Field-work@Alsace 2002-03

Field_work@Alsace 2002-3
Field_work@Alsace 2002-3
 3000~4000
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1100
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2200~
3124

4000~5000
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Passive Stereo scopic Proection
Using special Rear Projection Screen Field_Work@Alsace 2002
150 inch diagonal (Stewart FILM-150) Masaki Fujihata produced with ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany
July 2007 M.F.
 Time space interface using DV(digital video)
and GPS(Global Positioning System) technology
-A study with an art project
”Field-Work@Alsace”-

Masaki Fujihata

Department of Inter Media Art, Fine Arts,

Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music
5000 Komonma, Toride, Ibaragi, Japan
[email protected]
WWW home page: http://www.fujihata.jp,
http://www.ima.fa.geidai.ac.jp/ masaki

Abstract. This paper is summarizing a media art project from the artis-
tic idea to technological realization, and tried to conclude the important
aspects of media art from both side. Auther is an artist had been work-
ing as a pioneer in this area from computer graphics in early eighties
until interactive media art. The project ”field-works@Alsace” is a truly
successful example in a context of ”Interactive Cinema.” Especially with
the CAVE environment, its 3 dimensional space made possible to tactile
the content of the piece very well. Originally it was not planned to use
the CAVE, but the CAVE is the ultimate system for this project.

1 Preface
As a media artist, media technology is a tool to create a new medium, which
enables to realize an artistic vision into real production. The following exam-
ple, ”Field-work@Alsace” is the actual art project which was co-produced with
ZKM(Center for Art and Media Technology), Karlsruhe, Germany and myself.
Within the artistic side, the aim of this project is collecting people’s voice who
is living near the border between Germany and France by the video interview
with GPS. Technical aspect of this project is a sensor fusion of positioning and
orientation (directional) data with moving images. By establishing this fusion,
at the final image at the CAVE [1, 2, 3] screen, the video image is projected on
the virtual screen at the place where the image was shot and is moving according
to the movement of the camera, which can create an illusion, for example, as
far as the screen moves tilt or pitch the horizontal line in the video image is not
moving at the center as it is.

2 Location and Image

The fundamental idea for this series of project titled ”Field-Works” is com-
bine two different information, the position data and video images into one
Fig. 1. “Miage no Fuji” Katsushika Hokusai, wood block printing The height of the
Mt.Fuji is about 1.7 times higher than the real.

cyberspace. In 1992, I experimented with GPS (Global Positioning system) for

recording the series of position data, longitude, latitude and altitude while I was
climbing up the Mt. Fuji that is the highest mountain in Japan. The original idea
for collecting GPS data was to deform the shape of Mt.Fuji to fit the impres-
sion of climber. ”Deformation” is one of the traditional methods for paintings.
In history, Mt. Fuji had been deformed many times by many famous painters
and wood block printing maker in the past. (See. Hokusai’s famous Mt. Fuji
picture (Fig.1) ) After the real experience of climbing the Mt. Fuji, the resulting
image (Fig.2) is made and is showing an exploded shape of Mt.Fuji which was
deformed by my slowness for climbing up that is caused by tiredness of my foot.
This exploded shape was made by scaling the section of each altitude according
to my speed of that altitude; speed was calculated from GPS data.
At the same time, I also recorded whole sequences with video-camcorder,
Sony Hi-8 at that time. For the show in 1994, the special archiving software
was programmed for locating video images to the GPS data. (Programmed by
Nobuya Suzuki with the workstation.) It is a good example that is showing a
new way of handling video sequences with its location. Location can be used as a
tag for searching a video sequence. Each yellow tag on the 3D GPS line that can
be clicked by mouse is designed for activating the movie on the desktop window.
(See Desktop image from Irix workstation (Fig.3))
After the year 1994 I had been stopped to continue this project, from the
year 2000 I started again the similar project titled ”Field-Works”. The year 2000
is a mark able year in the field of GPS, because president Clinton stopped the
scramble from consumer use signal of GPS from 2nd of May, which gives us
completely same accuracy with military use the accuracy is plus minus 5m.
Fig. 2. “Impressing Velocity” 1992-94 Masaki Fujihata Resulting; image deformed
shape was made with the climbing up data.

3 Starting Field-works project [4]

After two years experimental projects realization from the year 2000, I started
new project that targeted the border between Germany and France, for the com-
ing exhibition ”Future Cinema” which would be organized by ZKM in 2002 [5].
The border exists an abstract conception, but once it is activated it changes the
status and is possible to kill people. However the border line is not visible in
real location even visible on the map, the idea for the project was coming to my
mind the border can be visualize by tracing with my foot and GPS. Of course
these GPS lines can contain video sequences of the interviews with local living
people near the border.
I targeted the area called Alsace. Strasburg is the main capital of this region
and now is famous for the center for the European Union. Alsace is not France
and not Germany; even the political situation of this area had been changed to
French or to German several times. Still they are independent from others and
still some of them can speak their own language ”Alsacisch.” In this area, we
can here German speaking, French speaking, and Alsacisch speaking which can
make a border between different languages, but in real most of the living people
can speak all of them. It’s a multi-lingual situation and for the people who can
speak three languages the border is meaningless, it is internationally borderless.
The real border is more complex.
Fig. 3. ”Impressing Velocity” 1992-94 Masaki Fujihata Computer display capture im-
age; jamming of lines are the GPS data and yellow tiny vertical lines are the hot spots
for the movie.

One clear border I found while in the process of the project is IT border.
Each mobile phone company should account the transactions when the route
was changed at the border that reflects the charge. Once you cross the border
from Germany to France, at the each time the mobile is annoying with sound,
which tells you that the welcome message was received and new roaming service
started even when we are speaking same language before and after crossing the
border.

4 Position and Orientation

Real space where we are living in is three dimension and we are passing through
the time. Time cannot be experienced from backwards. Photography made pos-
sible to cut off two-dimensional image from three-dimensional space and Cin-
ematography made possible to record series of two-dimensional images from
three-dimensional space and time. It was believed that the resulting image can-
not contain of its location and is the main characteristics of the image generation.
Attracting point of photography is photo image may invite us to start to imagine
the place where the image was fixed. Our imagination can bring us to the place
where we do not know, we also do not care even the place was exist when the
photo was recorded. On the other hand, when the photography was used for
documenting the fact, a photo need to be attached with a written text which
documenting the happening, location, and relation. The position and orientation
data can make photography more valuable media.
 Fig. 4. Equipments; DV camera, PDA, GPS, and 3D strain

In the case of ”Field-works” project, the location is captured by using GPS

even the video camera was not running, for example while in transporting from
main camp to the real location, the position data have been captured. Technically
speaking, it is quite important to record position data without video sequences,
because these lines can be used to figure out the shape of that region near the
video image was shot. In this case, GPS data recording is dominant rather than
video images.
Another important data for the final production is the orientation data that
is showing the directional data on which direction the camera was targeting.
It is used for commanding the direction of the screen in the final cyber space.
”3DM” is the name of the sensor made by 3D strain company. (See Fig.4) The
movement of the screen is showing the movement of the camera which indicating
the intension of the cameraman what he was willing to shoot. At the show in
CAVE the user can hear the interview itself and see the faces and some more
sceneries and also user can read the movement of the author as a cameraman.

