk. O projeto traça o caminho do leite, da vaca até o consumidor. Alunos da minha disciplina Midia Locativa estão fazendo o mesmo, mas com a informação jornalística”: O caminho da notícia, do fato até o leitor. Veja o projeto Nomadic Milk no Brasil agora, em abril de 2009, com vacas com GPS no Mato Grosso e performance no Centro Cultural São Paulo. As fotos são do site do projeto.

(vaca com GPS)

(performance no CCSP)

Outro mapeamento colocando em forma de mapas (fixando localizações) de práticas de mobilidade urbana. Aqui os pontos para prática do skate em São Francisco:

“so, for my project I decided to put together a map of all the skate spots in and around SF state. (…) I made this map in hopes that everyone goes skating on their breaks to help remove the stigma away from skateboarding on campus. It worked for bikes, right? Anyways, I made the map in google maps. I’m hoping to add as many skatespots in San Francisco as possible, so if you have some information or pictures, that’d be totally radical if you sent them my way.“

E ainda em SF, vejam esse depoimento sobre localização, deriva, se perder…Do Pervasive Media Studio: Lost in San Francisco:

“I’m constantly surprised by how many people now have iPhones, but more even more so by how actively people are engaging with the wealth of applications it has to offer. It was our last night in San Fran and 3 lively characters had offered to take us out for dinner in the Marina district, well known as a more up-market, Cliftonian place full of fancy wine bars and sake restaurants. So as we rolled around the hilly streets looking for parking out come the iPhone. In this case the humble human eye triumped over the GPS enabled, hyper-connected hand-held map, spotting a car park relatively easily. When it came to finding our restaurant, out came the device again and off marched our tour guide, nose pressed to the screen, turning this way and that, slowing her pace with every wrong turn. The bizarre thing was that she paid absolutely no attention to her actual real-world surroundings, trusting instead the blue cross-hair in the Googlemaps application to determine her location. She navigated herself by a series of trial and error decisions aimed at making the cross hair move in the direction of the restaurant, as opposed to using a little logic and deduction based on the street names and land marks around her.

In actual fact we were only a block or two away but the iPhone and its driver sent us in circles! The moral for this story is not yet forthcoming but I leave you with the thought that, if we are not careful, we risk dumbing ourselves down to the point of needing constant digital support systems to undertake the simplest of tasks. All the more motivation to design an application that responds to a genuine need or desire, to one of the irrepressable human impulses to play, to learn or to share…”

Sobre a Internet das coisas, principalmente sobre as etiquetas de radiofrequência, RFID, na CNN. Trechos da matéria “internetting everywhere”:

“It’s called ‘The Internet of Things’ – at least for now. It refers to an imminent world where physical objects and beings, as well as virtual data and environments, all live and interact with each other in the same space and time. In short, everything is interconnected.(…) “The Internet of the future will be suffused with software, information, data archives, and populated with devices, appliances, and people who are interacting with and through this rich fabric.” (Vint Cerf)

(…) Bruce Sterling, one of the pioneers of cyberpunk literature in the 1980s and an active sci-fi guru, neologized the term “spime” in 2004 to refer to any object that can define itself in terms of both space and time, i.e. using GPS to locate itself and RFID to trace its own history. “Whatever a Web page can do, so can a pair of shoes,” says rafi Haladjian, the visionary co-founder of Violet. (…)”The distinction between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ is becoming as quaint as the 19th century distinction between ‘mind’ and ‘body,'” says Usman Haque, Pachube’s creative director. “We want to bring about a connectivity between the physical world, its objects and spaces, and the virtual world of Web sites and environments.”(…)”

Sobre arte locativa:

“It’s been said that locative art was born the day the Cold War ended. Once consumers got hold of previously restricted technology that could more accurately pinpoint their position on a map, it was only a matter of time before artists started to explore how it could be used creatively. The combination of GPS technology and software like Google Earth and applications such as YouTube further opened the way for some unique and perhaps genuinely new art experiences. (…)

Spiral Jetty (1972), de Robert Smithson

The question of course is whether the art is as new as has been claimed. Land art projects of the 1970s – monumental projects like Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty from 1970 or Michael Heizer’s City, begun in 1972 and still going – are the artistic ancestors of many of the new projects. It might be argued that the new projects are more ephemeral than a gigantic pile of stones but artists like Andy Goldsworthy are among the best known of a more recent generation who have made art in the landscape that is intentionally transitory.”

E agora sobre novas narrativas com a locative media art com as GeoTales de Daniel B Rogers (UK/DE), Gwenola Wagon (FR), Matthias Stevens (BE) and Esther Polak (NL). Vejam abaixo os projetos descritos no post.

“Gwenola presented a series of projects made with Nogo Voyages, proposing experimental travels through unexpected peripheral territories and using GPS technology. Their project Moillesullaz 1:1 was created in collaboration with Matthias Stevens who developed the software part. Matthias, developer specialized in geo-localisation, talked also about his current research on locative media projects using smart-phones.“

“While Daniel talked about his daily practice of mapping, Esther showed her visualization approach, going from digital to physical (with sand tracks made by a little robot). We could see here two perfect complementary approaches in many ways, going from personal to global data’s, from urban to rural environments, and from a nearly pictorial interpretation to a collaborative, involving, multiple experience.”

Concluindo:

Todas as idéias, projetos e experiências desse post apontam para o “download” do ciberespaço, para o uso dos lugares a fim de resgatar experiências estéticas, comunitárias, comunicacionais ou polítcas usando, de forma crítica, as tecnologias e serviços baseados em localização que aliam, paradoxalmente, mobilidade e localização, movimento, fluxo, e parada, raiz, morada. Nessa tensão, novos lugares e novas dimensões de antigos lugares aparecem. Vemos cada vez mais experiências que colocam as novas tecnologias digitais, portáties e conectivas, a serviço da “situação”. Elas passam assim a ajuda aquilo que é próprio da nossa maneira de estar no mundo: “ter que construir para habitar” (Heidegger). É da situação que aprendemos, pensamos, jogamos, vivemos. A aprendizagem, a memória, a cogniçao, a vida social só existe em uma dimensão: a dimensão locativa.