The artist: the first person to set out a boundary stone, or to makea mark

—Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari [1]

When the oceans became navigable following the deploymentof the chronometer as an onboard location device, our viewof the earth and our relationship to it changed, as did theforms of representation used to express or explore that rela-tionship. The first photographs from the Apollo space mis-sions changed once more the view of the earth and yieldedone of the most iconic and ubiquitous images ever produced.Today it is digital and satellite mapping technologies that havecaught the attention of a new generation of artists and do-it-yourself (DIY) technologists, who are exploring the use ofportable, networked, location-aware computing devices foruser-led mapping, social networking and artistic interventionsin which the fabric of the urban environment and the con-tours of the earth become a “canvas” [2].

All art engages in location to some degree, even if just inthe way that it responds to the space created by gallery andframe, or the way that the found object is marked by the ab-sence of the location from which it was drawn. If a precursorto locative media were to be identified within the art world, itmight be the work of Richard Long, who creates his art by walk-ing through a landscape, annotating the physical environmenthe encounters with stones or other ambient materials, anddocumenting this augmented space, creating photographsthat provide an esoteric other to the objectifying gaze of car-tography or satellite photography.

If net art is the art of the Internet, then locative art is theart of mobile and wireless systems [3]. The emergence of lo-cative media signals a convergence of geographical and dataspace that comes about as soon as computing becomes mo-bile or ambient, reversing the trend toward the view of digitalcontent as placeless, only encountered in the amorphous andother space of the Internet [4]. The exploratory movementsof locative art are located between the art of communicationsand networking and the arts of landscape, walking and the en-vironment. Artists are responding to the technical possibili-ties of electronic mapping and positioning technologies andlocation-aware, networked media by asking what can be ex-

perienced now that could not be experienced before, in some casescreating more or less conventionalscreen-based visualizations using lo-cation data, in others mapping newhorizons for creative content andthe art object and a new under-standing of the relation betweenphysical and digital.

Locative art and locative mediaare less focused on positioning thanon the preconditions of moving orbeing able to move. This paper islikewise concerned with the pre-conditions for a locative art ratherthan with a set of current projectsor artifacts. It is specifically con-cerned with the period between 2003 and 2004 [5]. At thattime locative media was in an embryonic state, everything stillup for grabs; a zone of consistency was yet to emerge. Whileartists such as Masaki Fujihata ( Japan), Teri Rueb (U.S.A.),Stefan Schemat (Germany) and Iain Mott (Australia) had formany years been producing work we may term locative art, inthis period locative media and locative art were simultaneouslyopening up new ways of engaging in the world and mappingtheir own domain. This resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’ssense of territory, in which there is a blurring of the distinc-tion between real estate and intellectual property, between themapping of physical space and the production of an artisticor cultural milieu: the territory is constituted by the signatureor expressive mark, both in the sense that birds use song tomap their domain and that the artist creates a new way of see-ing and occupying the world.

A TAXONOMY OF LOCATIVE ARTSA focus on this period enables us to study the stem cells of locative media and locative arts and thus refuse a narrow understanding of locative media that has since emerged. A classification of locative art projects that is useful for initialorientation might include the categories mapping, geo-annotation and ambulant (walking or moving about).

MappingDigital mapping is at the core of many locative projects, andthere is a vibrant area of locative media that defines itself pri-marily as a grassroots, open version of GIS (Geographic In-formation Systems).

Open and Wiki Maps. One approach that has become com-mon is to generate line drawings from global positioningsystem (GPS) data generated by people moving through thephysical environment. One such set of images was produced

©2006 ISAST LEONARDO, Vol. 39, No. 4, pp. 348–355, 2006 349

Locative Arts

Drew Hemment

Drew Hemment (curator, artist, researcher), Creative Technologies, University of Salford,Manchester M3 6EQ, U.K. E-mail: <drew@futuresonic.com>.

This is a revised version of a paper written in August 2004 and originally published in the proceedings of ISEA2004: The 12th International Symposium on Electronic Art, 14–22 August 2004, <http://www.isea2004.net/mainframe.php?id=proceedings> (accessed December 2005). This new version of the text does not undertake to provide an overview of all locative art projects produced since August 2004.

A B S T R A C T

The author discusses the fieldof locative arts, focusing onworks and interests from 2003to 2004. An overview is pre-sented of the artistic projecttypes found within this field, andthe author considers in depth a number of issues such as how projects are shaped bytheir reliance on positioningtechnologies and the impor-tance of the social within thisarea of practice.