5 Reality with the screens in the screen

Cinema was invented in early 20 centuries. Shooting a moving image and seeing
a moving image is quite new experience for the human’s history. Shoot by camera
and then projected on the screen is the typical scheme for the cinematic system.
Within this system the camera can move but the screen is not moving. Even for
the television system, viewer had been sitting in front of the television set. For
the coming situation of media so called multi-media, new-media, or networked
media, this common sense will be alternated by the new medium which is not
yet invented and will make a new common sense that the screen will fade away
or screen can contain screens or screen can go anywhere. The CAVE, originally
proposed EVL at Illinois’s university is a good example for this topic where
people can forget about the real vinyl screen, and then the viewer can focus the
virtual object in cyber space.
The interaction with images and real 3D space movement the new type of
reality might come up to the user. It is not a kind of virtual reality also not a
kind of mixed reality, but the user’s imagination can be convinced to construct
a spatial reality by combining 3 dimensional movements in cyber space and with
many numbers of the fragmented video images which had shot in real space.
The importance is how to kick and start user’s imagination for creating and
connecting several different realities into one. The interface, in this case whole
design of the medium, should be designed very carefully and centered the user’s
behavior. Designer should learn the user’s process of learning the language of
the interface.
In my case, as an artist, who designed whole process of this project and
realized it by himself until exhibit it. When at the starting point, no one could
imagine how the result is becoming; only the artist could recognize and was
possible to start the production. Each tiny movement of the screen in cyber
space was calculated when it was recorded on site according to the consciousness
of the artist for the final production. I need a new design of the medium and
then I constructed and used it. Technically speaking in the engineering side,
it is possible to create any type of new medium or combine several different
mediums into one or even improve the pre-exist medium, but it is not usable for
the artistic production when it could not give the artist to imagine the valuable
aspect of the medium itself.
Figure 5 and Figure 6 are taken from computer screen. Thin white lines
are made from GPS data which shows the movement of the cameraman, and
the rectangle frame is texture mapped with video streaming. While the video is
running on it, the rectangle frame is also move according to the orientation data.
For example when the camera move to right, then the rectangle is also move to
right. Each video was edited in post process, each video’s duration is about 30
sec. to 90 sec. and the maximum three videos are running simultaneously.

References
[1] Carolina Cruz-Neira and Daniel J.Sandin and Thomas A.DeFanti, ”Surround-
Screen Projection-Based Virtual Reality The Design and Implementation of the
CAVE”, Proc. ACM SIGGRAPH 93, pp.135-142 (1993).
[2] Ars Electronica Center, Linz, Austria, http://www.aec.at/
[3] National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation.
http://www.miraikan.jst.go.jp
[4] Field-works project page: http://www.field-works.net
[5] ”Field-works@Alsace” at the exhibition ”Future-Cinema” at ZKM Karlsruuhe
http://www.zkm.de/futurecinema/fujihata werk e.html
Fig. 5. “Field-Work@Alsace” Computer display capture image;

Fig. 6. “Field-Work@Alsace” Computer display capture image;

Fig. 7. Snap shot on the ferry boat on the Rhein river.

Impressive Velocity 1992-94
Deformed Mt.Fuji Using the GPS data captured the way climbing. Sections at each attitudes are deformed,
scaling up or down, according to the speed at tht time and position. Generated spikes are shown the
slowness of the climber, who got tired and did pause, esppecially on top of the mountain.

Original data was captured in the summer 1992, processed and exhibited at ICC gallery in 1994.
Deformed Mt.Fuji Using the GPS data captured the way down the mountain.

Un-deformed Mt.Fuji The height stretched 12 times.

Landing Home in Geneva 2005
“Landing Home in Geneva” 2005
Project targeted to make interviews with people, who are working as an interpreter or translator moved in Geneva from outside
countries. Interviews started from each interviewee’ s home in the city of Geneva and then moved to other places where remind
of their home land or the place feel comfortable for him/her.

Interviews are done on 4th-10th July 2005

Project realized with Laboratoire Forms de l’ interactivite, Haute ecole d’ arts appliques, Geneva
Locative Arts
Drew Hemment
Curator, artist, researcher
Creative Technologies
University of Salford
Manchester
M3 6EQ
Email: [email protected]

Abstract
A discussion of the field of locative arts, focusing on works and interests dating from 2003-4. Provides an
overview of the kinds of artistic project found within this field, and considers in depth a number of issues, such as
how projects are shaped by their reliance on positioning technologies, and the importance of the social within
this area of practice.

Keywords
Locative media, art, social, mapping, wireless, mobile, ambulant, context

Bio
Drew Hemment is Director of Future Everything, a non-profit creative company responsible for Futuresonic
International Festival; AHRC Research Fellow in Creative Technologies at University of Salford; Project
Investigator in PLAN - The Pervasive and Locative Arts Network. Currently working on the interdisciplinary arts-
based research project Loca: Location Oriented Critical Arts. Involvement in music events as DJ and/or
organiser since 1980s. Projects include Loca (2003-ongoing), Futuresonic (1995-ongoing), Low Grade (2005),
Mobile Connections (2004), FutureDJ (2004), Turntable Re:mix (2004), Migrations (2002/3), Blacktronica (2002),
Sensurround (2001/2), BrokenChannel (2001) and SenseSonic (2000). Completed an MA (Distinction) at the
University of Warwick, and a PhD at University of Lancaster.

Locative Arts | Drew Hemment

Locative Artsi
ii
The artist: the first person to set out a boundary stone, or to make a mark.

When the oceans became navigable following the invention of the chronometer as an on-board ship location
device, the view of the Earth and our relationship to it changed, and so did the forms of representation used to
express or explore that relationship. The first photographs from the Apollo space missions changed once more
the view of the Earth, and produced one of the most iconic, and ubiquitous, images ever produced. Today it is
digital and satellite mapping technologies that have caught the attention of a new generation of artists and DIY
technologists, who are exploring the use of portable, networked, location-aware computing devices for user-led
mapping, social networking and artistic interventions in which the fabric of the urban environment and the
iii
contours of the Earth become a 'canvas'.

All art engages in location to some degree, even if just in the way that it responds to the space created by gallery
and frame, or that the found object is marked by the absence of the location from which it was drawn. If a
precursor to locative media were to be identified within the art world it might be Richard Long, who creates his
art by walking through a landscape, annotating the physical environment he encounters with stones or other
ambient materials, and documenting augmented space that results in photographs that provide an esoteric other
to the objectifying gaze of cartography or satellite photography.
iv
Locative art is art at the interface of communication networks and location. Narrowly defined, it might be said to
be the artistic off-spring of GIS (Geographic Information Systems), or art involving the use of networked,
location-aware mobile media. In another sense, if netart is the art of the internet, then locative art is the art of
mobile and wireless: the emergence of locative media signals a convergence of geographical and data space
that comes about as soon as computing becomes mobile or ambient, reversing the trend towards digital content
v
being viewed as placeless, only encountered in the amorphous and other space of the internet. The exploratory
movements of locative art are located between the art of communications and networking and the arts of
landscape, walking and the environment. Artists are responding to the technical possibilities of electronic
mapping and positioning technologies, or location-aware, networked media by asking what can be experienced
now that could not be experienced before, in some cases creating more-or-less conventional screen based
visualizations using location data, in others mapping new horizons for creative content and the art object and a
new understanding of the relation between physical and digital.

