Panel Statement

Panel: Beyond Locative: Media Arts after the Spatial Turn

With the in­tro­duc­tion by Apple and Google of Lo­ca­tion-Based Ser­vices (LBS) on smart phones world­wide, Loca­tive Media has rapidly been main­lined to the masses. For­merly a term that re­ferred to a loose col­lec­tion of media art prac­tices that ex­per­i­mented with lo­ca­tion as a con­tex­tual fil­ter for media  sit­u­ated within or dis­trib­uted across urban or rural en­vi­ron­ments, today Loca­tive Media has come to con­note any soft­ware ap­pli­ca­tion that fil­ters con­tent based on what is “nearby.” While some would at­tempt to re­cu­per­ate the term for dis­course in the arts and hu­man­i­ties, look­ing for the “be­yond”, “after” or “post-” Loca­tive in an at­tempt to the­o­rize an his­tor­i­cal pe­riod of media art prac­tice in order to lay claim to “the next big thing”, oth­ers might argue that it’s time to sim­ply FOR­GET Loca­tive Media – that the cre­ative, the­o­ret­i­cal and aes­thetic pos­si­bil­i­ties of lo­ca­tion as con­tex­tual fil­ter have been ex­hausted – and that in order to en­gage the broader and more sub­tle nu­ances of con­tem­po­rary urban, ex­ur­ban and rural en­vi­ron­ments, new ap­proaches to con­text are nec­es­sary.

• Mark Shep­ard is an artist, ar­chi­tect and re­searcher whose post-dis­ci­pli­nary prac­tice ad­dresses new so­cial spaces and sig­ni­fy­ing struc­tures of con­tem­po­rary net­work cul­tures. His cur­rent re­search in­ves­ti­gates the im­pli­ca­tions of mo­bile and per­va­sive media, com­mu­ni­ca­tion and in­for­ma­tion tech­nolo­gies for ar­chi­tec­ture and ur­ban­ism.