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Article Frontispiece. Esther Polak, Amsterdam Realtime project, GPS visualization, 2003. (Photo © Esther Polak/WAAG Society)

at an influential workshop at Karosta inLatvia, hosted by the media art collectiveRIXC—an event that brought togethermany early practitioners and played animportant role in the emergence of thefield of locative media [6]. The basic car-tographic technique of generated linedrawings enables the creation of digitalmaps that are not dependent upon anypreviously existing data set, such as U.K.Ordinance Survey (OS) data. This makespossible user-generated, editable mapsthat work on the same “open” principlesas those behind projects such as Wiki-pedia, where content is generated andmaintained by the users. With such “wiki-maps” it is not just individual landmarksthat are created and maintained by users,but the features of the landscape and ge-ographical information as well.

In Amsterdam RealTime, by Ester Polak(the Netherlands), an early, seminal locative-media piece, participants roamedthe streets of Amsterdam equipped withnetworked GPS devices, and traces oftheir movements were relayed to a pro-jection screen in an exhibition space (Article Frontispiece). At the outset thescreen is blank, but as the journeys arerecorded, individual meanderings fuseinto a composite representation of howpeople occupy and use the city—den-sity and concentration are recorded inthe luminescence of overlapping lines;spaces unvisited remain dark. While, asEric Kluitenberg pointed out during theISEA2004 conference, such compositeimages generated through successive su-perimpositions are statistical in nature,the project offers an evocative visual por-trait of the life of the city and a grassroots,collaborative mapping of how urbanspace is used that offers an alternative to the top-down perspective of conven-tional cartography.

Figurative, Expressive, Performative.GPS Drawing, by Jeremy Wood (U.K.),uses this same technique to create not re-

even if this be abstracted to just a line ordot, affects the way people act and movein the present.

Social, Semantic. Much current inter-est is concerned with the interface be-tween locative media and social software,the semantic web or web 2.0. Such mapscan be combined with calendar tools or with social software so that users are“able to find things—events/pictures/anything—‘near’ to them, where ‘near’can mean close in geographical location,in ‘person space,’ or in ‘interest space’”[8]. Metaphors such as “a programma-ble and machine-readable world,” “peo-ple search engines,” “social interfaces toplaces,” “city as canvas or medium” and“person as cursor in the city” abound.There is a strong current of social proj-ects within locative media, and a DIYtechnology culture has grown around it as part of a wider space that includescopyleft, open source, free networking,etc. In an arts context, mobile socialnetworking and social network analysishave been explored in the work Trace En-counters. Infrared pins given to the audi-ence at Ars Electronica 2004 detectedand recorded any other pin that passedwithin range. The connections betweenpins, and—by implication—people, werevisualized in the gallery to display “cliques”and shared patterns of movement (of asimilar kind to those explored in the Fa-miliar Strangers project).

Geo-Annotation“Geo-annotation” is a central conceptwithin locative media and is here under-stood as making data geographically spe-cific or placing a digital object in space.Geo-annotation involves authoring me-dia in an environment and accessing it atthat same location. Media contents—dig-ital photos, for example—are assignedspatial coordinates, recording the placeat which they were taken as metadata(data about data), in the same way thattime and date are stored. These photosmay be accessed by an enabled device,configured to select digital objects whosespatial attributes correspond with the de-vice’s current location. While the “true”location of the content is a database, bymaking it possible to access that contentin a particular position—and only in thatposition—its place migrates into thephysical environment. Whether the useris authoring or only accessing content,the metaphor remains: The person be-comes a kind of “cursor” navigating dig-ital media located in the world.

Located Media. Geo-annotation hasgenerated widespread interest for use in

alistic representations of a town or ter-rain but outline images of animals, sym-bols and words, shifting the focus fromrealism or documentation to figurativedrawing. One example is what Wood describes as “the world’s biggest IF,”stretching from the south coast of En-gland to East Anglia—an outline draw-ing of the word IF created by positionaldata generated during a journey acrossthe country and then superimposed overa satellite photograph of the U.K.

The Karosta images illustrate a vi-sual aesthetic common to many such GPS projects, where expression emergesbetween the cartographic contours in the intricate abstract shapes producedthrough this mapping technique. Someinvolve a secondary mapping of error,plotting the accuracy of each GPS read-ing as the diameter of a circle, generat-ing aleatory tracings that expose the limitof the technical system (Fig. 1) [7].Artists have explored this aesthetic in avariety of ways, such as the use of ropeand string in the Distance Made Goodgallery-based installations by Jen Hamil-ton and Jen Southern (Canada/U.K.).