We might also say that locative art or locative media are less about positioning than about the pre-conditions of
moving or being able to move. This paper is likewise concerned with the preconditions for a locative art rather
than with a set of current projects or artefacts. It is specifically concerned with the period between 2003 and
vi
2004. At this time locative media was in an embryonic state, everything still up for grabs, a zone of consistency
yet to emerge. While artists such as Masaki Fujihata (JP), Teri Rueb (US) and Stefan Schemat (DE) had been
producing work we may, with benefit of hindsight, term locative art for many years, in this period there were still
only a handful of fully realised locative art works, with many projects remaining in the beta stage if not still on the
drawing board. At this time locative art, and locative media generally, were simultaneously opening up new ways
of engaging in the world and mapping its own domain. This resonates with Deleuze’s and Guattari’s sense of
territory, in which there is a blurring of the distinction between real estate and intellectual property, between the
mapping of physical space and the production of an artistic or cultural milieu: the territory is constituted by the
signature or expressive mark, both in the sense that birds use song to map their domain and that the artist
creates a new way of seeing and occupying the world.

A Lazy Taxonomy of Locative Arts

A focus on this period enables us to study the stem cells of locative media and locative arts, and thus refuse
closure around a narrow understanding of locative media that has since emerged. To see what such a narrow
understanding might consist in, a classification of locative art projects that brings us close to the horizon of many
contemporary perspectives might include drawing, user-led mapping, documentary realism, ambulant, critical
and geo-annotation. This lists some of the key areas of creative practice in locative media, but does not engage
in the underlying motivations of the works. It is useful for initial orientation, a temporary list, one that will not even
vii
last till the end of this paper - a lazy taxonomy.

Drawing
One approach that has become common is to generate line drawings from GPS data generated by people
moving through the physical environment. This basic cartographic technique is widely used in the creation of
user-generated maps. GPS Drawing by Jeremy Wood (UK) uses this same technique to create not realistic
representations of a town or terrain, but outline images of animals, symbols and words, shifting the focus from

Locative Arts | Drew Hemment

realism or documentation to figurative drawing. These are presented online on the project website, and are
sometimes superimposed over a satellite photograph of the site where the data was generated. One example is
what Wood describes as “the world’s biggest IF” stretching from the south coast of England to East Anglia - an
outline drawing of the word IF created by positional data generated during a journey across the country and then
superimposed over a photograph of the UK.

User-led mapping
Where GPS Drawing adopts the conventional form of figurative drawing, a more interesting project is Amsterdam
RealTime by Ester Polak (NL). In this early and seminal locative media piece participants roam the streets of
Amsterdam equipped with a networked GPS device, and a trace of their movements is relayed to a projection
screen in an exhibition space. At the outset the screen is blank, but as the journeys are recorded individual
meanderings fuse into a composite representation of how people occupy and use the city, density and
concentration recorded in the luminescence of overlapping lines, spaces unvisited remaining dark. While as Eric
Kluitenberg has pointed out during the ISEA2004 conference, such composite images generated through
successive superimpositions are statistical in nature, the project offers an evocative visual portrait of the life of
the city, and a grass roots, collaborative mapping of how urban space is used that offers an alternative to the top
down perspective of conventional cartography. A similar set of images were produced at an influential workshop
at Karosta in Latvia hosted by the media art collective RIXC - an event that brought together many early
viii
practitioners and played an important role in the emergence of the field of locative media. These images
illustrate a visual aesthetic common in such projects - where expression emerges between the cartographic
contours in the intricate abstract shapes produced through this mapping technique - while some involve a
secondary mapping of error, plotting the accuracy of each GPS reading as the diameter of a circle, generating
ix
aleatory tracings that expose the limit of the technical system.

Documentary realism
There is a strong current of work that takes a documentary approach, seeking to archive and embed hidden
meaning or collective memory, such as the MILK project by Ieva Auzina and Esther Polak (LT/NL) which maps
journeys using GPS to explore at once incidental meanderings and international flows, using photography and
personal testimonies to delve into hidden substrata of meaning in the journey of milk from cow to consumer. This
has led Chris Byrne to examine the relation between locative media and documentary realism, while similarly
x
Michelle Kasprzak has explored how truth and fiction are articulated within locative arts. In some instances -
such as the mapping of error found in the Karosta images - this picture is complicated by an ambiguity that
exceeds the binary of truth or fiction, even though in that case it is an ambiguity that ultimately reduces to
statistical variation.

Ambulant
Other projects dispense with a screen based representation or gallery presentation, and instead involve walking
and moving about. One of the more interesting ambulant projects is .walk by Wilfried Houjebek's (NL), which
draws on psychogeography in a kind of transverse encoding of the city, using simple commands (in an analogue
of computer code) to denote a series of movements for participant’s bodies, who follow algorithmic patterns
around the city, and who alter those algorithms and paths by exchanging numerical data with other participants
they encounter. .walk is generative in the sense that the consistent application of a simple algorithm continually
shuffles the movements of participants with open and unpredictable results. And in creating an intimate and
direct relationship between bodies and code it also shifts the focus from mapping or visualisation to
performativity - enabling normally hidden operations to be not only brought into view but also performed.

// Classic.walk

Repeat

1 st street left
2 nd street right
2 nd street left

Wilfried Houjebek, .walk

Critical
Much like 'tactical media', some projects start from the premise that technology is not 'neutral', and seek to
engage in ethical or political concerns. Such an orientation is of particular relevance in locative media because of
its uneasy coincidence with commercial and State surveillance, and with the 'military-entertainment complex', a

Locative Arts | Drew Hemment

 xi
subject I have explored in Locative Dystopia. A number of 'critical cartography' projects such as Bureau
d'Etudes (FR) and They Rule (US) seek to visualise webs of power by mapping connections and lines of
influence between corporations or the people that run them, for example. The iSEE (US) website, created in
2001, enabled people to plot routes through New York avoiding surveillance cameras. And Loca, a project I am
myself involved in with Mika Raento, John Evans and Theo Humphries (UK/FI), involves tracking and
communicating with Bluetooth devices that pass within range of the Loca node network - seeking to distract
people in the course of their everyday lives, and expose the disconnect between the mobile user and the digital
identities that create an invisible trail behind them.

