Locative Media & The City

I am the worst with directions and locating myself within the structures of a city. I don't know how to read maps very well either. I thought it would be fun, amusing, and somewhat informative to try and attempt to reconstruct my understanding of the way that Buffalo is laid out. I took a marker to a piece of paper and furiously scrawled my poor understanding of the streets of Buffalo. Click this link to see the map - Chris Ferrari's Cognitive map! I will also attempt to attach the file to this post so that everyone can see it.

Something I am noticing in this airport In Boston on my way back to Buffalo is that I can not connect to the wifi connection in order to post my thoughts on this wonderful blog. There is a service with excellent reception, but it wants me to pay $7 for an hour of internet time. This led me to some interesting thoughts that we might have grazed over in class. Perhaps we are beating a dead horse when discussing things like the digital divide, but I feel it is important to think about when discussing things like calm technology, ubiquitous computing, and storing/encoding meta information into a physical space.

As I type this, I am enjoying a beer by my lonesome at the JFK airport waiting for my next flight to Boston. I cant help but to think about that movie Playtime and some of its implications. Right now, I feel "at home in the crowd and alone in the crowd." There are some really interesting conversations I am overhearing here, and people EVERYWHERE walking all over the place carrying various bags and items. As we briefly discussed in class, I find myself making up stories about these people. I wonder where they are going and what their stories are. I guess where I'm going with this, is that I am more sensitive to my experiences had I not taken this class. It reminds me of how my experience watching movies has changed through my studies. The question is, are my experiences genuine in the sense that I'm just letting them happen naturally, or am I constantly scanning for hints of things that I am reading about. Im really not sure how I feel about this, but nonetheless it is interesting. It's nice to read about this stuff, but it is even more engaging to find yourself actively living and reacting to these experiences.

I don't want to let go of this idea as it was briefly mentioned by mark in passing when he was giving some comments to William after his paper presentation. I will somehow explore the idea of a "promiscuous data body" and somehow tie it to the movie Minority Report. I was reading through Francesco's blog and noticed he has some similar understandings of the indefinite "paper trail" that we leave behind us.

While we love new technologies that make our lives easier, they tend to take away certain "luxuries" as I will call them. These luxuries include things such as being truly alone, being anonymous (in any application of the word), and having the piece of mind that something you do IS NOT being traced in some way.

This is in response to Sugey's blog post on Pervasive Gaming.
Let the battle begin! ^_^

So if these games somehow change someones experience in a city, I still ask what the value of this actually is. For some reason, I'm thinking of some kind of technology that can change the way that I go to the bathroom. Maybe it might make it more fun, or somehow entertaining, it might even make me visit the bathroom more, but at the end of the day, I'm still just expelling waste materials from my body. This is a natural function of the way I was designed. Its what I have to do. As blunt as it may sound , I'm still doing the same thing even though I am thinking about it in a different way. My analogy (gross, I know) is that people are still in a city having experiences because they are either going to work, visiting a museum, or getting a bite to eat. They are there and doing as they will anyways. Do they need pervasive gaming to alter this? The city is a living organism that has rituals, patterns, and its own way of working (which may include pervasive gaming). What Im getting at is that my experience in the city might change or my bathroom habits might change, but who cares? Why should someone care if it doesn't add to some good?

The other day in Trebor's Sociable Web Media class (I recommend it) the notion of "calm" technology came into play. Theres something that I really like about the name in itself. Upon further evaluation, there also seems to be something pretty scary about the whole thing.

Ubiquitous computing or ubicomp sounds very promising. Perhaps pervasive gamers wont have their faces sucked in by the GPS or Palm Devices if this idea is ever realized. Maybe my milk can be delivered to my house when the refrigerator tells Wegmans that I'm low. Calm technology attempts to put everyday devices into the peripheral of our vision. What happens when they recede too far? In class we discussed how its possible to get reliant on these devices, but what happens when they begin to function without us even knowing it. Surveillance cameras are one thing, but hidden voyeur cams are another. They are out of our sight and out of the mind. They operate in a different sense. With the panopticon, you can always see the main observatory. Calm technology promises to operate without us even knowing or possibly seeing.

