Posts tagged locative media

CFP: Symposium Mediating Cityscapes (The Hague, Sep, due June 14)

“If urban space has historically been defined by the relation between static structures and mobile subjects, this dichotomy is fast giving way to hybrid spatialities characterized by dynamic flows which not only dissolve the fixity of traditional modes of spatial enclosure, but problematize the unified presence of the subject traversing their contours.”

(Scott McGuire, The Media City 2008)

Abstracts due June 14, 2013.

Symposium: Mediating Cityscapes, The Hague, Sep 27-28, 2013.

ABOUT – As Scott McGuire suggests, the contemporary city is marked by a number of tensions found between fixity and flow and the resulting hybrid spatialities which are shaped by a multifarious range of mediations. Historically, certain of these mediations, such as film, photography, music, art, and more recently, mobile and locative media, have helped shape the diverse strata which compose both the material and immaterial dimensions of the contemporary city. In form, and as practices and discourses, they have also afforded opportunities to critically engage with and creatively intervene in the city. As part of the annual arts festival Two Days Art, held in Den Haag, this interdisciplinary symposium will focus on creative and artistic responses to the mediated cityscape. We encourage papers and submissions from academics, artists and practitioners that consider the multiple ways in which various media (film, music, photographic, digital, etc.), creative practices, and technologies put in to play a diverse array of encounters and interfaces that engage with, interrupt, reconstitute, or resist the hybrid spatialities which define the contemporary cityscape.

Abstracts of no longer than 250 words can be sent to geoff.stahl@vuw.ac.nz

Closing Date: Friday, June 14th 2013.

Participants will be notified by July 1st, 2013.

Aca-articles: designing with companies, DIY production, and Locative social media

Design Research Society recently published a massive collection of open-access papers that were presented at the DRS 2012 Bangkok conference. It stretches over more than 2000 pages…

… but here are a few articles that cought my attention (with direct links to the paper on Scribd):

Co-creating with Companies: A design led process of learning, by Alessandro Deserti and Francesca Rizzo, Politecnico Di Milano.

Sustainability by Do-It-Yourself Product Design: User design opposing mass consumption, by Janwillem Hoftijzer, University of Twente.

Designing Experimental Urban Mapping with Locative Social Media, by Andrew Morrison, Institute of Design, The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, et al.

Bonus: Medea’s Anna Seravallis Bangkok paper Building Fabriken: Design for Socially Shaped Innovation.

CFP: The Hybrid City - Subtle Revolutions (due Oct 20)

This conference is dedicated to exploring the emergent character of the city and the potential transformative shift of the urban condition, as a result of ongoing developments in ICTs. A mix of artists, designers, researchers, advocates, stakeholders and decision makers will explore the technologically mediated urban activity and experience.

Hybrid City Conference, May 23-25, 2013, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece.

Abstracts due Oct 20, 2012.

Selected topics

  • Open cities, open urban data.
  • Environmental sensing and the Internet of things.
  • Urban data visualization.
  • Citizen science and peer production of knowledge.
  • Psychosocial perspectives into the impact of locative and pervasive media use.
  • Placemaking, place attachment and place identity in the hybrid city.
  • Mobile commons and wireless practices.
  • Public spaces and mediated presence.
  • Gamifying the urban space: playful engagement and game-like citizenship.
  • Hybrid spaces of conflict: forms of power and counterpower in the networked city.
  • Tactical media practices in the urban context.
  • From open data to data commons.
  • Open source models of policy and governance.
  • Emerging currencies and values.
  • Issues of data ownership and copyrights in hybrid urban contexts.

Full call: http://uranus.media.uoa.gr/hc2/

New Book: Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces - Locational Privacy, Control, and Urban Sociability

On the development of location-aware technology within the context of other mobile and portable technologies such as the book, the Walkman, the iPod, the mobile phone, and how these technologies work as interfaces to public spaces.

