What role do public spaces play in the “reputation economy”? How does your experience of a place change when you check only 1 star reviews on Google Maps?
Category Archive: locative
Dani Ploeger’s performance explores the tensions between the unavoidable barbarity of war and the increasingly sophisticated technologies that enable a greater distance (both physical and emotional) between combatants
If you click around Santamaria’s website and feel like you’re falling down the rabbit hole, that’s part of his plan. He wants you (and the data) to go to places where you’re not supposed to go
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The event attempted to re-frame the discussions around borders, looking at how borders are strengthened, shuffled and blurred by global phenomena such as climate disruptions, planetary-scale computation and international politics
Although the exhibition is small, it still manages to convey many of the mechanisms, discriminatory practices and possibilities for rebellion that shape the narrative of transnationalism
Maps and the 20th Century: Drawing the Line covers 100 years of maps, reminding us of all the traumas, cultural revolutions, social mutations and technological advances the world has gone through over the course of the 20th century. It’s been a fierce time and mapping technology has echoed and sometimes even shaped every moment of it.
social
Nearest Costco, Monument or Satellite is a networked sculpture that accurately points to the nearest Costco, monument or orbiting GPS satellite(s). As an artwork it explores how we form our sense of of place in the contemporary environment
Friction Atlas addresses the issue of legibility of public space, its programs, and the laws that regulate its uses. Many regulations discretize human behavior, tending to be algorithmic, quantitative and invisible. Friction Atlas aims to make regulations – that are always implicitly present in any public space – explicit and visible, through graphical devices
Forensic Oceanography critically investigates the militarised border regime in the Mediterranean Sea, mapping the liquid geographies of maritime jurisdictions in order to document the violence perpetrated against migrants at sea. By producing maps, visualisations, human right reports, videos, articles, exhibitions and websites, Forensic Oceanography interrogates this maritime sensorium in the attempt to challenge the regime of visibility imposed by surveillance means and become a tool in the struggle for freedom of movement
The work of Mishka Henner might evoke the one of Edward Burtynsky, Trevor Paglen, Omer Fast, Michael Wolf and Jon Rafman. Yet, comparing his work to the one of some of the artists i admire the most is pointless. Henner is his own man slash artist. He uses contemporary technology to give a new twist on artistic appropriation and redefines the role of the photographer, the meaning of the photography medium and the representation of the landscape. Without ever using a photo camera
Post Cyberwar proposes 3 methods to prepare for the time after a cyberwar: one is an open navigation system that uses seismic activity, the second one uses analogue television broadcasting to provide a wireless communication infrastructure and the last one would use London’s sewerage system to store data
La Cosa Radiactiva is a “research on transparency and nuclear secrets. A performance to demystify radiation while building awareness of its risks. An imagination exercise to reflect on how it would be like to live with radiation and above all this, a call about the importance of citizens having their own tools to be able to verify public health data provided by governmental authorities.”
The Art of Walking: a field guide is the first extensive survey of walking in contemporary art. Combining short texts on the subject with a variety of artists work, The Art of Walking provides a new way of looking at this everyday subject
OpenPositioningSystem aims to offer an alternative to the dominant global positioning systems or other navigation systems which are controlled by governments, network companies or in the case of GPS by the U.S. military. Developed in the same spirit as OpenStreetMap, OpenPositioningSystem would be open, accessible to anyone and collaboratively run by citizens.
Finally! An art & tech festival that makes sense. A festival that resonates with the media art expert and the casual passerby alike. An event that values art above in-your-face tech prowess. It was my first visit to an AND festival. I found it witty, surprising, often thought-provoking and enlightening
The nine eyes are the cameras mounted on the pole on top of each vehicle that Google sent around the world 5 years ago. The technology of Google Street View has sparkled moments of deep humiliation, interest from the press photography community, privacy concerns and brilliant artistic reactions.
Jon Rafman was one of the first artists who spent hours looking at the images collected by the cars and searching not just for the amusing, the ridiculous and the fortuitous but for postcard perfect moments. And does he have an eye for stunning images…
The Cold Coast Archive project investigates and explores human beings’ efforts to preserve civilization and defy the inevitability of its demise. We look at the vault as a whole: its practical, political, historical and symbolic structure, its arctic location, as well as its infrastructure and cultural nuances, with all the research concentrated at this site, as a backdrop to explore the human relationship to time between now and eternity
The lack of Corporate and Governmental transparency has been a topic of much controversy in recent years, yet our only tool for encouraging greater openness is the slow, tedious process of policy reform.
