Re: [-empyre-] LOCATIVE MEDIA WRKSHP: Dispatch from the borderlands...

Christina McPhee <christinamcphee@yahoo.com> · Wed, 23 Jul 2003 13:03:54 -0700 (PDT)

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--- nodus@sympatico.ca wrote:
> 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
> 
>
---------------------------------------------------------------------
> * 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
> 
>
---------------------------------------------------------------------
> * 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
> 
> Jaanis Garancs (LV)
> http://www.cellulae.net/flux/ (Cell[ular]Flux.
> Cellular Cities)
> http://www.cellulae.net/humans/
> ("MultiCultureMolecular 
=== message truncated ===

=====
<http://www.naxsmash.net>

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