Locative Media?
I have done the first half of my residency in the Banff New Media Institute working with Locative media. It has been an amazing experience so far, and like many of the times when your days are packed with excitement and new things, your perception of the time passed changes and a week feels more like several months, your memories of the world outside of this place start to fade. This is one of those cases. I am surrounded by people who are brilliant and have a lot to teach me. I will write a little about them later but first thing first. By now you are probably wondering what is locative media?
And just to assure you, this is a question that we (me and the other 10 people doing the residency) try to answer about 20 times a day, and usually feel weird explaining. It feel a bit like the kids that could never explain to their relatives at the Christmas table what they really do. Everyday, at lunch, at a communal dinner, or at a party we find ourselves explaining locative media. The explanations vary and we realized we all give a different one. Which is perhaps the beauty and the confusion of this media. The explanation I found in Wikipedia is.
‘Locative media are media of communication bound to a location. They are digital media applied to real places and thus triggering real social interactions. While mobile technologies such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), laptop computers and mobile phones enable locative media, they are not the goal for the development of projects in this field.’
After this wonderfully broad description you might understand why we have trouble describing what we do here.
Basically, place is not really just a geographical location, while a place could be described as longitude and latitude, it is a much more layered and complex phenomena. Each one of us has an intimate connection to a place and each place has stories, cultures and histories attached to it. While we don’t see this overlayed stories they are intrinsic to the way we connect to a place.
Locative media often overlays the stories and experiences about a specific place with the place itself. Imagine being in a boat in a dammed lake. While you are cruising in the boat, imagine listening to the stories of old timers who lived in the land that got flooded, on your multimedia player. The stories tell us of the life in the villages that are still beneath you, but under the water. You start understanding the layers that exist in that space way beyond what you can perceive or see. Creating media (in this case audio) like that, is an example of a locative media project.
I am working on some more blog posts that show our advetures in a locative media fascion, so keep tunning in.