[ISEA2008] Paper: Lily Shirvanee – Collective Territories: The Shared Space of Locative Media

Abstract

Within the urban perspective, this essay looks at the space that location-aware media generates and the nature of flow that is projected from and is implied by the collective activities of locative media. How do these landscapes reflect and deform the intricate set of power relations that produced them? What happens to our relationship with the public space around us when we can collectively share information over time with others who are remotely nearby? How might locative territories renegotiate and redefine the original meaning of the spaces they occupy? Locative media is defined here as geographically-based media that can be used to actively create a reciprocal awareness between groups of people and their environment, thereby, merging various types of information and media within the limits of specific geographic landscapes; these limits may vary in dimension from a specific point in a landscape to large areas of space such as nodes and pathways. This essay is a brief analysis of several recent examples in the area of locative art and media, and an observation on the issues that they bring to the transforming public urban landscape.

  • Lily Shirvanee, Digital Studio, Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

Full text (PDF) p.  418-419