In projects where mapping and track-ing techniques are applied in an art con-text, the participants tend to have adifferent relationship to the data or arti-facts produced than would otherwise bethe case, and this often takes on a per-formative aspect. A number of locativeart projects involve performance or per-formers, such as Myriorama, by Ambi-entTV.NET (U.K.), and Choreography ofEveryday Movement, by Teri Rueb (U.S.A.).Many more feature some element of per-formance by non-performers, whetherthis be the filmmaker Pete Gomes draw-ing in chalk outside the ICA in Londonor the participants in Fujihata’s Field-Works pirouetting playfully while mak-ing impromptu sketches. What is of notehere is the way in which awareness thatmovement is being recorded or mapped,

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Fig. 1. RIXC, GPS visualization at LocativeMedia Workshop in Karosta, Latvia, 2003;screen grab from <http://locative.x-i.net/>.(© Raitis Smits)

Fig. 2. InterUrban, Untitled ( Jeff and visitordowntown LA), 2003. (Photo © L. NaomiSpellmann)

everything from museum or city guidesto utility-company field operations. Hereit is used as a means of documentationand of augmenting the environment withadditional information that elaborates orexplains something already present. It is another means of delivering informa-tion, a new way of experiencing other-wise conventional media content in theenvironment.

Graffiti, Narrative, Gaming. Geograf-fiti (Canada/U.K.) and GeoNotes (Swe-den) seek not to document or interpretthe environment, but instead to embel-lish it with digital graffiti or virtual tag-ging as expressive mark. The same basicprinciple is at play in InterUrban (U.S.A.),but in this case, multiple, interconnecteddigital contents create an ambient narrative, experienced via movementthrough an urban space and encounterswith narrative elements designed tomake sense in any sequence (Fig. 2).Likewise Uncle Roy All Around You, by BlastTheory and the Mixed Reality Lab (U.K.),combines ambient narrative with perva-sive game play.

Social Authoring. In a number of proj-ects the focus is on opening up a so-cial space by enabling people to producetheir own content within such an envi-ronment. (area)code (U.K.) and [murmur](Canada) enable people to author andaccess stories, poems or anecdotes abouta particular place via a mobile phone us-ing SMS (short-message service) or voicemail, respectively, not by using digital po-sitioning technology but simply by ad-vertising an access number on posterslocated in designated sites. Yellow Arrow(U.S.A.) adopts a similar low-tech ap-proach, but in this case uses stickers sothat participants, rather than the projectcreators, can choose where the digital ob-ject is placed as well as its content, en-abling it to work on a much larger scalewithout ties to any one particular site. Ur-ban Tapestries (U.K.) and Mobile Bristol(U.K.) are more complex locative au-thoring platforms. They have been thefocus of social experimentation that ex-plores how multiple layers or threads of meaning may be woven or insertedwithin the environment in a form of collaborative authoring characterized bymultiplication, as well as localization, ofperspective. In these kinds of projects itstarts to become possible for users to en-gage with the database rather than justwith individual contents.

AmbulantMany locative projects dispense withscreen-based representation or gallery

other, community wireless and media ata park bench. They each exploit the dis-continuity between urban space and theinvisible layer of media floating above itto juxtapose incongruous actions or be-havior. The intersection of the digital andthe geographic brings into proximity dif-ferent kinds of incommensurable space.The engineering challenge of verticalhandover, moving seamlessly betweenwireless networks of varying resolutionand latency, finds an analogue in negoti-ating seams between overlapping and dis-continuous social milieu. This affords anopportunity to intervene and to play. In-stead of interpreting or embellishing a lo-cation, projects such as Radio Ballet andPark Bench TV present something that is more relational, attempting not to re-solve the discontinuities but to hold themopen, enabling us to stand momentarilyoutside the everyday. Here locative art isnot to do with simple representation, norplacement of digital objects nor simplymoving about. It is instead an interven-tion that is simultaneously spatial andsocial.

DECONSTRUCTING THE GRID:DIS-LOCATIVE ARTSLocative art’s focus on networking, au-thoring and accessing creative contentwithin the environment offers the chanceto take art out of the galleries and off thescreen. This hope needs to be temperedby an awareness that, in place of the rich-ness of embodied experience of theworld, many projects offer the challengeof roaming the environment while squint-ing at a tiny screen and clunky menu, sep-arated from the world by a barrier of badusability. What is more, some locativeprojects may be “of the world” but are not“in the world”: their final form is on-lineor gallery based, rather than experiencedvia mobile devices or “old media” such asstickers.

In an important sense, this is a false dis-tinction, however. First, even if the finalform is screen-based, the process throughwhich the work is produced is com-monly located within the rural or urbanenvironment, typically in the form ofworkshops involving a small number ofpractitioners. More importantly, to theextent that the focus is on the dynamicrelation between data space (or data-base) and world, it is incidental where thefinal representation is sited.

The nature of this relationship be-tween database and world is of greaterconsequence than simply the question of whether the project is sited “in the

presentation as the primary site of thework and instead involve walking andmoving about. Where the focus is on me-diated experience specific to a certain lo-cation or locations, this category is likelyto be a natural companion or correlateof geo-annotation projects, rather thanan option exclusive of them.