Authors: Adriana de Souza e Silva & Jordan Frith, North Carolina State University

View on Amazon

ABOUT - Mobile phones are no longer what they used to be. Not only can users connect to the Internet anywhere and anytime, they can also use their devices to map their precise geographic coordinates – and access location-specific information like restaurant reviews, historical information, and locations of other people nearby. The proliferation of location-aware mobile technologies calls for a new understanding of how we define public spaces, how we deal with locational privacy, and how networks of power are developed today.

In Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces, Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jordan Frith examine these social and spatial changes by framing the development of location-aware technology within the context of other mobile and portable technologies such as the book, the Walkman, the iPod, and the mobile phone. These technologies work as interfaces to public spaces – that is, as symbolic systems that not only filter information but also reshape communication relationships and the environment in which social interaction takes place. Yet rather than detaching people from their surroundings, the authors suggest that location-aware technologies may ultimately strengthen our connections to locations.

CFP: Locative Media - Culture, Economy, Policy (edited volume, abstracts due May 7)

The aim of this edited volume is to bring together a comprehensive account of the various location-based technologies, services, applications, and cultures, as media — and to identify, inventory, explore, and critique their cultural, economic, political, social, and policy dimensions internationally.

Abstracts due May 7, 2012. Locative Media: Culture, Economy, Policy. Edited by Rowan Wilken (Swinburne University of Technology) & Gerard Goggin (University of Sydney).

Location technologies have experienced a relatively long and complex incubation. Satellite-based global positioning system (GPS) commenced life as a military technology before finding its way into wider commercial and consumer uses (not least being used in mobile phones along with triangulation of cellular networks for services such as enhancedemergency calling). Location-based services for cellular mobile networks and devices were the subject of much experiment and anticipation in the 1990s. Mobile social networking applications first emerged in the 1990s, with the celebrated Lovegety gadget in Japan, and pioneering efforts such as Dodgeball in NorthAmerica. Technologies predicated on location also were pieced together through telecommunications, Internet, and web-based friendship, dating, and hooking-up services and sites such as Gaydar.

The early 2000s witnessed a wave of location-based experimentation around location and mobile devices across art, urban design, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, and strands of gaming cultures. These experiments included locative art, performances, activist interventions, location-aware fiction, location-based games (famously those of Blast Theory), annotation and story-telling, and a wide range of other manifestations. As mobile phones developed into fully-fledged media devices, various affordances led to new kinds of socio-technical marshalling of location. The ubiquity of camera phones allowed innovative visual and textual instantiations and representations of place. Cross-platform game developments increasingly relied on locative media as a key part of integrated, transmedia forms. Music and sound moved to the foreground of media imaginatively yoked to location.

Towards the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, two major developments put locative media squarely at the centre of contemporary cultural and social dynamics.

First, new kinds of locative media emerged through the ‘geoweb’ — the combination of the Internet with mapping, place-making, and locational technologies. Since the Google’s embrace of geolocation services in 2005 — with the fascination attracted by Google Earth and Google Maps, mainstream interest in and uptake of locative media services flourished. Such Internet-based locative media increasingly coincided with the widespread diffusion of mobile phone, mobile broadband, wireless Internet, and portable, networked media technologies. Consumers are now well accustomed to using sat nav devices in their cars, or while walking, Google Maps on desktop and laptop computers and mobile devices, and geoweb, geotagging and other mapping applications from all manner of places, and various apps on iPhones and smart phones that use location-aware technologies.

Secondly, with the phenomenal growth of smartphones following the launch of Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android plaforms in 2007-2008, the mobile Internet firmly took hold. As inadvertently revealed, smartphones gather unprecedented amounts of longitudinal data on their users’ locations — data which can support new kinds of tailored retail and consumer services, lifestyle profiling and mapping, and surveillance, with considerable privacy and social implications. Such mobile media built on the success of user-generated content and social networking systems (Cyworld, Mixi, Flickr, YouTube, QQ, Renren), and brought the locational aspects of these systems to the fore — especially with extensions such as Facebook Places, iPhoto tagging, and so on. The arrival of apps on smartphones — supported by Apple’s apps store, Google market, Window and Nokia’s shared apps — was also fuelled by the incorporation of locational capacities into this new wave ofmobile computing and software.

