Imagine traveling through an area you know nothing about, and being able to get information fed to your cell phone, or even the dashboard in your car. Imagine these features as standard as a car radio. I can imagine locative media becoming a mainstream feature in the future, as our mobile devices become increasingly advanced with integrated GPS systems.
In order for this to happen, we must examine the possible uses for this technology, as well as potential objections or reasons for disinterest. The usefulness must be both practical and interesting to a large majority, not just the tech savvy or media minded artist. With these technologies, the artist can benefit greatly from the advancement of the tools. There is a need for a large consumer interest in order to generate enough revenue to grow the technology effectively. With growth, the barriers between the artist and the technology will begin to break down. Software interfaces with GPS could improve accuracy, and the feature set of the software could be broadened. As the artist gains more control over the tools, the work produced will benefit greatly.
What kinds of features would need to be emphasized to get attention as a key feature for consumers? What objections could the general public have to the technology? What reasons would consumers have for being disinterested in the technology, and in what ways could the technology be made to become more interesting to the mass public?
Social Revolutions
In the article “Know Your Place – Headmap manifesto and the spatialised internet revolution”- http://www.sirc.org/articles/know_your_place.shtml -Elanor Taylor observes about the Headmap manifesto: “The Headmap manifesto is clearly not just a geeky vision of a future of 'doing cool stuff' with phones. The particular combination of a free wireless internet bandwidth with mobile, location-aware personal computers is seen not just as a technological innovation, but as a social one.”
We have already seen how social networking sites such as Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, etc., are forming the way people use the internet. The next phase of social networking brings these ideas into the real world using locative media. The Headmap manifesto tackles the topic of “social software and spatial interfaces”. For example, according to Headmap, people will be able to locate their ‘closest friend’. In fact there are already several applications on the iPhone which do just that. A search in the iTunes App Store will find applications such as, ‘Amigo Mapper’, and ‘Locate My Friends’, which display the location of friends on a map, updated live. Friends would have to register an account with the software and allow a set group of friends to see their location. Objections to using this software are mostly cultural. Why would I want everyone to know where I am at any given time? A few years ago, the idea of sharing updates about what you are doing would have raised similar objections. More and more, social networkers are updating their Facebook status or Twitter with such information. The cultural barriers of sharing information about current activities are dissolving as users of social networking sites grow accustomed to updating their status. Soon the same will become true for location services as well. Then the question will be, “Why wouldn’t you want friends to know where you are? Are you hiding something?” One could argue privacy concerns, but young people are already giving up privacy by sharing pictures and status updates on these social networking sites. As social culture becomes less concerned with privacy, sharing one’s current location becomes less objectionable as well.
Ubiquitous Internet
The cultural impact of a ubiquitous internet will change our relationship with place.
“Emerging out of a Do-It-Yourself punk culture, projects like the London-based "Consume the Net" sought to build a nation-wide peer-to-peer infrastructure of free wireless nodes throughout the United Kingdom. Similar grassroots projects helped catalyze communities of artists globally from Berlin to San Francisco. In suggesting that ubiquitous Internet access would change our relationship with place by overlaying a second virtual world over the physical one, the free wireless movement was a seminal source for locative media's ambitions.” - Beyond Locative Media by Marc Tuters and Kazys Varnelis - http://networkedpublics.org/locative_media/beyond_locative_media”
For many consumers, limitations of internet access confine the usage of these tools to home internet or hotspots. Even with these hotspots, most people don’t carry a laptop computer with them everywhere they go. Even as the internet becomes more available everywhere, accessing it presents yet another hurdle. This will be overcome as our personal devices, like cell phones, integrate internet access interfaces that are cheaper and easier to use. Screen size and clarity is increasing, and context sensitive touch screens make interfacing with the internet easier and more natural. Less interaction with the device itself using predictive software will make using the internet outside the computer workstation more inviting. The software interface could adjust to a user’s location, providing more relevant front access. For example, a person at a shopping mall could turn on the mobile internet browser in their personal device, and be presented with a list of shops in the mall. Selecting a store from the list would then provide more information about that store. If the same user leaves the mall and goes to the parking lot, the browser could automatically switch to a map with the location of their car displayed on the map.
Common Features
Locative tools are currently available as almost standard features in everyday devices such as cell phones, navigation systems in cars, etc. The primary interest in GPS features is for navigation. Most consumers understand the value of an accurate navigation system with a comprehensive map as a visual guide. This is the most obvious usage for GPS and widely accepted. Getting this type of technology into the hands of the masses opens up the possibilities for other uses such as geo-tagging, location based education or gaming, even localized advertising. One limitation the technology has is prohibitive cost. Navigation systems often cost hundreds of dollars, and many consumers don’t find them necessary enough to justify the extra expense. The good news is that these devices are getting cheeper and GPS is becoming more commonly integrated into smartphones, which are also getting cheeper. It’s only a matter of time before it’s a standard feature, as common as cameras are in cell phones today.
Relationship to the Aritst
The importance of consumer interest becomes relevant to the locative artist as the tools mature, providing more possibilities for works produced with the tools. Using open source tools such as Mscape is cumbersome to many artists, while highly refined software such as Photoshop, is becoming second nature. As consumer interest in locative media increases, commercial developers will build and improve locative media software. With software that is easier to use, the artist will be able to focus more on their work than on the tools. If the tools become more intuitive and more feature rich, they will begin to become second nature, freeing the artist to produce work without a thought as to how to get the tools to do what the artist wants. Having this freedom will encourage artistic processes beyond software limitations. As more features become available, and user interfaces become more intuitive, the artist will have to think less about how to use the tools and what is possible, so they will be able to focus more on what they want to show or say.