Interpretive, Explanatory. Some proj-ects involve a journey that is informative,responding to and illustrating features of the natural or human-made environ-ment. Here the media is about that place,describing or elaborating it. The simplestcases involve following a path, such as ina heritage trail, where the user is guidedin their journey by, say, an audio mono-logue. Otherwise, a project may enableusers to find their own path through a setof predetermined possibilities, movingthrough an area that has been mappedout and encountering interactive mediathat correspond to certain locations orobjects.

Expressive, Generative. Here the jour-ney is creative and expressive. Audio orvideo walks, of the kind Janet Cardiff has been creating since the early 1990s,entail a more esoteric encounter with media objects and environment. An am-bulant action that engages in computa-tion is .walk, by Wilfried Houjebek (theNetherlands), which uses simple com-mands (in an analogue of computercode) to prompt a series of movementsby participants, who follow algorith-mic patterns around the city and who alter those algorithms and paths by ex-changing numerical data with the otherparticipants they encounter. .walk is gen-erative in the sense that the consistentapplication of a simple algorithm con-tinually shuffles the movements of par-ticipants with open and unpredictableresults. In creating an intimate and directrelationship between bodies and code, it also shifts the focus from mapping or visualization to performativity—en-abling normally hidden operations to be not only brought into view but alsoperformed:

// Classic.walkRepeat{1 st street left2 nd street right2 nd street left}

Social, Relational. Radio Ballet (Ger-many) and Park Bench TV (U.K.) in-volve interventions in which participantsare invited to use public space in a non-obvious way, one involving a flash mob–cum–ballet in a train station (Fig. 3); the

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world,” on-line or in a museum or gallery.One issue that quickly becomes apparentis the reliance in locative arts on the clin-ical precision of digital tracking and theemphasis on point-to-point correspon-dence [9]. Projects that draw not only oncartographic tools but also on metaphorsof mapping tend to aim for a one-to-one correspondence between world andimage, between the movements of par-ticipants and their screen-based repre-sentation. Likewise many geo-annotationprojects seek a determinate placing or fixing of position, wherein location is unambiguously designated or assigned.In most cases ambiguity—or disruptionof mechanical precision—arises only inthe negotiation of land features and theresolution or granularity of technicalhardware.

Furthermore, locative media often assumes a reductive understanding ofspatiality. It encounters the fabric ofspace-time via an abstract coordinate sys-tem, betraying its indebtedness to car-tography and GIS, in which location isreduced to a set of geographic coordi-nates or a wireless cell. In this respect theparallel between locative art and the workof Richard Long gains further resonancewith the intervention of Bill Drummond,in which he drew x/y coordinates on oneof Long’s photographs before cutting outthe pieces one by one. These pieces arenow circulating in the hands of a thou-sand new collectors. Locative media’sunderstanding of location often seems toshare more in common with that ofDrummond than of Long, its transcen-dent frame of reference and Cartesianspace much like the grid marked by

sions of the project, a subversion of theCartesian grid was effected by represent-ing the physical terrain as a function ofthe speed at which it is encountered; inone iteration the shape of Mount Fuji be-came distorted, the same slope shown tobe longer when going up than when go-ing down.

In Choreography of Everyday Movement,Teri Rueb (U.S.A.) works with classicallytrained dancers to explore the poetics of the urban body, as well as the distancebetween the world and its representa-tion. It too incorporates GPS traces in the final gallery-based representation, buthere they are inscribed in sheets of Per-spex, which are then layered to create a kind of Rorschach image. The longi-tude/latitude coordinates are deliber-ately removed—“The performer is onlyvisible as an ant-like dot crawling acrossthe screen. Movement and physical pres-ence are reduced to the most basic ab-straction” [11]. Here we are reminded ofLev Manovich’s identification of radar asthat which epitomizes the use of linearperspective to map and identify objectsand spaces: “Radar is the best example ofthe rationalization of sight in the twenti-eth century. . . . [A] radar operator sees ascreen, a dark field with a few brightspots. Here the function of visual nomi-nalism . . . is isolated and abstracted” [12].Just as radar can be said to clarify andcondense the function of modern visualsurveillance technologies, so Rueb takesthe real-time abstraction of movement toan extreme at which its limit is revealed,the cartographic function left bare. Cho-reography illustrates how—as a data-based form—locative art brings the coordinate system itself into the frame as the material upon which it works.

Achieving a similar effect from a verydifferent approach is Location, Location,Location (2004), by Pete Gomes (U.K.).This saw Gomes walking and drawingwithin a 1-km-square area in London, tak-ing GPS readings and annotating the ur-ban environment in chalk. In some casesGomes drew numerical readings of posi-tion or time at sites where he encoun-tered objects or events; in other caseschalk lines following longitude or lati-tude were drawn on, and in some caseseven through, buildings. This project,and related works by Gomes such as SE8v1.0 (2004), inscribes the cartographicgrid on the city, making an idealizedCartesian space manifest. It does so, how-ever, only to then reassert the transient,material and everyday. The drawings aretemporary, quickly washed away by rain.In the impossibility of continuing a true

Drummond on Long’s photograph [10].Locative art’s condition of possibility is aprior abstraction, and as a consequenceits emphasis on location is accompaniedby a distancing from embodiment, phys-icality and context, which—within sucha reductive understanding of spatiality—become a mere residue of the coordinatesystem.

