Locative Media & The City

Locative Media is an emerging field of media art and technology practices that incorporate location, data, mobile computing and wireless networks. This seminar focuses on Locative Media practices situated within urban environments and provides a critical context within which to evaluate their potential to transform how we locate and orient ourselves within, interact across, navigate through, and otherwise inhabit the contemporary city. Drawing on a broader discourse involving the technological mediation of urban experience, the course combines readings in social theory, spatiality, technology and urban form; film screenings addressing the development of the modern metropolis and its post-industrial mutations; and an examination of specific art practices of the Surrealists, the Situationists, conceptual and performance art from the 60's and 70's, and more recent projects in Locative Media. Topics include sedentary vs. ambulatory knowledge, cognitive mapping, pyschogeography, surveillance, site-specificity, participatory networks, spatial narratives, pervasive gaming, and hybrid spatial experiences, among others.