[-empyre-] LOCATIVE MEDIA WRKSHP: Dispatch from the borderlands...
LOCATIVE MEDIA WORKSHOP
July 16-26, 2003, K@2, Karosta, LV | Longitude 21.00, Latitude 56.55
* REPORT [23-07-03]: Dispatch from the borderlands...
At the K@2 Culture and Information Centre, located on an abandoned military installation in
Liepaja on the coast of the Baltic Sea, the Locative Media Workshop has brought together an
international group of artists and researchers interested in notions of mobile geography.
Participants have been discussing how to develop tools for expressing media spatially in order
to create collaborative mapping tools with which to explore issues of memory and of place.
Inexpensive receivers for global positioning satellites have given amateurs the means to
produce their own cartographic information with military precision. This user-generated
cartographic data has recently begun to be shared in a variety of networking
machine-searchable environments, which is enabling the development of an 'open source' data
pool of human geography. With the arrival of portable, location-aware networked computing
devices this "collaborative cartography" will permit users to map their physical environments
with geo-annotated, digital data. As opposed to the World Wide Web the focus here is
spatially localized, and centred on the individual user; a collaborative cartography of space and
mind, places and the connections between them.
The workshop split into a technical team and a content team. Jo Walsh proposed a semantic
web location model constituting an RDF map of physical spaces and the connections between
them. In collaboration with Andrew Paterson, a flexible model was developed to provide
participants with a framework for their media annotations of the physical environment that
includes fields for spatio-temporal as well as subjective elements to suggest an open model for
further locative media projects. The workshop also utilized real-time mobile networking
devices, location aware through GPS (courtesy of the Waag Society), for tracing the
movements in real time, the visualization of which was created by Pall Thayer in flash, inspired
by the Waag Society's KeyWorx software and a .php script created by Jaanis Putrams.
In terms of content generation, the objective was to create an online map interface by which
the local public could access and author the geo-annotated space of Karosta. In the first days
Carl Biorsmark and Kristine Briede recounted local stories that were woven together in
conceptual framework of local sites, sounds and stories as interpreted by a collection of
international participants, including: Ben Russell, Mari Keski-Korsu, Cheryl L'Hirondelle, Pete
Gomes, Gabriel Lopez Shaw, Signe Pucena, Voldemars Johansons, Mika Meskanen and
Andrew Paterson. Teams conceived of metaphors for expressing media spatially and, guided
by local residents, ventured throughout Karosta collecting media samples of the environment
and creating annotations with GPS receivers. The teams also conducted a variety of mapping
experiments from an analogue tagging system based on traditional Latvian patterns to a game
of tag via Bluetooth. All the while, a second group --Esther Polak, Ieva Auzina and Zaiga
Putrama located in the East Latvian province of Latgale have been using mapping techniques to
visualize the rural landscape and disappearing farming practices.
Bringing together a diverse set of perspectives, the workshop's objective is to initiate work on
a series of goals including:
-developing tactics and methodologies for locative media practice.
-exploring and prototyping interface metaphors.
-articulating a flexible standard for collaborative geo-annotation projects
-creating geo-annotated content as part of an open cartographic database of Karosta
-designing a wireless client application to exchange files with this
database over "picture phones" (Java and Bluetooth enabled)
-producing documents that detail the impact of locative media on the
creative process
-generating ideas for the thematic structure of future RIXC organized events, for which the
events list-serve (locative@x-i.net) will be maintained and opened to those who are interested
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* ABOUT THE LOCATION *
Karosta, Latvian for 'war port', was built by order of the Russian Tzar
Alexander III as a military port in the Baltic region. After the Soviet occupation of Latvia,
Karosta became a military base housing some 25,000 and was closed to civilians by a fortress
wall was build all around the whole city. The Soviet army evacuated Karosta in 1994,
following Latvian independence, leaving behind some 6000 people. Mostly Russian speaking,
the stateless citizens of Karosta either carry Latvian issued so-called 'alien' passports, or old
Soviet ones. Today the town appears to be a landscape of ruins. Many houses are completely
destroyed, and the town is plagued by mass unemployment. After and experience setting-up
arts workshops there, documentary film-makers Kristine Briede & Carl Biorsmark began
making a film on Karosta and subsequently decided to step through the screen to "become
documentary social workers" with the inauguration of the K@2 Culture and Information
Centre in December 2000.
http://www.karosta.org
http://www.karosta.lv
http://www.borderland.tv/main.html
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* PARTICIPANTS and RELATED locative media LINKS *
Locative Media Workshop
http://locative.x-i.net/
Janis Putrams (LV)
http://www.camp.lv/~janis/realtime/pic2.php?date=&scale=2.3&offset_y=22.2&offset_x=189
(real time map of Karosta - ongoing - part of Locative Media project)
http://www.camp.lv/~janis/realtime/pic2.php?date=&scale=0.28&offset_y=58.6&offset_x=-190.4
(Rural Real Time - farmer path in Latgale- ongoing - part of
Locative Media project)
Esther Polak (NL)
http://www.waag.org/realtime/ (Real Time Amsterdam, co-project with Waag Society)
http://www.rixc.lv/03/realtime.html (Real Time Riga, co-produced with Waag Society &
RIXC, for Art+Communication 2003)
Ieva Auzina (LV)
http://locative.x-i.net/archive/2003-July/000058.html (proposal for Rural Real Time -
co-project with Esther Polak & RIXC)
Marc Tuters (CA)
http://www.gpster.net
http://www.impakt.nl/online/box/songlines/utrecht.html (real-time, wireless geo-annotation
project in and about Utrecht)
Raitis Smits (LV)
Rasa Smite (LV)
http://rixc.lv/03
http://locative.x-i.net/archive/2003-July/000084.html
Jo Walsh (UK)
http://space.frot.org/ (collaborative mapping on the semantic web)
http://locative.x-i.net/archive/2003-July/000094.html (introduction, and more projects)
Ben Russell (UK)
http://www.headmap.org (location aware devices - know your place)
Honor Harger (UK, NZ)
Adam Hyde (UK, NZ)
http://www.radioqualia.net/real/frame.html (Locative Media : declassified satellite images / The
Wireless Tuner)
Kate Rich (AU, UK)
http://uphone.org/ (an experimental utility immediate sound archiving phone to web)
Andrew Paterson (UK, FI)
http://www.mlab.uiah.fi/~apaterso
http://aware.uiah.fi
Jaanis Garancs (LV)
http://www.cellulae.net/flux/ (Cell[ular]Flux. Cellular Cities)
http://www.cellulae.net/humans/ ("MultiCultureMolecular Humans", Society as a
MultiCultureMolecular Virus Epidemy)
Pete Gomes (UK)
http://www.mutantfilm.com/wireless/
Mari Keski-Korsu (FI)
http://www.katastro.fi/~mkk/expand
Mika Meskanen (FI)
http://koti.org/mesq/
http://www.amfibio.org/
Cheryl L'Hirondelle (CN)
http://ndnnrkey.net/climbing/
Gabriel Lopez Shaw (US)
http://www.rockmediafellows.org/content.php?section=artists&sub=artist_detai
l&fellowID=627
Pall Thayer (IS)
http://www.this.is/pallit
http://130.208.220.190/panse/ (an open platform for the development of
audio-visual netart)
Zita Joyce (NZ)
Adam Willetts (NZ)
Kristin Bergaust (NO)
Daina Silina (LV)
Linda Zemite (LV)
Signe Pucena (RIXC, LV)
Voldomars Johansons (LV)
Zaiga Putrama (LV)
Normunds Kozlovs (LV)
and others.
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http://locative.x-i.net/
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