Hi, this is my first post,

I'm a Canadian currently living in a semi-nomadic state in Latvia,
helping-out at the RIXC Media Centre, getting ready for the RAM 5
workshop, which might be of interest to some of you
<http://www.rixc.lv/ram/>.

I've been involved in this location-awareness "mappy" wireless stuff
for about three years now, collaborating on some projects like GPSter
(2001), a database for GPS waypoints that has a wireless client, which
let you leave sounds and images and see them wherever they were left
(it was like that Urban Tapestries project in London that some of you
might be familiar with.)

My interest in "locative media" has been less about making
location-based wireless art, I guess, that theorizing the emergence of
this "geospatial web" (i.e. "won't it be great when we can all access
messages left in space and get a sense of the shared digital/spatial
history of a place?")

The problem with that angle on locative media is basically this: until
enough people get these "locative" devices --assuming that even ever
happens, and assuming that we even want that to happen- there will
never be an accumulation of enough "geo-annotations" to make accessing
the "geospatial web" a compelling experience.

This seemed like a big problem to me, until I realized that, as usual I
was just out of my depth.

"Locative media" is a new term in media art (I know this because I was
there when it was invented by my colleage Karlis Kalnins when we were
brainstorming project ideas and trying to reverse engineer the acronym
"WiFiLM" to describe a project for distributing location-based films
over WiFi: WiFi Locative Media --Pete Gomes did this and called
Parkbench TV)... but the "geospatial web" angle of locative media is
not new, it's the domain of geographers, who, for years, have been
collecting digital data (often with taxpayers moneys).

The problem with digital geographic data (and GIS software systems) is
that for one they are heavy and moreover they are trapped in the ivory
tower of geography departments and GIS companies, with many of the
datasets being either prohibitously expensive to access (this is often
the case in the UK), or else the software licenses cost a fortune.

So what, what i'm interested in these days is coming up with ways to
transfer the knowledge from the domain of digital geography to locative
media.

I think that a project that did so would be doing more than simply art
(not that art is simple or that it isn't enough on it's own), but such
an initative would really also be doing foundational work, at least at
a tech-dev level, for establishing a kind of collobrative commons for
locative knowledge, something that I think would come closer to a
public space for the 21st C than all the National Lottery funded art
galleries and other weird public spaces that city councils seem to
think is the best way to spend public money.

And that is my two cents to the crumb list.

Oh, btw, you're all welcome to present any ideas you have in this area
at the Futuresonic Locative Media workshop in a few weeks, so I hope to
see you there.

cheers,



Marc Tuters