In short, not only are locative media one of the fastest growing areas in digital technology, questions of location and location-awareness are increasingly central to our contemporary engagementswith online and mobile media, and indeed media and culture generally. While locative media, especially in its recent North American incarnations, has become an fertile topic for research, policy, and public debate — and the subject of important recent studies such as de Souza e Silva and Frith’s Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces (2012), Gordon and de Souza e Silva’s Net Locality (2011), and Farman’s Mobile Interface Theory (2012) — there are many aspects of the international phenomenon of locative media that need research and critical discussion.

Thus the central aim of the Locative Media collection is to bring together a comprehensive account of the various location-based technologies, services, applications, and cultures, as media — and to identify, inventory, explore, and critique their cultural, economic, political, social, and policy dimensions internationally. In particular, the collection is organized around the perception that the growth of locative media gives rise to a number of crucial, as yet clearly articulated and addressed questions concerning the areas of culture, economy and policy.

Accordingly, we welcome proposals for papers that address any aspect of culture, economy, and policy, and the constitution, functions, and effects of locative media, especially (but certainly not limited to) the following:

  • How do we understand and theorize locative media as media? What are the interactions, affiliations, and remediations, between locative media and other media, especially Internet and mobiles?
  • How have locative media developed? What are their different histories that influence their present forms? What are the cultural, economic, and political economies that have shaped location-basedservices, locative, and geo-media?
  • How do locative media differ across national markets, geo-linguistic communities, and cultural contexts? What are the specificities of locative media in countries and regions that remain understudied in the anglophone literatures?
  • What the contrasting, or shared, meanings or practices associated with locative media in particular societies or groups of users? And what are the particular affordances of locative media in different settings and configurations of the technologies?
  • How have locative media been imagined as a policy object and regulated to date? What are their implications for current and future policy and regulation? In what ways can new frameworks be devised to capture and respond to the challenges of locative media?
  • What are the privacy ramifications oflocative media? What are the new concepts of privacy evolved alongside locative media? How do we understand the important concept of sharing — or its obverse, withholding information, emerging with locative media?
  • What are the implications of locative media are for broader understandings of media and technology? How do locative media fit into with new accounts of media, mobile, and networked publics?

Proposals
Please send proposals to both editors by 7 May 2012: Rowan Wilken (rwilken(at)swin.edu.au) and Gerard Goggin (gerard.goggin(at)sydney.edu.au).

Proposal should include:

  • title
  • abstract of up to 500 words
  • short biographical details for author and affiliation.

Provisional acceptance will be advised by 19 May 2012.

About the editors:
Rowan Wilken (rwilken@swin.edu.au<mailto:rwilken@swin.edu.au>) is Australian Research Council DECRA (Discovery Early Career Researcher Award) Fellow in the Swinburne Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. His books include Mobile Technology and Place (2012; with Gerard Goggin), and Teletechnologies, Place, and Community (2011).

Gerard Goggin (gerard.goggin@sydney.edu.au<mailto:gerard.goggin@sydney.edu.au>) is Professor and Chair of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. His books include the Routledge Companion to Mobile Media (2013; with Larissa Hjorth), New Technologies and the Media (2012), Global Mobile Media (2010), Mobile Technology: From Telecommunications to Media (2009; with Larissa Hjorth), and Cell Phone Culture (2006).

Aca-article: Ecology of Embodied Narratives in the Age of Locative Media and Social Networks - a Design Experiment

The present account of storytelling in the age of locative media would radically reject the traditional assumption that new technology challenges old narrative forms per se. Still, the very probable rise of personal devices based on the Global Positioning System (GPS), Geographic Information System (GIS) or similar geocoding standards and platforms will likely provide storytellers with a very interesting ground for the development of specific and very new literary applications.