One project that moves us toward anengagement in the perspectival and em-bodied is also in many ways the direct pre-cursor to locative art. From its initiationin 1992, through its many contemporaryiterations, Masaki Fujihata’s Field-Works(Color Plate E) shows how nuance andhidden depth can emerge through thecreative use of a technology designed toimpose a rigid cartographic grid uponthe world, going beyond simple docu-mentation to open a rich space of con-textual and aesthetic meaning. Througha juxtaposition of location data capturedby GPS and moving images captured byvideo, it aims to articulate local narra-tives, while also excavating a sense of par-allelism in the universe on a human scale.Field-Works stretches and pulls at the co-ordinate system, in the same way thatdancers play with shifting the body’s cen-ter of gravity to create a kind of distortionin the fabric of space-time. This is firstlyachieved simply by introducing multi-ple viewpoints, and secondly by using a camera-mounted gyroscope to trans-late even the intimate movements of thephysical gaze as a part of the resultingwork, the video frame—viewed movingalong a GPS trace—shaking and turn-ing to correspond to unsteady motion of the camera during filming. In earlier ver-

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Fig. 3. LIGNA, Radio Ballet Leipzig, 2003. (Photo © Eiko Grimberg)

grid line at street level, the project high-lights the opacity of bricks, mortar andlived space. Moreover, in the way it isexperienced by an audience movingthrough the city, it foregrounds not theomnipresent perspective of satellites cir-cling overhead but a partial and in-complete perspective at ground level,bringing cartography down to earth [13].

Other projects shift the focus awayfrom positioning toward proximity andrelationality. In Hlemmur in C, by PallThayer (Iceland), two taxis equippedwith GPS and their base at the Hlemmurbus terminal in Reykjavik are each rep-resented with a middle C note. While thesound attributed to the base remains con-stant, the pitch associated with the taxisvaries according to their distance fromthe base, creating instability in the tone.This piece also involves a visual mappingcomponent, but is most interesting in theway in which proximity is registered as dy-namic tension in the sound, a strange anddisconcerting auditory space.

Sound Mapping, by Iain Mott, is an installation in which participants realizea composition by wheeling four move-ment-sensitive suitcases within a publicplace (Fig. 4). Four of the cases containodometers measuring wheel rotation inboth directions as well as two gyroscopesmeasuring tilt and azimuth, and they arelinked by data radio transmitters to a fifthcase equipped with GPS. While muchwork with GPS is limited by its low res-olution—the nuance of embodied ex-perience exchanged for a blunt on/offswitch every few meters—Sound Mappingproduces music in response to nearby ar-chitectural features, subtle movements

lar trajectory in locative media generally,identified by Ben Russell among others,from the spatial to the social [14]. And itmay be situated alongside a broader blur-ring of the distinction between art andthe social today, which marks a departurefrom conventional understandings of theplace of the artist in Western culture andin particular the post-Enlightenment un-derstanding of the artist as apart fromsociety.

An emphasis on the social is likewisefound in Nicolas Bourriaud’s under-standing of relational art: “an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm ofhuman interactions and its social con-text, rather than the assertion of an in-dependent and private symbolic space”[15]. The kind of relationality involvedin projects such as Hlemmur in C and BodyMapping is primarily geometric and spa-tial. Another kind of “relationality” arisesthrough the overlapping of differentkinds of mapping—geographical maps,social network maps, node maps, etc.Something a little closer to Bourriaud’sunderstanding may be seen in locative-art projects that explicitly engage an audience in a social space or process.They tend to offer something differentfrom the gallery-centric, white-cube so-ciality proposed by Bourriaud, for whererelational-art projects tend to be stagedand exceptional, locative arts are moreoften implicated in the everyday, even ifonly in their willingness to address non-art contexts.

Park Bench TV, by Gomes, involved apark bench with free Wi-Fi access, plus achat forum and local TV channel towhich anyone with a wireless-enabled lap-top had access. The bench served as aphysical metaphor for the wireless nodeand a focal point for local content, but italso brought users into physical prox-imity and—through the layering or co-incidence of different types of location(inner-city park, bench, Internet chatroom)—produced an uncertain and in-congruous social space [16]. This projectalso prefigures a wider trend toward freenetworks becoming portals to a localenvironment or community—as cham-pioned by the collective île Sans Fil inMontreal, for example—rather than justaccess points to an undifferentiated band-width. In another project, Life: A User’sManual, Michelle Teran walks the streetsequipped with a scanner and a moni-tor—in one iteration wheeling themalong in a shopping cart—picking upfeeds from closed-circuit TV cameras shepasses, which are visible on her mobilescreen. Her solitary intervention serves

and gestures, and the absolute and rela-tive movements of the participants.

