The massive rise in satelite navigation devices (and use) in cars is possible because the Americans turned off the scrambling device on the GPS satellites. However, because navigation is governed by the shortest distance between points, it may lead trucks down tiny roads, or people cars through waterlogged fiords.
Something is wrong, why are people getting lost when using car navigation, trying to drive off cliffs, or through watercourses. Lones argument is the there is information missing, the map that satnav is based upon is not situated in the environment.
Michael de Certeau “place is a practiced space”, people access the city in two ways -from outside through the map(not in the game), from inside as a pedestrian(situated person) . The Naked city(Deboard & Jorn, 1957) is a deconstruction of a map into the flow. This is the route description.
So there is the route description and the map, and gps navigation is a route description.
You do need to know what is happening out there.
The dream that GPS manufacturers are selling is false, It dosen’t situate us, this is why people drive into the water. Make us believe that we can be teleported from place to place without worry.
Archive
Dr Brian Degger – independent researcher brian@transitlab.org (see a picture of me at talk here)
Location! Location? Location!! Can location neutrality exist in artworks?
(http://www.isea2008singapore.org/abstract/a-c/p450.html)
Brian Degger
This paper starts from examining the notion of location neutrality, contrasting artworks that feature a locatitive media or location independent aspect.
Art in these works serves to enable reimagining of a place, a defamiliarisation of the familiar. Indeed a recent rise in the popularity of psychogeography, has led to a number of interesting performances and installations which seek to create new juxtapositions between the physical environment and imagined spaces.
One recent work was the remapping of Blooms (Ulysees, Joyce) walk through Dublin onto any city in the world using a web interface to generate the new walk. It takes site specificity and neutrality to an abrupt intersection. Interestingly, due to copyright issues with the underlying map data, people in UK could not use the interface for generating maps for UK cities.
Agnes Meyer-Brandis connects with an imagined subterranean landscape that underlies our own. In her works, location is neutral or sited upon a certain facility (e.g. ice rinks) as the works explore the interconnected underworld, searching for life in coresamples, icecores and atmospheric moisture.
Atau Tanaka’s work Net_Derive seeks to extend artwork beyond the gallery into the urban environment. It is based upon mobile and locative technologies.
These are but a few artists engaging with locative media. Other examples will be drawn from Blast Theory, the play of GEOcaching, Beatrez Dacosta’s PigeonBlog and FoAM’s TRG amongst others.
I will argue that location neutrality can exist in some works, but that these are a special case, and overwhelmingly location is a significant component.
Continue reading ‘Location! Location? Location!! Table of works’
I have just run a session on ethical protein provision for the luminous green event 31st July in Singapore 2008. Luminous Green is a series of gatherings about a possible future; about a human world, that is enlightened, imaginative, electrified and most importantly – living in a fertile symbiosis with the rest of the planet.
The session went well, it was on ethical protein concentrating on meat although I am more confused than when I started. I wanted to look at a number of protein sources, but we did not touch vegetable proteins, as the group had much experience with meat
Meats place in theworld is very complicated and there were a number of issues to discuss before even concidering the meat licence. As the panel was made up of 5 self selecting people (3 from the SE Asia and India), me living in uk, we had the opportunity to discuss the complicated picture.
So, imediately it was apparent that the people in my group had a far better understanding of meat, hunting and killing than me. Three had experienced a village and hunting culture in their youth.
We also got to start exploring the meat and religion. From its diverse population, there is a majority of people that rever the cow(88%) and the minority that don’t(12%). So depending upon who you talked to, there was a completely different attitude to beef.
In other news, to save on land space, holland is concidering a pig skyscraper/farm to supply its pork.
I found the SE asian viewpoint on hunting to be rich, with the slightly controverial idea that livestock/meat is money on 4 legs for the disenfranchised/people without land. As a source of protein, its ethics do not come into it if it is the only way they can sustain themselves.
Just a few provocations…..ethical meat the supermarket way is unstainable/affordable for masses.
The Meat Licence is an interesting probe for the uk, but outside the western world, where there is a better connection with the land, it makes the idea irrelevant. For immegrants coming into the UK will they have to be licenced if they cant prove that they have been involved in the slaughter of meat?
It is interesting that these asian regions are going down the same route of industrialised farming.
From one participant, there was also a strong reaction to another law in the already overregulated UK, do we need another law?
Brian
Image via WikipediaWhy do the terms fishy and shit so negative?
I think it is a disengagement or disenfranchisement event. It is a woprd that connects with the intense olfactory reaction…..bus can we get past its olfactory unplesantness and explore what we could activate these terms for the betterment of ourselves.
I am still thinking….but my initial thoughts (influenced by people at the urban climate camp and luminous green as part of ISEA2008, Singapore) is that there is something strange going on. These terms (or their describe an ecological approach to food/energy production and a awareness of diversity. So when we talk about food/energy production…. through the reintroduction of biomass to the land, or burning biomass for generation of energy… we are talking about shit, a totally natural part of life.
Fishyness is a connection with the underwater world, and through this ourselves. Fish in their water world are a metaphor for our own. We want to use the power of uniqueness against the tide of monoculture. In some ways something that unique/endangered is now valuable…..so why are we replacing what is unique (through draining swamps, growing monocultures for biomass production etc) with what is a unsustainable monoculture?