Authors: Kai Pata, Tallinn University, Center for Educational Technology; Anatole Pierre Fuksas, Università degli Studi di Cassino, Dipartimento di Linguistica e Letterature Comparate.

Published in Cognitive Philology. Access article: http://annalidibotanica.uniroma1.it/index.php/cogphil/article/view/9602

ABSTRACT
A Design-based research tested a Hybrid Ecosystem emerging from collaborative storytelling supported by geo-locative technologies and Social Networking Services. We assumed that such Hybrid Ecosystem emerges when people experience a given environment through their own sensory-motor system while processing related locative media. We found that individual and collaborative activity in a hybrid ecosystem could be described on the basis of the swarming concept from biology.

Indeed, topics and themes seem to emerge, to be narrated and spread on the basis of unplanned, not concerted, polygenetic activity. Interaction basically leads to the emergence of behavioral patterns which immediately develop into mutated forms. As soon as a topic or a theme spread among the community, individual participants start differentiating their unique point of view on it, eventually comparing it with the one of some peers, so as to team up on the basis of affinity.

Literal references emerging from storytelling in hybrid ecosystems outscore metaphorical by far. Rather, comparison is definitely very active as a processing strategy whereas proper metaphors and generalizations emerge on a very limited basis. It looks like individual participants evaluate the collaborative streaming of narrative references as a series of individual, standalone events which are meaningful in themselves, not because the combination of them make it possible to grasp a general meaning.
A more careful assessment of data is very likely needed, but we can already conclude that narratives which emerge in hybrid ecosystems supported by locative technologies and Social Networking Services define the borders of participatory and collaborative story formats which reshape human presence in the environment while redefining the very concept of storytelling.

Access article: http://annalidibotanica.uniroma1.it/index.php/cogphil/article/view/9602

Aca-article: The New Place of Reading - Locative Media and the Future of Narrative

This paper argues that new mobile reading platforms in general are altering conceptions of literary space in highly conflicted ways, by radically expanding the sites where narratives can be accessed and experienced even as they reinforce a residual notion of literary reading as a sedentary and decontextualized experience.

By: Brian Greenspan, Carleton University

Article published in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Summer 2011, Volume 5, Number 3.

Access full article here, open access

Abstract

Locative technologies hold out the promise to transform literary space in all of its dimensions, including its represented spaces, reading interfaces, and the very spaces within which literature is produced and consumed. Yet, despite the growing use of location-based technologies, authors and readers alike have been slow to take to site-specific narrative due to limitations inherent in both the current design of locative media systems and our received notions of what constitutes the narrative experience.

This paper argues that new mobile reading platforms in general are altering conceptions of literary space in highly conflicted ways, by radically expanding the sites where narratives can be accessed and experienced even as they reinforce a residual notion of literary reading as a sedentary and decontextualized experience. Locative media likewise hold out the promise of increased mobility and contextual awareness, but confront several cultural and technological factors preventing such an enhanced emplacement of narrative, factors that current performance-oriented approaches cannot fully address. At the level of cognitive engagement, the conditioned expectation of being “transported” to a remote fictional world interferes with readers’ appreciation of the locative narrative’s close ties to the real world, as well as the contextual effects it elicits by means of transportation through the actual world. At the technical level, the discontinuous algorithms of place that inform the architecture of most locative media systems hinder the perception of narrative patterning and flow across more extensive spaces.

Locative media thus operationalize the spatial tension between conventionally sedentary modes of literary engagement and new modalities of mobility, a tension that is constitutive of our present mediality. The study concludes with a discussion of StoryTrek, a next-generation locative hypernarrative system designed to enable more complex, dynamic and fluid modes of embodied narrative spatiality. By encouraging the user to actively form complex narrative links between real and fictional spaces, StoryTrek enables utopian forms of spatial play that neutralize both the spatial limitations of current locative media design and the sedentary reading practices that continue to structure the experience of digital literature.

Access full article here, open access.