Biomapping, by Christian Nold (U.K.),measures galvanic skin response—usinga customized device of the kind used inlie-detector tests, combined with GPS—to record anxiety and stress levels of par-ticipants as they move through the city.Here the body is brought into the equa-tion only to be abstracted and left be-hind. Nold works with readings plottedonto a map in the same way other proj-ects record a visual trace of movement,the composite images mirroring the wayAmsterdam RealTime reveals the idiosyn-crasy of how urban space is used. Thereis a reverse movement in the way thatpeople respond to readings—their ownor those of previous participants—thisshaping their movement through thecity. From the perspective of the userroaming the city, it prizes open a spacebetween the physical environment, net-works and the body and offers a differentway of encountering the city, where thelow-cost, DIY aesthetic of the Biomappingdevice becomes more significant than theaccuracy of its representation of physio-logical data.

OTHER GEOMETRIES: RELATIONAL AND SOCIALOne trajectory that may be discernedwithin locative arts—implicit in the tax-onomy above—runs from realism anddocumentation (conventional maps, cityguides) to expression (digital graffiti, am-bient narrative) to the collaborative andsocial (collaborative maps, social author-ing). In broad terms this mirrors a simi-

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Fig. 4. Iain Mott, Sound Mapping, Linz, 1998. (Photo © Iain Mott)

as a metaphor for the alienation of thesurveilled subject, but in intercepting thesignal she also creates a counter-site andinvites people in: audience, passersby andon occasion employees of the companiesoperating the cameras. Radio Ballet, de-scribed by the group as an “exercise inunnecessary loitering,” involves a chore-ographed and orchestrated performanceguided by audio broadcast over a free net-work. It creates a happening or event atvariance with the everyday, functional useof space, and in so doing brings the so-cial norms that govern our use of publicspace into view. These projects offer aview of locative art as something morethan spatial representation. Indeed, theyfall outside a narrow definition of lo-cative art or locative media. And yet theyillustrate how spaces that are both so-cial and other can be opened at the in-terface of communication, location andthe body.

Whereas “mixed reality” posits the vir-tual and physical as layered or intersect-ing, these projects suggest that somethingelse can be produced in between. In locative-media projects we find a fold be-tween virtual and physical, data space andgeographical space. In some cases, suchas Houjebek’s generative walk or Gomes’spark bench, these folds do not just mixrealities but produce a reality of theirown. They might in this sense be said tobe counter-sites and—like Foucault’s “het-erotopias,” or “other” places—to place allother sites into question [17]. This mightbe metaphoric as much as literal. Wemight, for example, ask how the intensityof luminescence in Amsterdam RealTimeor the trace of embodiment in Biomap-ping might be said to constitute a het-erotopic image, an image of an otherplace, rather than a representation of the real. Likewise, we might ask of geo-annotation projects how they open an“other” space, which is not the same asproviding more sophisticated interpre-tive tools.

The straightforward geo-annotation of space—placing data in geographicalspace—can be seen as an instance ofwhat Deleuze and Guattari have termedemplacement, which they distinguish fromhaecceities, or “concrete individuationsthat have a status of their own and directthe metamorphosis of things and sub-jects” [18]. These have the kind of indi-viduality we find in seasons or dates, asopposed to subjects or things, and “con-sist entirely of relations of movement andrest between molecules or particles, ca-pacities to affect and be affected” [19].When locative media hides behind theconsole of positioning systems, an ab-

ture RICX, 2004) pp. 175–177. Also available on-line,http://www.locative.net/tcmreader/index.php?locarts;gomes.

14. Ben Russell (U.K.) is author of Headmap Mani-festo (1999, http://www.headmap.org/headmap.pdf),and one of the founders of the Locative Media Lab(http://www.locative.net), which also included MarcTuters (Canada) and others.

15. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Paris: LesPresses du Reel, 2002).

16. A similar approach has been taken more recentlyby Anab Jain (India/U.K.)with her work Yellow Chair(2005), http://anab.in/yellowimages.html.

17. M. Foucault, Of Other Spaces. Diacritics, Spring1986, pp. 22–27.

18. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A ThousandPlateaus, Brian Massumi, trans. (Minneapolis: Uni-versity of Minnesota Press, 1987) p. 261.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid.

URLs

Field-Works, by Masaki Fujihata, http://www.field-works.net/.

Teri Rueb, http://www.terirueb.net.

Stefan Schemat, http://www.schemat.de/.

Sound Mapping by Iain Mott, http://www.reverberant.com/.

Amsterdam RealTime by Ester Polak, http://realtime.waag.org/.

Locative Media Workshop at Karosta, Latvia, http://locative.x-i.net/.

