Locative Media, Perspective, Flight

The primary concern in locative media has been, understandably, location. This has been a great new leap in terms of art, technology, science and narrative. Locative Media Art consists of artworks utilizing locative technology to trigger artworks in a specific physical space.

Locative media art goes back to early experiments such as Telepresent by Steven Wilson in 1997 that was an object equipped with GPS left to be communally interacted with and moved while continually sending images via the Internet.

Another key development was the GPS drawings of Jeremy Wood in 2000 in which he discovered that by tracing his movements as he drove or walked with GPS that he could form shapes formed by the sequence of plotted movements. Other projects worked with Geo-Annotation which placed a comment or reflection on a physical location (similar to what hikers for years would do at posted signs on certain trails). Then came the project 34 North 118 West that was the first locative narrative.

34 North 118 West was a mapping of a four block area of Los Angeles where the primary non-passenger rail yard and related infrastructure at the turn of the last century and the original grand passenger station of Los Angeles (La Grande station) once stood. The majority of the buildings are the same but have changed in usage in time, state of disrepair and who has come to live and work in them in waves of development and housing.

Other buildings were destroyed over the years and only the ghosts of historical information and personal accounts remain. The project created a "narrative archaeology" as the layers in time were to be agitated into being. In one place would be narrativized data from 1936 a few hundred feet from a spot before a building that triggered something from 1910.

Now groups such as the C5 collective are doing work such as the GPS mapping of the entire great wall of china and then placing the coordinates in another location. This type of work creates a layered commentary and plays with form and semiotics as well as referencing the Situationists who developed absurd commentaries like a walk through the streets of Paris following a map of another city..." Continue reading Floating Points: Locative Media, Perspective, Flight and the International Space Station by Jeremy Hight with Alexander van Dijk, Hz Journal, #8, June 2006.