Geo-annotation
'Geo-annotation' involves authoring media in the environment, and accessing it at that same location. Media
contents, digital photos for example, are assigned spatial coordinates, recording the place at which they were
taken as metadata (data about data), in the same way that time and date are stored. These photos may be
accessed by an enabled device, configured to select digital objects whose spatial coordinates correspond with
the device's current location. While the ‘true’ location of the content is a database, by making it possible to
access that content in a particular position - and only in that position - its place migrates into the physical
environment. This has generated widespread interest for use in everything from museum or city guides to utility
company field operations, where it is employed as another means of delivering the same information. Artistic
projects such as Geograffiti (CN/UK) and GeoNotes (SE) depart from an epistemological frame measured in
terms of truth and accuracy, seeking not to document or interpret the environment but to embellish it with digital
graffiti or virtual tagging as expressive mark. The sense that the environment may be annotated and digitally
read is further developed in projects such as (area)code (UK) and [murmur] (CN), which enable people to access
and author stories, poems or anecdotes via a mobile phone using SMS or voicemail, using not digital positioning
technology but simply by advertising an access number on posters located in designated sites. Yellow Arrow
(US) adopts a similar low-tech approach, but in this case uses stickers so that participants rather than the project
creators can choose where the digital object is placed as well as its content, enabling it to work on a much larger
scale without ties to any one particular site. Other projects, such as Urban Tapestries (UK), have sought to
create a fully-fledged locative authoring platform, some more complex and unstable than others, and these have
been the focus of some interesting social experiments. Such projects explore how multiple layers or threads of
meaning may be weaved or inserted within the environment, in a form of collaborative authoring characterised
by a multiplication, as well as localisation, of perspective.

Also deserving of consideration are ambient narrative (eg. InterUrban, US), gaming (eg. Asphalt Games, US or
Uncle Roy All Around You, UK) and sensory immersion (eg. Come Closer, UK or Teri Rueb's Drift, US). Each of
these can be loosely accommodated within this working list, and so for the sake of this discussion shall not be
considered as separate classifications. Another that has a strong argument for inclusion is performance. Some
projects directly involve performance or performers, such as Myriorama by AmbientTV.NET (UK) and
Choreography of Everyday Movement by Teri Rueb (US). Many more feature some element of performance by
non performers, whether this be the filmmaker Pete Gomes drawing in chalk outside the ICA in London or the
participants in Fujihata's FieldWorks pirouetting while making impromptu sketches. What is of note here is the
way that awareness that movement is being recorded, even if this be abstracted to just a line or dot, affects the
way people act and move in the present. This does not yet represent a sub-genre either of performance or of
locative media, however, and so is not listed as a separate classification.

Deconstructing The Grid: Dis-locative Arts

Locative art’s focus on networking, authoring and accessing creative content within the environment offers the
chance to take art out of the galleries and off the screen. This point needs to be tempered by an awareness that,
in place of the richness of embodied experience in the world, many projects offer the challenge of roaming the
environment while squinting at a tiny screen and clunky menu, separated from the world by a barrier of bad
usability. What is more, some locative projects may be 'of the world', but are not 'in the world': their final form is
online or gallery based, rather than experienced via mobile devices, or 'old media' such as stickers.

In an important sense this is a false distinction, however. Firstly, even if the final form is screen based the
process through which they are produced is commonly located within the - rural or urban, say - environment,
typically in the form of workshops involving a small number of practitioners. More importantly, to the extent that
the focus is on the dynamic relation between data space (or database) and world it is incidental where the final
representation is sited.

The nature of this relationship between database and world is of greater consequence than simply the question
of whether the project is sited 'in the world', online or in a museum or gallery. One issue that quickly becomes
apparent - and that is an issue across most of the classifications just outlined - is the reliance in locative arts on
xii
the clinical precision of digital tracking, and the emphasis on point-to-point correspondence. Projects that draw

Locative Arts | Drew Hemment

not only on cartographic tools but also on metaphors of mapping tend to aim for a one-to-one correspondence
between world and image, between the movements of participants and their screen based representation.
Likewise many geo-annotation projects seek a determinate placing or fixing of position, wherein location is
unambiguously designated or assigned. In most cases ambiguity - or disruption of machinic precision - arises
only in the negotiation of land features and the resolution or granularity of technical hardware. Clinical, clean
precision is the limit point of locative art, its realisation and its undoing. While error may introduce sites of
disturbance, when reduced to statistics it offers deviation but not disruption of the norm.

Furthermore, locative media often assumes a reductive understanding of spatiality. It encounters the fabric of
space-time via an abstract coordinate system, betraying its indebtedness to cartography and GIS, in which
location is reduced to a set of geographic coordinates or a wireless cell. In this respect the parallel between
locative art and the work of Richard Long gains further resonance with the intervention of Bill Drummond, in
which he drew x/y coordinates on one of Long’s photographs before cutting out the pieces one by one, pieces
which are now circulating in the hands of a thousand new collectors. For locative media’s understanding of
location often seems to share more in common with that of Drummond than of Long, its transcendent frame of
xiii
reference and Cartesian space much like the grid marked by Drummond on Long’s photograph.

Locative art’s condition of possibility is a prior abstraction, and as a consequence its emphasis on location is
accompanied by a distancing from embodiment, physicality and context, which - within such a reductive
understanding of spatiality - become a mere residue of the coordinate system. For locative art to “escape its own
axiomatic system” (Trans Cultural Mapping, RIXC) and go beyond simple positioning, it needs to engage in how
people’s relationship to their environment changes, and to engage not only in location but also in context. It is
too simplistic - for all but a minority of projects - to claim that context is reduced to a coordinate point, or that the
understanding of place and of being in the world does not extend beyond the pull up display. Rather these might
be seen as tools through which context may be encountered, and their use becomes most interesting when the
focus is not just upon placing data, but on opening up spaces of ambiguity and play.

One project that moves us towards an engagement in the perspectival and embodied is also in many ways the
direct precursor to locative art. Initiated in 1992, and through its many contemporary iterations, Masaki Fujihata’s
(JP) Field-Works shows how nuance and hidden depth can emerge through the creative use of a technology
designed to impose a rigid cartographic grid upon the world, going beyond simple documentation to open a rich
space of contextual and aesthetic meaning. Through a juxtaposition of location data captured by GPS and
moving image captured by video it similarly aims to articulate local narratives, while also excavating a sense of
parallelism in the universe on a human scale. Field-Works stretches and pulls at the coordinate system, in the
same way that dancers play with shifting the centre of gravity of the body to create a kind of distortion in the
fabric of space-time. This is firstly achieved simply by introducing multiple view points. Secondly, by using a
camera mounted gyroscope to translate even the intimate movements of the physical gaze as a part of the
resulting work, the video frame - viewed moving along a GPS trace - shaking and turning to correspond to
unsteady motion of the camera during filming. And, in earlier versions of the project, a subversion of the
Cartesian grid was effected by representing the physical terrain as a function of the speed at which it is
encountered, in one iteration the shape of Mount Fuji becoming distorted, the same slope shown to be longer
going up than when going down. Furthermore, while Fujihata’s own focus is very much on the final and realised
piece, the impromptu sketches made by participants in Field-Works highlight the fact that what is at stake is not
only producing artistic works that can be shown in a gallery context, but also the embodiment and performativity
of the participants involved in generating the works.

