Locative Media Summer Conference
at the Research Center "Media Upheavals"

September 3-5, 2007

University of Siegen, Germany

"Everything is related to everything else, but closer things are more
closely related"
(Waldo Tobler's First Law of Geography, 1970)

Nowadays everything in the media world gets tracked, tagged and mapped.
Cell phones become location-aware, computer games move outside, the web is
tagged with geospatial information, and geobrowsers like Google Earth are
thought of as an entirely new genre of media. Spatial representations have
been inflected by electronic technologies (radar, sonar, GPS, WLAN,
Bluetooth, RFID etc.) traditionally used in mapping, navigation,
wayfinding, or location and proximity sensing. We are seeing the rise of a
new generation that is "location-aware". This generation is becoming
familiar with the fact that wherever we are on the planet corresponds with
a latitude/longitude coordinate.

The term "Locative Media", initially coined in 2003 by Karlis Kalnins and
the 2006 topic of a special issue of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac, seems
to be appropriate for digital media applying to real places, communication
media bound to a location and thus triggering real social interactions.
Locative Media works on locations and yet many of its applications are
still location- independent in a technical sense. As in the case of digital
media, where the medium itself is not digital but the content is digital,
in Locative Media the medium itself might not be location-oriented,
whereas the content is location-oriented. Can Locative Media like digital
media thus be understood as an upheaval in the media evolution? This is one
question we want to discuss at the Locative Media Summer Conference in
Germany.

Locative Media can now be categorized under one of two types of mapping,
either annotative (virtually tagging the world) or phenomenological
(tracing the action of the subject in the world). Where annotative projects
seek to demystify (see all the Google Earth Hacks), tracing-based projects
typically seek to use high technology methods to stimulate dying everyday
practices such as walking or occupying public space. The Japanese mobile
phone culture, in particular, embraces location-dependent information and
context- awareness. It is thus projected that in the near future Locative
Media will emerge as the third great wave of modern digital technology. The
combination of mobile devices with positioning technologies is opening up a
manifold of different ways in which geographical space can be encountered
and drawn. It thereby presents a frame through which a wide range of
spatial practices that have emerged since Walter Benjamin¹s urban flaneur
may be looked at anew. Or are Locative Media only a new site for old
discussions about the relationship of consciousness to place and other
people? In the early days of sea travel, it was only the navigator who held
such awareness of his exact position on Earth. What would it mean for us to
have as accurate an awareness of space as we have of time? In the same way
that clocks and watches tell us the exact second, portable GPS devices help
us pinpoint our exact location on Earth.

As we dig a bit deeper into how particular Locative Media projects
negotiate local and global spaces, we see the increasing "technologisation"
and commodification of urban and public spaces. Are Locative Media the
avant-garde of the "society of control"? If this kind of media practice
resides in pure code (tracklogs), what is the difference between Locative
Media and software development? Or is the recent rise of Locative Media
just a response to the disappearance of net art?

In reaching beyond art, many of us are becoming familiar with GPS units,
such as navigation systems. GPS technologies now appear in mobile,
location-aware computing games such as "Mogi" or "Tiger Telematics
Gizmondo" which utilize GPS to enable players to see each other's
locations. Most of the location-based games nowadays seem to emphasize
collecting, trading and meeting over combat. Does this indicate a social
trend in mobile entertainment? Do Locative Media generate more accessible
than aggressive play plots? Can we say that the numerous distributed
geotagging projects (Flickr, Geocaching etc.) unleashed have given rise to
a new genre of collaborative "geocommunities"? Could these geolocated
spatio-temporal web portals become a dynamic visualization matrix for all
scales, from nano to astro, and incorporate interoperability standards for
the biological sciences, the geosciences, history, economics, and other
social sciences? And finally, are Locative Media a kind of manifestation of
what Bruno Latour means by the "Internet of Things "? By geotagging
objects instead of people, and having these objects tell us their stories,
do we create what Jean-Jacques Rousseau called for, an awareness of the
genealogy of an object as it is embedded in the matrix of its production?

This summer conference will attempt to give an overview of actual research
on this topic, especially focusing on how Locative Media tackle social and
political contexts of production by focusing on social networking, access
and participatory media content including story-telling and spatial
annotation. Participants from all relevant disciplines are invited,
especially researchers in social science, IT design, urban, media and
cultural studies. Project demonstrations are warmly encouraged, but the
main objective is to move beyond presentation and to build conceptual and
theoretical links and exchanges between disciplines. This kind of
conference is meant a forum for the presentation of papers, further
discussion, collective reading work and as a preliminary step for the
publication of an edited volume in 2008.

Invited and confirmed speakers:
Prof. Dr. Lev Manovich, University of California, San Diego (USA)
Prof. Dr. Stephen Graham, University of Durham (GB), Department of
Geography
Dr. Miya Yoshida, Malmö Art Academy, Lund University (S)
Dr. Adrian Mackenzie, Lancaster University (GB)

How to participate:
Submissions should include 1) Title, 2) 500-word abstract 3) Selected
bibliography and 4) 200-word CV for the presenter. These should be sent to
thielmannfk615.uni-siegen.de as pdf or doc attachments by May 15, 2007.
Notification of acceptance will be provided two weeks later so as to allow
adequate to make travel arrangements. Full papers for publication are due on
December 31, 2007.

For further information contact Tristan Thielmann:
thielmannfk615.uni-siegen.de. The summer conference is organised by the
research group "Media Topographies" of the Collaborative Research Center
"Media Upheavals", University Siegen, Am Eichenhang 50, 57076 Siegen,
Germany.