Presented in the form of a Soviet F1 Hand Grenade, the Transparency Grenade is an iconic cure for these frustrations, making the process of leaking information from closed meetings as easy as pulling a pin
To get a sense of the true vastness of the Solar System, you are invited to follow its walkable scale model. Along one of Britain’s most longest Roman roads, local shopkeepers at the appropriate points on the route are acting as guardians to the planets – hosting models represented by everyday objects, at their correct sizes on this 3.1 km scale
The project explores the difference between the virtual freedoms experienced by a population and the physical constraints imposed upon it by the urban environment. It explores the effects of new technologies of urban sight and urban occupation on the social and political structure of a city. The resultant proposition is a series of physical interventions that subvert the urban landscape through its digital counterparts
Artists play with both the material and the content of the map. Paper plans are all over the book but so are maps made of artist’s hair, drawn on the body, printed onto the sand or turned into large-scale installations. Some maps have a clear activist, political agenda, others are infused with mental visions, covered with alien-abduction sites, etc
Or how an exhibition i disliked gave me the opportunity to interview an artist whose work i’ve been admiring ever since i started the blog
Together with the inhabitants of Sampsonia Way in Pittsburgh, two artists staged collective performances and actions on the day the Google Car drove through the neighbourhood: a 17th-century sword fight, a dramatic escape using bedlinen, a parade with a brass band and majorettes. These actions now form part of the digital maps of Sampsonia Way made available online by Google Maps
A photo of a secret CIA prison. A map designed to help visitors reach Malibu’s notoriously inaccessible public beaches. Guidebooks to factories, prisons, and power plants in upstate New York. These are some of the more than one hundred projects represented in Experimental Geography, a collection of visual research and mapmaking from the past ten years
There is No Road consists of a range of artists’ projects that record or evoke a series of actual or imaginary journeys, either through the local landscape of Asturias, or through a comparably remote and mountainous terrain
The work of artists, designers and activists like Lize Mogel, John Emerson and Brooke Singer demonstrate that maps have the potential to bring about social changes
Gosh! Was it hot that day! That didn’t prevent Lucas to hide inside a cabinet waiting for passersby to roll him home, Jenny walked around in black jacket monitoring wifi signals and Gerry morsed around the neighbourhood
The workshop was great and extremely insightful. The least one could say about my contribution to this PDF document is that is extremely minimal but the rest is well worth your sunny afternoon my friends
Part of the pharmaceuticals, chemicals and food we ingest eventually end up in waste water. As treatment plants haven’t been designed to filter them, the content of our medicine cabinets are eventually passed into the water supply. In London, tap water comes from surface water which implies that traces of our medicine can end up in our drinking water. This results in local differences in tap water which reveals potential local city-body ecologies or biotopes
An augmented reality device to visualize nodes of free access to wi-fi networks in the city but also the intimate links existing between urban space and virtual communication connections
also serve as the conceptual base for the interactive installation titled
Wooden boxes that deliver Situation(ist) quotes, order you to bring them to their friends upstairs within 30 seconds, and treat you like delinquents or servants
10 maps and 10 essays about social issues from globalization to garbage; surveillance to extraordinary rendition; statelessness to visibility; deportation to migration
The uses of satellite technologies that emerge from state-sponsored espionage but also media art & activism
Under its motto CONSPIRE…, transmediale.08 seeked to examine dubious worlds of story telling and remote opinion making, to look critically at the means of creative conspiratorial strategies, and use these to uncover new forms of expression and digital discourse.
A conversation with hackitectura.net about new ways of using “situation rooms” to empower the action of social networks, rather than central powers. “How could situation rooms enhance distributed control? How could they be used to generate socially useful knowledge and to increase coordination between social movements?”
What can a map of London made of urine samples and postcodes teach us about the way we will interact with each other and our environment in the near future?
A data visualization project which expresses the meaning and extent of the damage that car traffic is doing to both the city of Madrid and its inhabitants
Constraint City – The Pain of Everyday Life lets you literally, feel this pain of information society. The […]
Jean-Baptiste Labrune recently pointed me to this excellent overview of “Walking as art.” Here’s a new project to […]
Just back from Dislocate 07, a great little exhibition in two venues around Tokyo and a two-day symposium […]