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.

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.

Table 1.
(refs can be found on www.transitlab.org/papers/loc_loc_loc/index.html)

type	Locative Narrative	Community authorship/storytelling	World Growing	Psych Tours	Playing the city
	Rider Spoke BT(2007)	Theirwork.org (2007) Connolly&Williamson)	Fo.AM – TRG(2004)	Shadowed Spaces(2007) Arika	Net-Derive(2007) Tanaka/Gemeinboek
	Day of Figurines BT(2006)	bold street /FACT (2007)	Times Up! – Sensory Circus(2004)	Report on an Unidentified Space Station (2007) Mike McHugh	Bio tracking(2007) Dimitriu
	I like Frank BT(2004)	PigeonBlog Beatrez Da Costa (2006)	Agnes-Myer Brandis Iceberge Sonde (2006)	TTS / PVI 2002-2005	Active Ingredient-Ere be dragons (2007)

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 Wikipedia

Steven 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

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…….

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.