OTOCRON

Despite the fact that the history of new media as they are adopted throughout technically and economically developed societies is fairly recent, this history has managed to create at least three distinguishable bodies of future visions that had sufficient mass appeal to make it into concretely percieved present.

Of course, specifically in the societal context of media en technology, envisioned futures follow each other up with an ever increasing speed. The funny thing is that the decay rate isn’t speeding up to the same extent. Once finance has found its way, and agenda’s, jobs and personal fates are committed, another time regime than that of the imagination takes over, and we get stuck with a severly mediated body of future visions for at least a couple of seasons.

So, that’s how we are currently living in at least three futures at the same time: Web2.0 is the warped but realised future vision of the early 80′ies hypertext believers, of the pre-dotcom and pre-www internet idealists for whom the net was to be the great democratising force - the means to spread all knowledge and power evenly.
Second Life is a beta version of an embodied future (rooted in the later 80′ies and early 90′ies) of the extropians, of the Californian Virtual Reality adepts that strove to leave the body behind and to upload consciousness into digital and (therefore) boundless realities.
And a third future - timebased in the second half of the 90′ies- that is being rolled out as we speak is that of RFID and GPS linked public data systems. It is the concretisation of the ubicomp dreams and the design ideology of ambient intelligence.

Web 2.0 and ubicomp’s currently embodied future seem to match rather well. RFID can in many relevant ways indeed be used as a social platform to exchange digital data related to places, objects and located people.
Second Life is a bit of an outsider in the currently realised futures - it seems to me the overarching idea of SL as a no-holds-barred place of the wildest imagination, only limited by a simple physics engine, and the amount of LindenDollars on your account, gets in the way of more interesting, more hybrid uses. But I’m not sure whether in the near future LindenLabs has some serious decision making to do, and possibly re-branding, or that it will be the users themselves who take SL in new directions (after all, SL is mainly what it’s user do with it).
Will SL grow into a tool for creative representation of First Life phenomena? A virtual office where everyone can talk to a pretty and helpful face instead of having to wait for an idiot phone robot to explain what number to dial to get offered the next set of possible problems into which your particular issue might fall? A YouTube cinema? - where you can meet friends and watch someones peculiar YouTube selection in a cosy virtual cinema, and chat about it, so you don’t have to watch alone.
A place where activists come together and wield political power by sheer number again? Blocking the entrances of virtual offices with their avatars to put pressure behind their demand for a pay rise?

So not all local projects are locative. A microtransmitter broadcasting some iPods’ playlist is not a locative media project. Unless that playlist would consist of field recordings done at other places, and broadcasted here with the intention to create some heightened or particular experience of the place we are. (- just making things up here, but probably such a project exists somewhere)

More problematic: the canonical
Familiar Stranger project would then not be a locative media project. Because the whole thing is not about location - it is about proximity! Yes, the projects informs your experience of places you share with strangers that are less strange then you knew or that become less strange over time - but the project is not centered around location at all. It is centered around the user of the application - wherever that user happens to be. I would say location is only a secondary informative context of the Familiar Stranger project. Familiar Stranger is a Proximity Media project, as are a lot of Bluetooth projects that run on phones.

The more physical space becomes an important informative layer or context in digital information, the less clear it becomes what the term locative media refers to.
In the least, it indicates a very broad set of projects, technical applications and practices. Too broad, for my taste. With the LocativeClub (a group of Amsterdam based practioners and theoretics of locative media) we have been trying to dissect the term locative media - to come up with useful ways to pinpoint it. We are still in the process, so it may turn out to be necessary to stick to an inclusive use, while being aware and clear about all the differentiations of the term.

If we knew better how excacty we can mean ‘locative’ - we would also be able to formulate more interesting critiques on so-called ‘locative’ projects. And we may come up with good ideas for next projects.

Criteria
The first and most obvious criteria we proposed for an appropriate use of the term locative media was: the primary informative context of a locative media project should be (a specific) location. We actually thought this should mean that a locative project can only really be accessed at the location itself.
A second criteria we came up with is that the content material of a locative project should be related to the location (allthough we agreed that this relation can be of very heterogeneous nature).
Implicitly, I think, we discussed the term from a user or participants perspective - so quite subjectively and pragmatically. So, we tried to describe what the script of a locative media project should include from the perspective of a user / participant.

(more later)

(Looking for the best way to get a tag cloud displayed at the top of the central column - also checking various three column layouts)

Hello world indeed. I’ll leave the css’ing for later, and will allow myself some trial and error when I’m at it. The first thing to do know would be to show you some footage of Oorbeek together with Bodies Anonymous, that was shot only yesterday at the BIMHuis in Amsterdam.

The occasion was the monthly Dance and Music Impro Lab. We (six members of the band Oorbeek and four dancers of Bodies Anonymous) played Oorbeeks game Oordeel - that probably best translates as Judgement. In this game you either play or you conduct. Conductors conduct the players, and can make them stop playing as well. They can also tell the other conducters to start playing. If a conducter tells you to stop playing, you automatically turn into a conductor. Conductors use a set of gestures to make their interventions understood. Obeying the rules is, of course, sacred. But they leave an interesting form of freedom within their structure.
A complete explanation and visual display of Oordeel’s gestures can be found at Oorbeek’s website . Do play Oordeel as much as you like, or play it by your own rules (it’s an open source game!) but please mention Oorbeek if you play it. And let us know if you have good ideas about new gestures (oorbeek [at] oorbeek [dot] net )
As it turned out, Oordeel was as effectively playable by dancers as by musicians.
What was very exciting about the show and its non-categorising approach to body movement and sonic behaviour (speaking from the perspective of a musician on stage) was how the spatial aspects of making music developed over the performance. During the show Oorbeek was somehow unpacked. Musicians started to intentionally move over the stage - location, coming together, spreading out, lining up, orientation, kneeling, etc. becoming almost architectural aspects of playing music. Using the space and choosing places, postures and directions became meaningful but it didn’t get narrative (OK, here and there it did) and that (I think) kept it very open for the audience to experience at their own leisure.