Diversity is both shit and fishy….It is frugal, but generates wonder, through careful hand to hand passing of a small packet of energy/information through a number of membrane systems. Rainforests and Coral reefs, frugal mass producers of diversity. One link (energy return system) is shit…. how wonderful is that?
Monoculture on the other hand, asorbs energy at a incredible rate, for a small output,requires constant maintenance. High energy use translates into economic transactions, which become a losing battle as non-renewable resources are consumed….
Margaret Schedel, Elizabeth de Martelly 117 Realizing the Moment: Towards a Continued Role for Technology in Art.
The need for scores in art has become important in the preservation of the art. Video documentation is not the work, and does not recreate the work. It was interesting that one example that was used was that 9 evenings. If there had been a score for the pieces, they may have been able to recreate it. Wish she had Variations VII has been recreated this year at AVFest08.
Margaret Schedel describes one of the works she made as part of her study and the process that is involved in making a score for this piece. She admits that of course making scores is not fun, but it is important and allows the replaying of the work, or at least the intent of the work. This may be why there are so few scores of electonic arts. Too rigid scores are almost as bad as no score.
Image via WikipediaSteven Pinker and SWAMP are really interested in Phineous Gage, who suffered from a railway spike passing through his brain, he didnt die, but his personality changed for the worse. This runs counter to the idea of the noble savage.
Matt and Doug from SWAMP talked about Vladimir Vernadsky and the noosphere. The theory that humans have been extended by technology.
However, now we have technology based diseases.
Metahuman is the now, the reach of the internet, satellite networks. Technology that uses people without much concideration of the humans. In the conflict between Metahuman vs Human,the Metahuman corporation often wins.
Walmartathon, 24hrs in a walmart consuming. The idea of the corporate organism and by doing this action they are interrogating the metaorganism.
spore1.1, 2004
SWAMP seeks to kill a rubbertree plant from home depot (with its garanteed money back offer), it is fed by the homedepot stock value, if it goes up, then it gets watered. During a bull market the plant died because of too much water, after enron the plant died because of too little. From this they worked out that this simple system was too likely to go to extremes as it was based on a single variable. In real life, multiple factors keep organism
I went to the artsactive panel yesterday that had representitives from SymbioticA, Arts And Genomics Centre, Ectopia, DSHED, Transgenisis, Artists in Labs. Artsactive has been set as an international network of partners interested and active in setting up art and science residency.
One thing brought up is that currently residencies are too short. there are a few different structures, one in which there is a lab and the artists are brought in, one where the organisation is a matchmaker, one where it is a commissioning agency. more later…….
Smell? Cut Grass, Burnt Hair, Cadaverine, Motor Oil (bio-fi).
Touch? Pierce, push, press, heat. (improvised empathetic device IED) This piece is amazing.
A custom software application continuously monitors a website (icasualties.org) that updates the personal details and numbers of slain U.S. soldiers. When new deaths are updated on the website, the data is extracted and sent wirelessly to custom hardware installed on the I.E.D. armband. The LCD readout displays the soldiers’ name, rank, cause of death and location and then triggers an electric solenoid to drive a needle into the wearers arm, drawing blood and immediate attention to the reality that a soldier has just died in the Iraq war.
The Studies of Work Atmospheres and Mass Production( s.w.a.m.p.) transform imaterial light data (from web scraping, facts about the calories in a big mac etc) into a physical visceral things that affects the player generally in an uncomfortable way. They seem to be the guinea pigs for their own creations. So its nothing they wouldnt experience first. A nice do unto others as you would have done to you kind of moment.
Go visit there site……
Douglas Easterly at the Biofi workshop. Here he is holding an arduino and explaining how great microcontrollers are.
I am attending the Bio-Fi workshop at Republica Polytechnica in Singapore, run by Doug, Matt and Kathrine from swamp.nu
During the workshop we are learning about php and how it can be used for data scraping (e.g. maybe we want to get the pollution/particulate value for a LA highway from the pollution website).
What do we want to do with that?
Well……we can use it to activate an arduino board. The arduino can drive a simple transmitter that talks to a Bio-Fi module. This module is attached to a essential oil vapouriser…. Cool!
Di Ball has a picture of the back of my head at the workshop here.
I take up the nomadic art/researcher mode today. Leave sunny Newcastle (yes its actually sunny!) travel down to london to catch a plane to Singapore for the Inter-Society for Electronic Arts(ISEA) conference. In the nature of these events I will cross paths with researchers/practitioners/curators from Lancaster(imaginationLancaster), Manchester(Cornerhouse&Futuresonic), Sunderland(Crumb) and Newcastle(Culturelab).
There will be a large contingent of Australians too. Compared to Europe, Australia and Singapore are practically next door.
What I am looking forward to are the discussions by new media networks and platforms for collaboration between arts and other fields of inquiry. It is not that art has the sole role of making work about social worries, environment or addressing aesthetics, but it is disenginious to say that it has none.
One project that inspires me is Luminous Green, initiated by Fo.am. It asks what are the possibilities and realities of using technology and know-how to envision a luminous green future rather than a dull grey one(this article is interesting on a factor 4-10fold reduce in the use of resources.
I will be talking about locative games in my paper Location! Location? Location!! (10am Nanyang Technological University B1-3 27th July 2008) These are games/experiences that have a sense of place, may use technology like GPS, mobile phones), what it promises and what the reality is.
This activity is supported by the National Lotterry through the Arts Council England Grant for the Arts (hence the logo).
