locative media
- peninsula voices
- our house
- a description of this place as if you were someone else
- plan b locative media projects
My
work with
locative media has almost exclusively involved sound-scapes (although
I have worked with images too: see Our House), that
are related to and, more importantly for me, triggered by location.
My experience with this medium started in 2004 when I received a research commission from the Arnolfini and Mobile Bristol, a research group formed by Hewlett Packard Labs and the University of Bristol. Mobile Bristol developed software that enables you to quickly attach behaviour to location so that when you enter a certain location with hand held computers attached to a GPS for location, audio or visual content is delivered to you.
peninsula voices
Our largest locative media project to date. After 16 hours of interviews, we have produced a project that encompasses most of the Greenwich Peninsula. If you were to listen to all the audio files back to back, it would take 4 hours >>more
our house
Our House projects the 1930s semi-detached house I grew up in onto another larger building, as if a ghost house from a different dimension co-existed within its walls. The spectator doesn’t just encounter the house as it stands today, but the layers the house contains, old family photographs of different generations squinting into the sun outside the front door, the voices of my parents remembering what the house was like from their childhoods. Using location-aware technology, the spectator moves round another public building inside which 'Our House' has been projected, exploring the layers of memory and wallpaper... >>more
A description of this place as if you were someone else
The project we made as a result of this first locative media commission came directly out of concerns, featured in Unfallen, of the city as mnemonic. I am fascinated by the idea that every street corner carries countless memories for those who have lived there or passed through and see locative media as a way of accessing those stories in the context that prompts them. This is a kind of dream to make a city talk to you and (give up) those stories you usually only hear after some time being there.
Making this dream of peeling back the layers of a city had to be made possible and so we took a natrually bounded area of Bristol, Queen Square, and concentrated on finding stories and memories that happened there. We were most interested in specific location, i.e. stories that start "This is the bench where... " or "You see that statue...?" and went about recording these from people that we knew that worked in or were associated with the Arnolfini Art Centre. This approach, rather than attempting to gather stories from a wider public was necessitated by the limited time we had to understand and test the equipment, the software and edit the material.
During this research project we also experimented with giving the user visual clues on the display of the hand-helds (iPAQs). This was an attempt to make the choice of location clearer and improving the specificity of the project as GPS is still too inaccurate to provide the sort of fine locational detail that we were interested in. A rough location of a 10 metre diameter circle is the average you can expect of a GPS and we were interested in one end of a park bench as opposed to the other.
locative projects as plan b
Stimmen über Berlin As
well as projects led primarily by Dan, we have also made locative projects
using the Mobile Bristol editor as plan b. The first of this was Stimmen über
Berlin which took place on Alexanderplatz in June 2005
>> continue