Seemingly, these objects inherently possess some kind of illusory properties that might not be so apparent at first glance. Most people can be caught up in the “WOW” factor. Look at this thing and what it does! This is cutting edge emergent technology that if it isn’t embraced, then de-evolution may occur! Lefebvre says, “Objects hide something very important, and they do so all effectively inasmuch as we cannot do without them; inasmuch, too, as they do give us pleasure, be it illusory or real (and how can illusory and reality be distinguished in the realm of pleasure?) (Lefebvre 81).” These objects are adopted because they fulfill what is believed to be a need. It can be said that these objects speak no truth about themselves. They are designed to create an otherwise unnecessary want. A project by Amos Bloomberg, Daniel Perlin, and Brett Schultz entitled, “Needies” immediately comes to mind. The needies NEED you. In an interview with Forbes.com, Amos Bloomberg says "For our target market, Needies are competing for attention with other plush dolls on the Wal-Mart shelf, they're like iPods--objects of desire. Needies will be priced as what they are-- designer goods for a discriminating market willing to spend on something smart (Hoffman.)" This is an interesting commentary on what appears to be the problem. There is in fact a market for those who wish to spend their money on smart objects of desire. The question still remains if these items are necessarily detrimental to a happy and meaningful existence or not.

Looking back on the film we watched by Vertov, Man With a Movie Camera has a lot to say when considering the context in which the film was viewed. After doing some research on what Vertov was up to with this experiment, I came to find out he attempting to abandon what he considered film clichés. He had actively criticized narrative style films supporting Communist ideas and as a result of this he lost his job.

The interesting thing about this movie is that it is not only very experimental for its time, but it was created under the politically oppressive rule of Lenin. This is interesting for artists like ourselves, because although we are free to express ourselves as we want, there is always someone watching. There is always someone who might not agree with what the artist is doing and will stop at no ends to either bring it to negative connotations or shut the operation down entirely. This can be seen with our dear friend Mr. Kurtz on the visual art side of the CFA. We have to be careful with what we are doing or be prepared to accept the consequences of our actions. In our day and age, this might be a bit harder than it used to be.

In summation, Id like to thank everyone for a wonderful semester. A lot of great ideas were flung around, and I think I got a fantastically rich learning experience from our time together.

Where does that leave me with Locative Media? I have been thinking that locative media could be most powerful when considered in tandem with other art practices. For example, my studies in Tactical media in conjunction with locative media might be an interesting way to make an new and interesting artistic statements. Locative media is not only valuable in theory, but also in practice.

The interesting things that I picked up from this class are as follows:

I'm still a little on the fences on whether or not I'm sold on pervasive gaming as art within the locative media field. Using the examples of projects we read about (Pac Manhattan, Can you See me Now?, and Uncle Roy All Around) there seems to be some essential ingredients missing to the mix.

As we spoke about in class, I feel that there can be more done with this type of thinking to add something to our cultural understanding of our environments. Forwardly looking, games could possibly take the role of becoming educational games, or somehow get people to understand something complex using elements of fun and competitiveness. The original Nintendo Entertainment System had a lot of games that were purely fun and had nothing really substantial to add to our lives on a cultural level aside from entertainment. However, games were launched that had academic goals in mind. Back then and to this day a lot of my understanding of simple math comes from educational games that involve statistics, logic, problem solving, and probability. My current video gaming experiences have been teaching me about the value of teamwork, cooperation, communication, and practice. This understanding comes from the next gen consoles having online connectivity and massive online multiplayer experiences in which all players are equipped with a microphone and controller. This enables people to work together in real time. I have found that the teams that talk with one another more are more apt to win matches than those that do not.