[ISEA2014] Institutional Presentation: Non Ten Xeito Fole, Andrea Olmedo & Rita Buil – Constelaciones: Locative Media paradigma and its social implications

Institutional Presentation Statement

Contemporanity is georeferenced and the servers where these data are stored are managed, organised and disseminated by transnational corporations of telecommunications. Actually location is the omnipresent parameter at the social communication. And we are in constant exchange, reception and transmission of information and its metadata.

Karlis Kalnins started to use the term ‘Locative Media’ in 2001 as a category to designate processes, prototypes and applications that are based on the interaction of a screen with the here and now of the urban places. There is an intermediate space of computerized interaction that is crossed by some layers of information that ask our location to give access. Our actions, movements, and ourselves became another field more of these repositories of the contemporary power: the databases.

Technosciences have configured the modern geographic representation, and with that a global map that pretends to move away of the change, of the uncertainty and the subjectivity that involves all human relation. Satellite photography and the devices GIS and GPS have continued with the neutral point illusion as a panoptic where we voluntarily deposited our data on real time.

Is urgent to promote a critical point of view with the implicit control mechanisms on that technologies, that are conditioned by its origins: the military research. There are critical projects on the intersection of Contemporary Creation, Science, Technology and Society that focus on the abstract representation of the mensurable space. Those practices are injecting the lived space, always subjective, to locative media.

Constelaciones uses locative technologies to establish processes and communicative P2P mechanisms with local communities. Is a collaborative project in that mediates on Spanish neighbourhoods whose gentrification plans have reduced confluence espaces on that places. There is also a lack of communication between local and new residents. The project aims to the social agents to do routes and to documentate the significative commonal places on a navigable map throw a data visualization system.

The main device of the project is a digital collaborative on‑line archive of the elitization process. We encourage TO different neighbourhoods agents to documentate the change process. We promote a collective mapping process to identificate resources and needs of the community, and also to identify problematic and possible ways to tackle it. Constelaciones facilitates also a video online tool where users can create routes on a navigable map with the aim to watch the intersection points of between different people.

A mobile app will be able to visualise documents on the same space where were positioned, Also to realise and document routes, and to establish confluences between connected users. We pretend to study the feedback between the physical and digital spaces in neighbourhoods.

One of the main interest for us is to develop actions that promote the access and the digital qualification of people with low technological profile and the testing the communicative devices generated to verify his viability. The project is easily replicable in other contexts through the adaptation of the documentated methodology and the platform, generated as an open source code library.

  • Xeito Fole a.k.a non ten xeito, trans gender non-conforming visual artist and transfeminist antiespecist activist, Constelaciones, ES
  • Andrea Olmedo, Constelaciones, ES
  • Rita Buil, Constelaciones, ES