RIXC, http://rixc.lv/.

Distance Made Good by Jen Hamilton and Jen South-ern, http://www.theportable.tv/dmg/.

GPS Drawing, http://www.gpsdrawing.com/.

Myriorama by AmbientTV.NET (UK), http://www.ambienttv.net/4/myriorama/.

Location, Location, Location (2004) by Pete Gomes,http://www.mutantfilm.com/wireless/. See alsohttp://www.locative.net/tcmreader.

Trace Encounters by Bradford Paley, http://www.traceencounters.org/.

Familiar Strangers by Eric Paulos and ElizabethGoodman, http://berkeley.intel-research.net/paulos/research/familiarstranger.

Geograffiti, http://www.gpster.net/geograffiti.html.

GeoNotes, http://geonotes.sics.se/.

InterUrban by Jeff Knowlton, Naomi Spellman andJeremy Hight, http://interurban.34n118w.net/.

Blast Theory, http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/.

Mixed Reality Lab, http://www.mrl.nott.ac.uk/.

(area)code by Jen Southern and centrifugalforces,http://www.areacode.org.uk/.

[murmur], http://murmurtoronto.ca/.

Yellow Arrow, http://yellowarrow.org.

Urban Tapestries, http://urbantapestries.net/.

Mobile Bristol, http://www.mobilebristol.com.

.walk by Wilfried Houjebek, http://www.socialfiction.org/dotwalk/.

Radio Ballet by Radio Ligna, http://www.ok-centrum.at/english/ausstellungen/open_house/ligna.html.

Park Bench TV by Pete Gomes, http://www.mutant-film.com/parkbenchtv/.

stract mode of individuation results. Forlocative art to exceed the sterile precisionof its own axiomatic system, it needs toact upon or through material bodies andsubstances, engage in the ambiguity, dirt,sweat and smells of the world, and ac-knowledge “the importance of rain, hail,wind, pestilential air, or air polluted bynoxious particles, favourable conditionsfor these transports” [20]. Locative artscan then come to be seen not as dis-tanced from the world but as offering a potential for transformation and en-gagement, opening up other places, theircontents circulating through location-aware networks, producing a field of re-lations and affects.

References and Notes

1. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A ThousandPlateaus, Brian Massumi, trans., Minneapolis (Uni-versity of Minnesota Press, 1987) p. 316.

2. Chang and Goodman have argued that locationcan be viewed not as canvas but as medium (“AsphaltGames: Enacting Place through Locative Media,” inD. Hemment [ed.], Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Spe-cial Issue on Locative Media, 2006).

3. “Locative art” is here understood as those areas oflocative media that are predominantly arts-based.Much interesting work happens on the bound-ary, and this term is intended to contribute to dis-course on locative media, not to set up any kind ofopposition.

4. Location and context are central to the mobileand wireless experience. A wireless or mobile artmight also be concerned with, say, the potential ofinterfaces unfettered by wires and cables for per-formance or interaction.

5. In particular between the influential Karosta work-shop organized by RIXC in July 2003 and the MobileConnections exhibition at Futuresonic in May 2004.

6. The term “locative media” was coined by KarlisKalnins (Canada) in 2003.

7. Thanks to Ben Russell for his comments on theKarosta images.

8. PLAN workshop in October 2005, project docu-mentation, http://www.open-plan.org.

9. The issue is not the accuracy or granularity of thetechnical system employed. Most tracking systems areanything but precise, as the Karosta images illustrate.Different systems have different granularity or reso-lution, ranging from sensor networks (high) to cell-based location data from mobile phones (low), andthis will vary depending on the context: GPS, for ex-ample, is unreliable in built-up areas.

10. This view of an endless grid that extends acrossthe Earth found iconic form in Superstudio’s Con-tinuous Monument project (1969). More recently, An-drew Wilson from Blink has argued, “Wirelessness isnot a grid laid across the world. Wirelessness is clus-ters and gaps.” Ultrasound conference, 2004, http://www.ultrasound.ws/archive/2004/index.html.

11. Teri Rueb, http://www.terirueb.net/.

12. Lev Manovich, “Modern Surveillance Machines:Perspective, Radar, 3-D Computer Graphics, andComputer Vision,” in CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Sur-veillance from Bentham to Big Brother (ZKM, Karls-ruhe/The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts,2002) p. 386.

13. Pete Gomes, “Signage for Invisibility,” in MarcTuters and Rasa Smite, eds., Acoustic Space: Trans Cul-tural Mapping (Riga: The Center for New Media Cul-

354 Hemment, Locative Arts

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Hlemmur in C by Pall Thayer, http://130.208.220.190/hlemmC/.

Biomapping by Christian Nold, http://www.biomapping.net.

île Sans Fil (Wireless Island), http://www.ilesansfil.org.

