[spectre] LOCATIVE MEDIA WSHP [01] Dispatch from the borderlands...

Thu Jul 24 22:22:53 CEST 2003

LOCATIVE MEDIA WORKSHOP
July 16-26, 2003, K at 2, Karosta, LV | Longitude 21.00, Latitude 56.55

* REPORT [23-07-03]: Dispatch from the borderlands...

At the K at 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 at 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 at 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
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.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
http://locative.x-i.net/
---------------------------------------------------------------------