A similarly complex and multi-layered project is Choreography of Everyday Movement by Teri Rueb (US). In this
piece Rueb works with classically trained dancers to explore the poetics of the urban body, placing emphasis
upon the participatory spaces occupied by the participants, as well as upon the distance between world and its
representation. It too incorporates GPS traces in the final gallery based representation, but here they are
inscribed in sheets of Perspex, which are then layered to create a kind of Rorschach image, opening up a
plurality of interpretation. The longitude/latitude coordinates are deliberately removed - “The performer is only
visible as an ant-like dot crawling across the screen. Movement and physical presence are reduced to the most
xiv
basic abstraction”. Here we are reminded of Lev Manovich’s identification of radar as that which epitomises the
use of linear perspective to map and identify objects and spaces: “radar is the best example of the rationalization
of sight in the twentieth century. … [A] radar operator sees a screen, a dark field with a few bright spots. Here
xv
the function of visual nominalism … is isolated and abstracted”. Just as radar can be said to clarify and
condense the function of modern visual surveillance technologies, so Rueb takes the real-time abstraction of
movement to an extreme at which its limit is revealed, the cartographic function left bare. Choreography
illustrates how - as a data based form - locative art brings the coordinate system itself into the frame, as the
material upon which it works.

Achieving a similar effect from a very different approach is Location, Location, Location (2004) by Pete Gomes
(UK). This saw Gomes walking and drawing within a 1km squared area in London, taking GPS readings and

Locative Arts | Drew Hemment

annotating the urban environment in chalk. In some cases numerical readings of position or time were drawn at
sites where Gomes encountered objects or events, in other cases chalk lines following longitude or latitude were
drawn on and in some cases even through buildings. This project, and related works by Gomes such as SE8
v1.0 (2004), inscribes the cartographic grid on the city, making an idealised Cartesian space manifest. But it
does so only then to reassert the transient, material and everyday. The drawings are temporary, quickly washed
away by rain. In the impossibility of continuing a true grid line at street level, the project highlights the opacity of
bricks, mortar and lived space. And in the way it is experienced by an audience moving through the city, it
foregrounds not the omnipresent perspective of satellites circling overhead, but a partial and incomplete
xvi
perspective at ground level.

In a sense a questioning of the transcendent grid might be said to be already at play in GPS Drawing, the
positioning function of GPS and the abstraction inherent in it both highlighted and subordinated to the expressive
figure or trace. But Rueb and Gomes make the abstraction explicit, and shows how, in bringing the cartographic
system into view, a creative and critical stance to it becomes possible. In neither case is there an attempt to
overcome the cartographic grid, by, for example, asserting the primacy of embodied experience (even though
this figures in both projects). Instead they set out to mark its limit, and in highlighting the play at the edges, the
accidental and transient, they deconstruct the dualism inherent in positioning technologies and bring cartography
down to earth.

Other projects shift the focus away from position towards proximity or relationality, thereby opening up an
understanding of context as open and constantly shifting rather than static or to do with determinate
correspondence. In Hlemmur in C by Pall Thayer (IS) two taxis equipped with GPS and their base at the
Hlemmur bus terminal in the Reykjavik are each represented with a middle C note. While the sound attributed to
the base remains constant, the pitch associated with the taxis varies according to their distance from the base,
creating instability in the tone. This piece also involves a visual mapping component, but is most interesting in
the way that relationality is registered as dynamic tension in the sound, an other auditory space. Aura by Steve
Symons (UK) is a virtual sound environment accessed by walking through a space equipped with GPS and
digital compass. Individual users can “hear” the location of other participants, and influence the sound
environment through their relative movements. Similarly Sound Mapping by Iain Mott (AUS) is an installation in
which participants realise a composition by wheeling four movement-sensitive suitcases within a public place,
with the “aim to assert a sense of place, physicality and engagement to reaffirm the relationship between art and
xvii
the everyday”. Three of the cases contain odometers measuring wheel rotation in both directions as well as
two gyroscopes measuring tilt and azimuth, and they are linked by data radio transmitters to a forth case
equipped with GPS. While much work with GPS is limited by its low resolution - the nuance of embodied
experience exchanged for a blunt on/off switch every few metres - Sound Mapping produces music in response
to nearby architectural features, subtle movements and gestures, and the absolute and relative movements of
the participants. By engaging in relationality and embodiment as well as in place it offers a rich vision of how
participants may both respond to and shape their environment. These same variables are also the focus in the
Oscillating Windows workshop series by Katherine Moriwaki (US), where the focus shifts from sound to data
networking, and looking at how patterns of proximity and co-location emerge amongst participants relaying
xviii
information across ad-hoc networks with no fixed centre, but rather multiple, mobile nodes.

If such projects move us away from simple positioning, often embodying an implicit critique of it, Biomapping by
Christian Nold (UK) embraces it. This project is significant for the way it introduces the body and embodiment
into locative media. Biomapping measures galvanic skin response - using a customised device of the kind used
in lie detector tests, combined with GPS - to record anxiety and stress levels of participants as they move
through the city. Here the body is brought into the equation only to be abstracted and left behind: Nold works
with a conventional screen-based mapping format, with readings plotted on to a map in the same way other
projects record a visual trace of movement, resulting in an aggregated, visual record of changes in stress level.
And yet, while Biomapping consists in a simple mapping of anxiety against position, it functions on other levels
also. The composite images mirror the way Amsterdam RealTime reveals the idiosyncrasy of how urban space
is used. And there is a reverse movement in the way that people respond to readings - their own or those of
xix
previous participants - this shaping their movement through the city. From the perspective of the user roaming
the city it prizes open a space between the physical environment, networks and the body. It offers a different way
of encountering the city, and of one's relation to it, where the low-cost, DIY aesthetic of the Biomapping device
becomes more significant than the accuracy of its representation of physiological data.

Other Geometries: Relational and Social

One trajectory that may be discerned within locative arts - that perhaps offers more insight than the 'lazy'
taxonomy above - runs from realism and documentation (conventional maps, city guides) to expression
(figurative drawing, digital graffiti) to the collaborative and social (collaborative maps, social authoring). In broad
terms this mirrors a similar trajectory in locative media generally, identified by Ben Russell amongst others, from

Locative Arts | Drew Hemment

 xx
the spatial to the social. And it may be situated alongside a broader blurring of the distinction between art and
the social today, which marks a departure from conventional understandings of the place of the artist in Western
culture, and in particular the post-Enlightenment understanding of the artist as apart from society.

An emphasis on the social is likewise found in Nicolas Bourriaud's understanding of relational art: "an art taking
as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an
xxi
independent and private symbolic space". The kind of relationality involved in projects such as Hlemmur in C
and Body Mapping is primarily geometric and spatial, and where social and interpersonal relations occur they
are spatially coded. Another kind of 'relationality' arises through the overlapping of different kinds of mapping -
geographical maps, social network maps, node maps, etc. Something a little closer to Bourriaud's understanding
may be seen in locative art projects that do explicitly engage an audience in a social space or process. When
they do so, however, they tend to offer something different to the gallery-centric, white cube sociality proposed
by Bourriaud, for where relational art projects tend to be staged and exceptional, locative arts are more often
implicated in the everyday, even if only in their willingness to address non-art contexts.

