Hello All,

Thank you for the invitation to put in my two cents this month. Many
of you will know me from my time directing the Videonale Bonn and the
Edith Russ Site for Media Art until I left Germany in 2004. I’ve been
in Indiana ever since, mentoring students and conducting research at
Purdue University, curating and writing about a host of different
projects – some more and some less New Media.

CRUMB asks this month how located are we with our bags full of located
media, and I have to answer that the more locative media I’ve got, the
less located I feel. Let me offer two examples:

1) While driving to Walter de Maria’s “The Lightning Field,” my
car-mate couldn’t help checking her smart phone every few minutes to
see if we were on track to this remote location, swerving slightly off
the road each time she looked down. The gist of the driving
instructions were: “Follow the road straight ahead for two hours, then
turn right.” I kept saying: “Well, the sun is over there, so this road
is still going south.” On a desert road in New Mexico, I felt
comfortably located while she was somehow lost as an advancing blip on
a screen.

2) In an 8-person meeting I attended last week, those checking their
devices for facts were intermittently lost to the conversation, ceding
leadership of the discussion to those making eye contact at the table
and staying on topic. This says much about the location of
consciousness and where people get their work done.

My work is accomplished where I am able to locate conscious thought. I
draw information out of the Internet and locative systems in order to
serve what is going on at that center, but if I lose myself out in
digital networks another type of connection is lost.

Of course, work today is located both inside and outside digital networks:

Example 3) A compendium of graphic novels about true stories of cancer
in my geographic community of Lafayette, Indiana will be located in
cyberspace as an ebook. It was also a work-on-paper gallery exhibition
and will be printed as a paperback. For this, local stories were
gathered online, advertised at small-town cancer fundraisers and
support groups. Simultaneously, I created a local network of artists
and script writers by seeking them out at comic conventions and
symposia, street fairs, through recommendations and studio visits. We
met regularly as a work group in coffee shops and at people’s houses;
sometimes individually at my university office. The meetings were
expanded in online groups and docs as well as a steady stream of
emails. Both parts of this project – process and product – continually
pass back and forth through digital gateways and wooden doors.

Does it matter that we were bound by a geographic location? Yes,
because that is where this group’s sense of itself as a community
resides – sharing schools, health centers, music venues, comic book
stores and Main Street. We also share social networking sites, which
connect us to each other and the rest of our “friends” in the world.

Digitally networked technologies are invaluable as gateways for
locating, gathering and disseminating information, but they can also
be over-valued. I need to re-value my actions at home – that centered
space where consciousness resides – because we connect to others from
here to create something meaningful. In my case, this makes me FEEL
located and comfortable as more than a dot on a network.

Cheers,
Rosanne