Locative Media & The City

Just to add a little more to the discussion on pervasive gaming I have to ask, how important is it to question its relevance? Is the long lasting impact really what would give it value and authenticity? I find its core function in notions of real vs. fiction and power realtions. We live in what Chomsky would call a stage, constantly moving around as actors in our own worlds, but mixing both into a gaming session combines these paradigms which exist in our everyday lives. Questioning the relevance appears purely subjective and would assume that there is a 'correct answer.' What if it is simply enough to say that the structure of pervasive gaming exists in order to change one's experience in the city?

Although the audio in this project might be tampered, I have to say that the one admirable element is the emotional attachment allocated to a specific time and place. Many times we simply walk and experience without reflecting on the history of a location. Here the history is oral, and like most oral history, we are hearing from people who wouldn't normally have a voice in media. If anything, this is the most important opening that locative media offers. Since I have never walked around Toronto, I wish there were more images of a specific block or location. Besides that, I truly respect this project.

In reference to media technology and popular media Crandall states that, “Each has produced instruments designed to collapse distance and time, aiming to close the gap between the perceiving subject and the visible world”(Page 6). A connection or a gaze is built between subjects by the use of these technological objects, but what I find interesting is the way in which military use and popular use seem so much alike. Tracking, in military terms, signifies an enemy. The subject uses detection in order to violently destroy an opponent. A relationship is formed between the object and the subject.

Sassen’s article attempts to unravel how the global economy is made up and how it differs specifically with the use of technology. What telecommunication then creates is the notion of ‘capital mobility.’ Production development draws upon international realms where management control creates a new set of organization in reference to products and in the end...a global financial network. It seems that Sassen’s article focuses more on how the global market is made up, instead of understanding how the term globalization functions outside of economic means and the ‘international regime.’ Globalization can not be looked at as a simple beneficial movement that produces international employment and capital mobility, but instead it needs to be read in a global perspective.

Stepping away from a one dimensional analysis, Frederic Johnson’s chapter on the theory of postmodernism offers an interesting approach to mediating the relationship between ‘existential experience’ and ‘scientific knowledge.’ He leads us to reflect on how we can build a link between both worlds in our modern day society by asking, “Can we in fact identify some ‘moment of truth’ within the more evident ‘moment of falsehood’ of postmodern culture? As he emphasizes later on in the chapter, it is the approach that should be reconstructed. Taking the notion of ‘cognitive mapping,’ I think Johnson is suggesting that we understand our world within languages of representations and our position within its confusion.

We are clearly warned at the beginning of Lefebvre’s article that the concept of production remains purely abstract, but what he does offer however, is an analytical understanding of the shift between productions to social spaces. Keeping in mind that social spaces transcend the notion of object vs. subject, how are they created? And what is its relationship to the process of forming social spaces? Lefebvre suggests that the key is in looking at how objects and subjects are looked at, understood and expressed or lived. But these sorts of interactions aren’t fixed and are determined by a variety of elements because social space works within material space and outside of it. Setting up a binary understanding of this process we have the ‘representation of space,’ which seems to define a particular model used to direct space by those in political and economic power and ‘representational space,’ which I understand as the social relationship between people in a given environment. With this in mind, the negotiation of space is what bears society and how humans interact and it seems that Lefebvre is suggesting that both the ‘representation of space’ and the ‘representational space’ are mutually exclusive and change with time, economics and history. What remains in the center is a number of spaces producing and reproducing themselves with time while concealing some level of ‘truth.’ (…As he states about the products of nature on page 80.) But is his study simply trying to unmask truth or is he questioning the idea that society produces ‘truth’?