Park Bench TV by Pete Gomes, involves a park bench with free Wi-Fi access, plus a chat forum and local TV
channel that anyone with a wireless enabled laptop has access to. The bench served as a physical metaphor for
the wireless node, and a focal point for local content, but also brought users into physical proximity and - by the
layering or coincidence of different types of location: inner city park, bench, internet chatroom - produced an
xxii
uncertain and incongruous social space. This project also prefigures a wider trend towards Free Networks
becoming portals to a local environment or community - as championed by île Sans Fil in Montreal, for example -
rather than just access points to an undifferentiated bandwidth. Another project, Life: A User's Manual by
Michelle Teran, both creates a similarly equivocal social space, and highlights an absence of the social. Teran
walks the streets equipped with a scanner and a monitor - in one iteration wheeling them along in a shopping
trolley - picking up feeds from CCTV cameras she passes, which are visible on her mobile screen. Her solitary
intervention serves as a metaphor for the alienation of the surveilled subject, but in intercepting the signal she
also creates a counter-site and invites people in: audience, passers by, and on occasion employees of the
companies operating the cameras.

Another project that does not involve positioning technology and yet is about location is WiFi-Hog by Jonah
Brucker-Cohen (US), an application that allows an individual to take control over a public access wireless node
from their laptop, by logging off all existing users and controlling who can subsequently log on, creating localised
and temporary user groups, while also highlighting how limits can be placed upon the supposed panacea of
openness and accessibility. Mobile Clubbing (UK) and Radio Ballet by LIGNA (DE) are a kind of wireless flash
mob, in which people converge in a public place - mobilised in advance by email or text - do something out of the
ordinary, and then disperse. Radio Ballet, described by the group as an 'exercise in unnecessary loitering',
involves a choreographed and orchestrated performance guided by audio broadcast over a free network. It
creates a happening or event at variance with the every day, functional use of space, and in so doing brings the
social norms that govern our use of public space into view. These projects - like Life: A User's Manual and
Oscillating Windows - offer a view of locative art as something more than spatial representation. Indeed, they fall
outside a narrow definition of locative art or locative media. And yet they illustrate how spaces that are both
social and other can be opened at the interface of communication, location and the body.

Whereas 'mixed reality' posits the virtual and physical as layered or intersecting, these projects suggest that
something else can be produced in between. In locative media projects we find a fold between virtual and
physical, data space and geographical space. In some cases, such as Houjebek's generative walk or Gomes's
park bench, these folds do not just mix realities but produce a reality of their own. To the extent that they
represent a standing out from a normalised construction of space they might be said to be counter-sites. They -
xxiii
like Foucault's understanding of heterotopias, or other places - place all other sites into question. This is
clearly the case in Radio Ballet, but it might also be metaphoric as much as literal. We might for example ask
how the intensity in luminescence in Amsterdam RealTime, or the trace of embodiment in Biomapping, might be
said to constitute a heterotopic image, an image of an other place, rather than a representation of the real. And
likewise we might ask of geo-annotation projects how they open an other space, which is not the same as
xxiv
providing more sophisticated interpretive tools. Then we might be able to claim of locative media what
Foucault says of ships: "The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up,
xxv
espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates."

Much current interest is concerned with the interface between locative media and social software, the semantic
web or web 2.0. Metaphors abound such as 'A programmable and machine readable world', 'People search
engines', 'Social interfaces to places', 'City as canvas or medium', 'Person as cursor in the city'. There is a strong
current of social projects within locative media, and a DIY technology culture has grown around that, part of a
wider space that includes CopyLeft, Open Source, Free Networking, etc. Whether a project is positioned as
social or as art, the aim can be about opening up possibilities or sites of play, more dissociative than simply
establishing a continuity or equivalence. Equally, however, the motivation all too often is simply making the world

Locative Arts | Drew Hemment

more transparent, the ability to fix associations, creating an environment that is navigable and known. Following
Foucault we might say that is to mistake espionage for adventure.

The straightforward geo-annotation of space - placing data in geographical space - can be seen as an instance
of what Deleuze has termed emplacement, which he distinguishes from “haecceities”, or “concrete individuations
xxvi
that have a status of their own and direct the metamorphosis of things and subjects”. These have the kind of
individuality we find in seasons or dates, as opposed to subjects or things, and “consist entirely of relations of
xxvii
movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected”. Locative arts offer
the possibility of a form of individuation that is as distinct from clinical positioning as locative media’s social
projects are from cellular advertising. When, on the other hand, locative media hides behind the console of
positioning systems an abstract mode of individuation results. For locative art to exceed the sterile precision of
its own axiomatic system it needs to act upon or through material bodies and substances, engage in the
ambiguity, dirt, sweat and smells of the world, and acknowledge “the importance of rain, hail, wind, pestilential
xxviii
air, or air polluted by noxious particles, favourable conditions for these transports”. Then locative arts come to
be seen not as distanced from the world but as offering a potential for transformation and engagement, opening
up other places, contents circulating through location aware networks producing a field of relations and affects.

Drew Hemment, August 2004, revised December 2005.

Locative Arts | Drew Hemment

Links
Field-Works by Masaki Fujihata
http://www.field-works.net/
Teri Rueb
http://www.terirueb.net
Stefan Schemat
http://www.schemat.de/
GPS Drawing
http://www.gpsdrawing.com/
Amsterdam RealTime by Ester Polak
http://realtime.waag.org/
Locative Media Workshop at Karosta, Latvia
http://locative.x-i.net/
RIXC
http://rixc.lv/
MILK by Ieva Auzina and Esther Polak
http://locative.x-i.net/piens/
Chris Byrne
http://www.mediascot.org/
Michelle Kasprzak
http://michelle.kasprzak.ca/
.walk by Wilfried Houjebek
http://www.socialfiction.org/dotwalk/
Bureau d'Etudes
http://bureaudetudes.free.fr/
They Rule by Josh On & Futurefarmers
http://www.theyrule.net/
iSEE by Institute for Applied Autonomy (I.A.A.)
http://www.appliedautonomy.com/isee/info2.html
Loca
http://www.loca-lab.org
Geograffiti
http://www.gpster.net/geograffiti.html
GeoNotes
http://geonotes.sics.se/ (Site down at time of publication)
(area)code by Jen Southern & centrifugalforces
http://www.areacode.org.uk/
http://www.blinkmedia.org/blinkmedia/area.htm
[murmur]
http://murmurtoronto.ca/
Yellow Arrow
http://yellowarrow.org
Urban Tapestries
http://urbantapestries.net/
InterUrban by Jeff Knowlton, Naomi Spellman & Jeremy Hight
http://interurban.34n118w.net/
Asphalt Games
http://www.asphalt-games.net/
Uncle Roy All Around You by Blast Theory
Locative Arts | Drew Hemment
http://www.uncleroyallaroundyou.co.uk/
Come Closer by squidsoup
http://squidsoup.org/comecloser/
Myriorama by AmbientTV.NET (UK)
http://www.ambienttv.net/4/myriorama/
Location, Location, Location (2004) by Pete Gomes
http://www.mutantfilm.com/wireless/
http://www.locative.net/tcmreader
Hlemmur in C by Pall Thayer
http://130.208.220.190/hlemmC/
Aura by Steve Symons
http://muio.org/
Sound Mapping by Iain Mott
http://www.reverberant.com/
Biomapping by Christian Nold
http://www.biomapping.net
Oscillating Windows by Katherine Moriwaki
http://www.kakirine.com/windows
Park Bench TV (2003) by Pete Gomes
http://www.mutantfilm.com/parkbenchtv/
île Sans Fil (Wireless Island)
http://www.ilesansfil.org
Life: a user's manual by Michelle Teran
http://www.ubermatic.org/life/
WiFi-Hog by Jonah Brucker-Cohen
http://coin-operated.com/. See also http://www.futuresonic.com/futuresonic/mobile_connections/.
Mobile Clubbing
http://www.mobile-clubbing.com. See also http://www.futuresonic.com/futuresonic/mobile_connections/.
Radio Ballet by Radio Ligna
http://www.ok-centrum.at/english/ausstellungen/open_house/ligna.html

(Websites accessed December 2005.)

