Reflecting on locative media art
with Fred Adam and Geert Vermeire
Mike Duggan and Cristina A. G. Kiminami
Locative media refers to mobile technologies that have the capacity to locate themselves and other media on maps using GPS, WI-FI and cellular technology. These commonly include GPS devices such as the Sat-Nav, the smartphone, and a whole range of smartphone applications including mapping apps, self-tracking fitness apps, food delivery apps and location-based games. This technology has been extensively used by artists over the past decade and more, looking to understand how our relationship to, and experience of, place can be augmented by digital technologies. We now have a wealth of knowledge and experience of how this technology shapes arts practice and how artists shape the use of this technology. And yet, there is still very little in the way of a public conversation about how artists came to use this technology and how it continues to shape their ways of working and thinking about the world.
In publishing the following edited interviews with two pioneers of locative media art, Fred Adam and Geert Vermeire, we aim to recognise their contributions to the field and to encourage and inspire readers to think about the possibilities of this media, and our reasons for using it. Locative media is nothing new, but as these conversations demonstrate, there is much left to think about how we might use it to explore questions of space, place, time, legacy, community, and ultimately what it means to live on the planet with others, both human and non-human, in the present, throughout history, and through deep time.
Our interest in publishing these interviews, which are best read as a pair, comes from working with them both on a research project exploring the possibilities of using locative media as an educational tool for understanding the locally-global issues of climate change, migration and mobility. For more information about this project please visit https://supercluster.eu/courses/earthlings/and https://cgeomap.eu/earthlings/
Authors
Cristina A. G. Kiminami
Cristina is a PhD candidate in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. She is an architect and urbanist, and her current research is on digital mediation relations with the users' perception of urban surroundings. Her Master's and Bachelor’s Degree are from Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2286-0346
Mike Duggan
Mike is a cultural geographer and Lecturer in Digital Culture, Society and Economy (Education) in the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. He has a PhD from Royal Holloway University of London, working in partnership with the Ordnance Survey on studying everyday digital mapping practices. His research is primarily interested in the tensions and contradictions that emerge when we examine how digital society and technology is theorised and how everyday life in a digital society is lived. He is currently studying how artistic interventions might counter the data collection practices of video conferencing platforms, and how locative media can be used to understand the locally-global issues of climate change, ecology and migration. He is the current editor-in-chief of the Livingmaps Review, a bi-annual journal for radical and critical cartography.
Website: www.mikeduggan.space
Twitter: @mikeduggan4
Acknowledgements
The research that led to these interviews was funded by a British Academy / Leverhulme Trust Small Study Grant (SRG1920\100813), and in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES) - Finance Code 001