Life: a User’s Manual by Michelle Teran, http://www.ubermatic.org/life/.

Web sites accessed December 2005.

(1995–present), Low Grade (2005), MobileConnections (2004), FutureDJ (2004), Turn-table Re:mix (2004), Migrations (2002–2003), Blacktronica (2002), Sensurround(2001–2002), BrokenChannel (2001) andSenseSonic (2000). Hemment was involvedin early U.K. electronic dance culture as a DJand event organizer. He completed an MA atthe University of Warwick and a Ph.D. at theUniversity of Lancaster.

Drew Hemment is Director of Future Every-thing, a nonprofit company responsible for Futuresonic International Festival; AHRC Re-search Fellow in Creative Technologies, Uni-versity of Salford; and Project Investigator in the Pervasive and Locative Arts Network(PLAN). He is currently working on the in-terdisciplinary arts-based research projectLoca: Location Oriented Critical Arts. Proj-ects include Loca (2003–present), Futuresonic

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Leonardo Celebrates Leonardo da VinciSpecial Section of Leonardo, 2007–2008

In celebration of Leonardo journal’s 40th anniversary, we are calling for essays related to Leonardo da Vinci and his concerns regarding the relationship between art and science. We are interested in submis-sions in which Leonardo’s own concerns serve as a springboard for looking toward the present. What,building upon Leonardo’s ways of thinking, can artists and scientists tell each other today? We also seekoriginal accounts of his visual art, of his achievements as a proto-scientist and of the relation between his concerns with science and with visual art.

Recommended length: 2,500–3,500 words.

Illustrations per essay: 5–8 black-and-white images; possibly one color image.

Prospective authors are encouraged to review the Leonardo Author Guidelines on the Web:www.leonardo.info. (Follow the links: Publications, Information for Authors, Leonardo Print Journals, Editorial and Illustration Guidelines.)

All papers will be peer-reviewed prior to acceptance for publication.

Submissions deadline: 15 January 2007.

Please send inquiries and submissions to Guest Editor David Carrier: <david.carrier@cwru.edu>.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Leonardo Journals and Books Available in Bookstores

Leonardo journals are available through subscription, but they can also be purchased in selected bookstores. Here is a partial list of bookstores that carry Leonardo and Leonardo Music Journal (LMJ).

If you are aware of a local bookstore that you think would be interested in carrying Leonardo, please send us contact information for the bookstore and we will have MIT Press follow up (send info to<isast@leonardo.info>).

Leonardo books and journals can be ordered on-line through <http://mitpress.mit.edu>. Leonardo Bookscan also be ordered through local bookstores or through on-line booksellers.

ANNOUNCEMENT TITLE

U.S. Bookstores (Leonardo):

Berkeley Art Museum Store2625 Durant Ave. Berkeley, CA 94720

The BookeryDewitt Mall215 N. Cayuga St.Ithaca, NY 14850

Builders Booksource1817 Fourth St.Berkeley, CA 94710

City Lights Bookstore261 Columbus Ave.San Francisco, CA 94133

Cody’s Books2 Stockton St.San Francisco, CA 94108

Eyebeam Bookstore540 W 21st St.New York, NY 10011

Franz Bader Gallery1911 Eye St. NWWashington, D.C. 20006

J & S Broadway News204 Broadway Ave. ESeattle, WA 98102

J & S Fremont News3416 Fremont Ave. NSeattle, WA 98103

Micawber Books114 Nassau St.Princeton, NJ 08542

MIT Press Bookstore292 Main St.Cambridge, MA 02142

News Express1803 Connecticut Ave.Washington, D.C. 20009

Newsland2112 Central SEAlbuquerque, NM 87106

Skylight Books1818 North VermontLos Angeles, CA 90027

St. Mark’s Bookshop31 Third Ave.New York, NY 10003

Stanford Bookstore Dist. Center8424 Central Ave.Newark, CA 94560

University of Minnesota Bookstores231 Pillsbury Dr., SEMinneapolis, MN 55455

Canadian Bookstores (Leonardo):

Librairie Olivieri5200 GatineauMontreal PQ H3T 1W9Canada

Other Non-U.S. Bookstores (Leonardo):

La Central Libreria del RavalElisabets, 608001 Barcelona Spain

Laie-CCCBMontalegre, 508001 BarcelonaSpain

Stichting V2 Institute Unstable Mediac/o Hans BeekmansEendrachtsstraat 103012 Xl RotterdamThe Netherlands

U.S. Bookstores (LMJ):

Cody’s Books2 Stockton St.San Francisco, CA 94108

Newsland2112 Central SEAlbuquerque, NM 87106

Yankee Book Peddler 999 Maple St. Contoocook, NH 03229

Non-U.S. Bookstores (LMJ):

Stichting V2 Institute Unstable Media PO Box 19049 3001 BA Rotterdam The Netherlands