Endnotes
i
This is a revised edition of a paper written in August 2004 originally published in the proceedings of ISEA2004:
The 12th International Symposium on Electronic Art, 14th-22nd August 2004
http://www.isea2004.net/mainframe.php?id=proceedings. (Accessed December 2005). The new version of the
text does not undertake to provide an overview of all locative art projects produced since August 2004.
ii
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaux, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis (University of
Minnesota Press, 1987) p. 316.
iii
Chang and Goodman (US) have argued that location can be viewed not as canvas but as medium ('Asphalt
Games: 'Enacting place through locative media', in D. Hemment (ed.), Locative Media Leonardo Electronic
Almanac Special Issue).
iv
'Locative art' is here understood as those areas of locative media that are predominantly arts-based. Much
interesting work happens on the boundary, and this term is intended to contribute to discourse on locative media,
not to set up any kind of opposition.
v
Location and context are central to the mobile and wireless experience. A wireless or mobile art might also be
concerned with, say, the potential of interfaces unfettered by wires and cables for performance or interaction.

Locative Arts | Drew Hemment

vi
In particular between the influential Karosta workshop organised by RIXC in July 2003 and the Mobile
Connections exhibition at Futuresonic in May 2004.
vii
My use of the word lazy is part serious part joke. It references the fact that there is a narrow understanding of
locative media that is inhibitive. And also that this paper does not pretend to offer an exhaustive overview or
classification of locative arts projects. A lazy taxonomy might yet one day become a living taxonomy.
viii
Much of the early discourse around locative media, in Europe in particular, was forged in art contexts, from the
RIXC Locative Media Workshop (K@2, Karosta, 2003), to next5minutes (Amsterdam, 2003) and Futuresonic
(Manchester, 2004). Other significant events include the O'Reilly ETech, UbiComp and PLAN conferences.
Despite the trend we have seen towards the collaborative and social in locative arts, the arts context is not going
to be appropriate to every project, and more recently there have been some attempts to create spaces free of
the arts gene. The term 'locative media' was coined by Karlis Kalnins (CA) in 2003.
ix
Thanks to Ben Russell for his comments on the Karosta images.
x
These points were explored at the Tracing Space panel, ISEA2004, Helsinki, 20th August 2004.
http://www.isea2004.net. (Accessed December 2005).
xi
Drew Hemment, "The Locative Dystopia." 2004. (Originally published in nettime: Fri, 9 Jan 2004 18:23:20
+0100 (CET)) and “Locative Dystopia 2" in Ed. Marc Tuters + Rasa Smite, Acoustic Space: Trans Cultural
Mapping (Riga: The Center for New Media Culture RICX, 2004).
xii
The issue is not the accuracy or granularity of the technical system employed. Most tracking systems used are
anything but precise, as the Karosta images illustrate. Different systems have different granularity or resolution,
ranging from sensor networks (high) to cell based location data from mobile phones (low), and this will vary
depending on the context: GPS, for example, is unreliable in built up areas.
xiii
This view of an endless grid that extends across the Earth found iconic form in Superstudio's The Continuous
Monument project (1969). More recently, Andrew Wilson from Blink has argued “Wirelessness is not a grid laid
across the world. Wirelessness is clusters and gaps.” Ultrasound conference, 2004,
http://www.ultrasound.ws/archive/2004/index.html (accessed December 2005).
xiv
Teri Rueb, http://www.terirueb.net/. (Accessed December 2005).
xv
Lev Manovich, ‘Modern Surveillance Machines: Perspective, Radar, 3-D Computer Graphics, and Computer
Vision,’ in CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (ZKM, Karlsruhe/The MIT
Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2002) p. 386
xvi
Pete Gomes, 'Signage for Invisibility', in Marc Tuters & Rasa Smite (eds.), Acoustic Space: Trans Cultural
Mapping (Riga: The Center for New Media Culture RICX, 2004) pp.175-77. Also available online
http://www.locative.net/tcmreader/index.php?locarts;gomes. (Accessed December 2005).
xvii
Iain Mott, http://www.reverberant.com/SM/. (Accessed December 2005).
xviii
See also UMBRELLA.net by Katherine Moriwaki and Jonah Brucker-Cohen (US).
xix
This side of the project will become more prominent in Version 2.0 developed during the PLAN workshop in
Nottingham during October 2005 that enables participants to view the data in real-time via a mobile device.
http://www.open-plan.org. (Accessed December 2005).
xx
Ben Russell (UK) is a seminal figure within the field of locative media, author of Headmap Manifesto (1999,
http://www.headmap.org/headmap.pdf, accessed December 2005) a text widely recognised as providing a
blueprint for wireless location aware devices, and one of the founders of the Locative Media Lab
(http://www.locative.net, accessed December 2005) a highly influential group during 2003 and 2004 which also
included Marc Tuters (CA) and others.
xxi
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Paris: Les Presses du Reel, 2002).
xxii
A similar approach has been taken by Yellow Chair (2005) by Anab Jain (IN/UK),
http://anab.in/yellowimages.html (accessed December 2005).
xxiii
Foucault, M., Of Other Spaces. Diacritics, Spring 1986, p. 22-27. Mine is in some ways an unconventional
reading of heterotopia; it is, however, in the spirit of Foucault's text.
xxiv
There may be many kinds of heterotopia. Jen Southern and Jen Hamilton found during a residency at
Creative Mwldan Creadigidol, Cardigan, that the inconsistencies in GPS readings they encountered during walks
out in the hills were very much like the inconsistencies in subjective experience of walking, when we often lose
time, switch off, suddenly find that we have progressed a certain distance with no memory of having traversed it.
Locative Arts | Drew Hemment
Jen Southern & Jen Hamilton, 'The aesthetics of walking in place' a seminar presentation at May You Live In
Interesting Times, Cardiff Festival of Creative Technology, 28 October 2005.
http://www.mayyouliveininterestingtimes.org (Accessed December 2005).
xxv
Ibid., p. 27
xxvi
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaux, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987) p. 261.
xxvii
Ibid.
xxviii
Ibid.

