Graffiti has traditionally been used by the poor as a tool of communication and self-expression. Now its in galleries next to tiffany windows and sold with cute toy graffiti trains.from the article:” but I imagine it’s difficult to profit off graffiti. Graffiti on toy trains! Now that’s cute.” WTF anyways, there are others trying to enable new tools for urban communication: graffitiresearchlab
I just wanted to say how awesome the first set of presentations were. The creativity and detail that people put into other individual’s biographies were great. The discussion at the end of class was the high light of the day. The various ideas that people had about locative media and its real world applications was enlightening. All of the views were expressed and encouraged. I was left walking away with a new appreciation for the uses of locative media.
For those of you who don’t already know (my usual assumption is that this is common knowledge) there is a company called Meraki which manufactures Wi-Fi repeaters that you can install in your home to boost you network signal. They also provide software packages to setup a network across larger areas like office complexes and neighborhoods. The repeaters themselves are fairly cheap, allowing you and say, your building to split the cost of one normal IP hookup, plug in a repeater or two, and disperse the signal as if everyone’s apartment had a modem. Their custom software makes it easy to divide up the bill by monitoring who’s usin’ how much bandwidth.
When San Francisco’s Muni-Wi-Fi deal with Earthlink fell through Meraki decided to try an experiment. They established a program which would send free repeaters to those who signed up. When the signal extended far enough, those who could see it had but to email Meraki, and they were sent a repeater as well. Meraki claims to have connected roughly 50,000 people over the past few months using this self-propagating model. Coincidentally there are no signals anywhere near my house.
When this “Free the Net” project was first noticed, it was lauded as the new Wi-Fi solution that would shame Earthlink and light a fire under the city. And all of Meraki’s advertising would lead you to believe that it was exactly that: a grassroots reaction to the big money problems of that the city couldn’t get handle on. But spokespeople from Meraki admit they they are not in competition with Earthlink and Google; that they do not have the same goals. When I first heard this I thought it was a cop out, but I soon realized that citywide Wi-Fi was a muchmore complex undertaking than just merely getting everybody’s routers connected. Municipal wireless would be a public utility like gas and water, and that means its reliability would be dependent upon new jobs, taxes, protocol and all that bureaucratic problems that come with them. The Meraki model is one that targets consumers, and is dependent upon pre-existing ISPs.
I thought I’d bring this up because of its relevance and the questions it poses on how to expand communication technologies to greater proportions of the population. To check out Meraki’s “Free the Net”, go here:
I thought that this was an intersting way for people to experience the past. The residents of Belfast, Ireland are using GPS tools as a method of touring the past building ground of the Titanic. Here visitors can experience the historical landmarks based with the building of the ship. At the end fo the tour they can view a representation of the ship. Locative art can also be used as a learning tool to educate those who have grown up in a electronic age. http://locmedia.wordpress.com/2007/12/09/the-belfast-titanic-interactive-trail/
Volkmar Klien and Ed Lear - http://www.traces-of-fire.org/
Volkmar Klien and Ed Lear embedded tracking devices into eight cigarette lighters and left them in various bars. As unidentifiable people picked them up and carried them around, Klien and Lear were able to track the movements of the lighters.
This is an interesting piece, I suppose. Their description of it equates their project to the tracking of wild animals (it even uses the same tracking devices), only the animals in this case are the lighters. They also mention the “potential evils of tracking the individual,” but I feel that they were never actually tracking people because they would not have been able to guarantee that the lighters don’t switch people; they can only truly follow the lighters themselves.
I don’t really think that this piece really carries it’s visual component well (at least the part that’s online), because the essence of time is lost on the maps, and the photographs are naturally discontinuous. They do, evidently, give tours of the routes the lighters took, which is probably vastly superior to simply reading about it.
So i found this web site that holds a few locative media works called leoalmanac.org. There I found one peace of work called the The long March http://leoalmanac.org/gallery/locative/index.asp. The work has this guy following the progress of people as they re walk the same path as the long march. When the group of people stop at certain place’s this guy would get a tattoo of the were there at. When the group no longer did the walk he begins to finish the march him self. He records this by video, photo’s and getting a tattoo.
This work seems vary interesting and is something I could see my self doing. Its a way to kind of relive a peace of history.I like what was going on in this work but I am not really sure how this is locative media. He went place to place and recorded it but I cant see how that ties into things.
“description:’always something somewhere else’ is a generative mediascape that creates a temporary map in a location as the user is asked to seek out certain base materials such as glass, stone, and water. As they reach each material they hear the beginning of a fictional narrative about another person in a far off location standing next to the same material. As the map is created the user can return to the points they marked to hear the stories fold in on themselves and conclude.” Taken directly from the mscape website.
When I was searching for projects that caught my attention I came across a YouTube video with snippets taken from people after they had completed the walk. The music was intruiging so I sought out the mscape website and did a little reading up on the project. I really like the idea of this walk, or scavenger hunt style art piece with music. But even more than that I really liked the fact that it had a larger message about materials and global warming. I really feel like this project is not just artist, I think it has a strong political viewpoint. One of the girls who had done the walk also mentioned something about the disorientation she experienced. The ability for this project to transport the participant out of their comfort zone is really amazing to me. If I had the opportunity to experience this first hand I would definitely go on the walk.
Here is a link to their website so you can check it out yourself:
mscape
This is connected to the discussion we had on tuesday. dealing with new technology, culture sensitivity and accessibility. Check it out
original article hereI like this project because its refreshing. Ricardo Dominquez is actually making art that matters. not for arts sake. or as an intellectual exercise. but as way to create a new language to empower people. ”oh, the technology will eventually become accessible, we care, we are thinking about it” - yah probably, it seems ”just a little” compared to Ricardo. who has taken on the responsibility of not making it an academic excerise, but putting it into the hands of the people that it represents. He has creatively figured out how to do this by pushing the idea of what it traditionally means to be an artist. diving into computer programming to figure out how to use GPS without a GPS receiver. a cheap phone that you probably tossed away before you got yr iphone. so Ricardo creates this movement. generates this new language. others start to contribute. eventually it grows and becomes an empowered group of people. would this be considered dangerous? to whom?so when we hear the goats get shot -maybe its for the better, maybe its an indication, a wake up call, that we have lost touch with the people and the space around us?
The locative media project I found interesting is called Trace by Allison Sant and Ryan Shaw. The project explores physical boundaries overlapped with invisible boundaries. The physical boundaries which society has come to believe define privacy are challenged by the extension of the invisible boundaries in to public space. They created maps of the city showing different networks and there names.The participants of the trace project were able to explore the city landscape while viewing different Wifi networks and signals. The participants were able to see through the GPS what is normally unseen, mapping the invisible. It is as if our walls are becoming transparent.