Locative Arts | Drew Hemment

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Parallell Realities
FUJIHATA Masaki
Translation: Alfred BIRNBAUM

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KDDI
GPS Camera

© FUJIHATA Masaki

Screen-in-screen angles — the biggest problem becomes compensat-

ing for that distortion in our brain. To facilitate cor-
The world we see with the naked eye appears recting the trapezoidal screen frame into a rectangu-
without any framing because the cognisance-level lar image, a perfectly planar-focused screen is ideal.
software of our brain is so programmed. For Thus issues of image focus and requisite screen pla-
although the extent of what can be seen by the narity dictate ineluctable technical conditions for
eye is of course limited, those bounds are unre- generating an imaginary screen in the brain.
garded and unclear. By contrast, all artificial imag- Experiments in placing such imaginary image
ing is distinctly "cut out" via rectangular frames. frames within the screen frame make this even more
Not only that, most are laid out perfectly flat. But clear. Even if the vertical-to-horizontal pictorial ratio
just why do these "movie screens" have to form varies somewhat, even if a frame with three-dimen-
such taut planes? sional depth is circumscribed within a larger frame,
One answer is technical: when using optical lens- our brain easily manages to reroute perceptions
es to project images, focus becomes a paramount through the screen frame to grasp the image project-
issue. The focus must be consistent over the entire ed inside. Just like watching a QuickTime movie
image area (picture plane) for the image to be recog- framed within a larger desktop frame. However small
nisable. When a cinema shows films out-of-focus, the screen, so long as we concentrate on the image,
viewers find themselves looking at the screen itself neither the size nor proportions seem to matter; our
instead of watching the film. brain carries out complex three-dimensional coordi-
A second factor is to be found in the relationship nate conversions to make sense of the contents.
between the viewer and the screen: as it is impossi-
ble for all viewers to face the exact centre of the Subjective and objective images
screen — most have to content themselves with
viewing a more-or-less distorted screen from oblique However distorted the screen, we can recognise

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what transpires therein as events in three-dimen- Conversely, videos taken by an individual may
sional space. We can even inject that image realm be said to be continuously subjective. Or perhaps
with our own imaginings. When the Brothers LUMIÉRE better said, video tends to be used solely to prove
first unveiled their film of a steam locomotive "I was there." A record of a subjective world of
steaming head-on into a station, the viewers all children growing up and places visited. Where as
fled. Even a two-dimensional black and white the act of watching such subjective images forces
image was sufficient to appear three-dimensional. the viewer to try to imagine the photographer's
Thus film-goers' "suspension of disbelief" serves to subjective viewpoint. Entering into another's reality
create a wholly subjective realm within the film. forces us to experience that other person's thinking
As far as I know, the film director who played as our own thought. For instance, when in a video
most intentionally with breaking the rules by the of a children's sports meet the camera suddenly
simplest means was Charlie CHAPLIN. In his films, pans to the left, we know the person behind the
he alone looks straight at the camera, something camera's attention quickly shifted to the left, leav-
the other actors were not allowed to do. Here is the ing the viewer to ascertain the reason why. Of
star player in his own film fiction addressing the course, the viewer will be frustrated if the reason is
real audience, thereby cutting the thread of direc- never explained. Such are the dangers of image
torial subjectivity. The film is fiction therefore it making. The more difficult to understand, the less
records this, the perspective of the camera filming information provided, the more it stimulates our
constituting total objectivity. Which is why film imagination. And while such stimulation can be fun,
actors typically do not stare straight into the objec- it can also be simply a strain on the brain, a waste
tive eye; to do so would be to negate the make- of imagination. Either way, the sense of reality to
believe of the film fiction, thereby pushing it into an be had via images is greatly increased through
altogether different area of meaning. active participatory search.

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III

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Parallel presence by means of multiple image ordering what in reality are parallel data into temporal
data linearity. Thus, existing forms of intelligence, most
notably written materials, represent the ability to unidi-
The act of experientially reading images simultane- mensionalise (serialise) multidimensional data.
ously induces two divergent selves in the viewer: the Nonetheless, might it not be possible to cinemato-
watching self and the self who experiences what goes graphically document real events as-is in simultaneity?
on within the images. We may not be so keenly aware Consider, for instance, the prospect of letting multiple
of this while sitting in a cinema, because the cinema subjective images coexist within a single screen, each
environment was specially designed to engender this parallel image data feed given its own set frame. An
split. The cinema being a space where we can "get attempt to render an interpretation of the parallel state
into" the film and "become" the protagonist, yet just of reality by reading in diverse subjects in parallel.
as easily return to reality one step outside the theatre. Many papers were written about subjective experi-
With the demise of the cinema, however, every- ence in terms of multiple realities existing in parallel. In
thing has changed. Today we are beset with images at mid-20th century quantum physics. In 1957, Hugh
every turn; we can even watch television programmes EVERETT III and John WHEELER proposed a "multi-
on our mobile phones. Image data streams at us in world interpretation" by which they established the
parallel feeds. At its most primitive, this constitutes an concept of "quantum parallelism." In their view, the
externalising of what occurs on the retina. We now live cosmos was not a single universe, but instead com-
inside an eyeball. At the level of the retina "screen", all posed of multiple universes — or rather, a "multiverse"
image data exists in equal multiplicity, our cerebral as it came to be called in physics.
software being designed to gather only those neces- Certainly, considering questions of temporal simul-
sary bits of information into conscious awareness, taneity, it proves difficult to define a perfectly unified
while simply voiding the unneeded remainder. In this Newtonian world existing in time. Now that we can call
sense, humans are creatures possessed of factors for international long distance to friends on the other side

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of the globe in near-realtime, the telltale timelag gives and accentuates a sense of parallel existence when
us a clearer sense of this: the audible intervals we hear communicated through. Such a space is necessary in
do not coincide with the pauses our friends make order to share common mindframe with others, as in
between utterances. Indeed, the more we think about fact all existing realtime communications have had to
it, we soon discover there really is no way to ascertain crouch through some intermediary place.
via telephone whether the time on this end of the line My on-going Field-Works series utilises GPS (global
is simultaneous with the other end. That being the positioning systems) in combination with digital video
case, better we didn't define the world as one single cameras to append positional information to video
whole from the very beginning. images and display them in three-dimensional
With same-space simultaneity thus thrown in cyberspace at the places pictured. This allows multi-
doubt, how can we get any real sense of the actuali- ple images to be shown simultaneously in situ, each
ties existing in parallel? The telephone is presumed to image reproducing each world-as-seen in configura-
be a realtime communications medium, however the tion. We used this system to create a kind of collective
closer we push the threshhold of realtime, the more memory in the project Lake Shinji as a Drawing Pad
apparent its limitations or rather the impossibility of (2002). For further clarification, please experience the
true realtime becomes. And yet, looking at the non- work for yourself.
simultaneity of email, it is a shared sense of place If film up to now trained us to "become" others, this
however hypothetical that matters. Say, for instance, scheme of configuring present-tense image data
some idea occurs to us in the middle of the night; up urges us to "accept that I am here just as others are
until now, we'd hesitate to call on impulse at such an here, accept that outside the reality my mind creates
ungodly realtime hour, but instead might jot down a there are also realities that other's minds create." If
memo in order to call the next day. Then how about that can be seen from a summative objective view-
email? Initially the memo sent by email just floats in point via a new kind of spatial vision, it may well lead
space, a space which, however, is shared in common to a new cosmology.