Locative Media & The City

Even though I only get to see the pictures of Erwin’s projects, I often feel an invitation of going into the space of the project and explore. I really appreciate the emphasis on subjective and physical interaction with space in Erwin’s projects, such as MATRIX, FADEI and FADEIII, which are often under a technologically and artistically coded design. At the same time, I find it interesting to think about how cultural elements play their roles in his projects, which are set in real life spaces other than gallery spaces.
When I visit some places, I like to take pictures. I often so concentrated on the LCD screen of my digital camera that my experiences of the space at those specific picture-taking moments have been flatten or frame by the screen and the photo images. Under this kind of situation, my experience of the space is digitized and subtly loses its physical nuances. How does it feel to be in that space? I don’t know how to answer this question, because I am often too occupied by my digital image making of the space with my digital camera. I move my camera and take a shot. The space has then been framed. The changing of frames does remind me of different ways to look at the space. But still “the looks” cannot cover all the physical experience of the space. One may say that using a video camera may be able to help to document that physical sense of space better with depth, movement, sounds and so on…However, I just feel a bit overwhelmed by my forming habit of prioritizing technological documentation of space over the physical interaction with space. Then we are first cyborg not human. This statement may be a bit extreme. However, I feel a bit isolated or suffocated by my life saturated by media technology as a dominant device of experiencing space.

The emergence of webblog is viewed by Ross Mayfield as one of the “most visible of disruptive technologies that make up the social software ecosystem.” While politicians and politically active individuals use blogs as a powerful social networking tool for change, some individuals often turn their blogs into more a “online diary,” in which they talk about their personal daily life. How shall we view this kind of blogs?
Sometimes I read this kind of blogs as personal literature. Some individuals are really great writers. It’s fun and interesting to read their descriptions or viewpoints on the world through their eyes. Through blogs, I read about a Chinese student’s “depressed view” on her “boring” student life in which she sleeps through a spoon-feeding style lecture on Marxism; I read about a French woman’s personal experience of getting lost in Israeli city; I read about a American man dealing with his fear of seeing his sister die of cancer. In some way, it forms an online history project, in which individuals tells their life stories to represent people’ life values and emotions as well as record the changes of the part of the world they are related.

Media culture used to be more about “us” than “me.” In the old times (actually not that long ago), we often have to watch a film in a cinema, have to share a big computer with others, and make phone calls through public phones. But nowadays, it’s more about “me.” Personalized media items like PC, “home cinema,” “my space” and I-pod are getting more and more popular. Individualization becomes a trend in media culture. When I read criticism on commercial media, I often got this sense of individuals being passive audiences or consumers in the overpowering commercial media. Then I get a bit cynical, depressed and tend to think: “So what? What can do about it then?” In this entry, I am not reflecting on specific articles we read but try to gather my thoughts on the layers of individualization. What does “me”(individuality) really mean in Media of every life?

It was interesting to hear more about Toronto Murmur project the past Thursday. I like the idea of using audio device to document people’s personal experiences about specific locations in Toronto, in which individual voices contribute to defining the identity of the city Toronto. The project is also unique in its way of distributing the audio stories through cell phones, so that people can listen to them while they are walking on the streets.
I notice how important “walking experience” is in the audio stories of this project. I have not listened to all the stories, but all the stories I have heard happened when people walked on the streets or when they were going somewhere on foot. One basic element that has made this project happen in Toronto is that people can easily walk to different locations. Toronto being a “walkable” city provides chances for people to stop by somewhere to experience local events as well as enable people from the project to have access to do interviews with individuals on the streets. One of the project creators Shawn Micallef also mentioned how car-based city experience in San Jose effect his process of doing this project in this city. In San Jose, he often needed to spend some time driving to specific locations to do his projects. Being in car to experience the city also hurries people’s gaze at the locations and limits individual engagement with the physical space of a city like San Jose.

I don’t mean to talk about folk song tradition here. But somehow the idea of the mountain folk singing and the technological influence on its disappearance are linked to my thoughts of myself singing Karaoke in the bars or listening to Ipod on the street. Compared with the mountain ordinary people, I tend to speak less through m singing. Is it just my “outsider” romantic thoughts about the mountain people or something else?
Two years ago, I had a chance to film a documentary on the folk song tradition of a Chinese ethnic group called Mosuo in Yunnan Province, China. I spent lots of time listening to and filming people singing folk songs out loud in the beautiful mountain. I learned that Mosuo people once had a tradition, in which people would communicate and even fight against one another when they walk in different mountains. Folk singing used to an essential part for these people to express their voices and pass down their culture from another generation to another. However, this tradition is dying out with television, cell phone and pop music coming into the village. Folk singing is no more cool enough for people to use “talking” in the mountains, though the kids are still singing in the form of pop singing and sharing the “modern” culture that they dream of. They still communicate, though through cell phones.

When one goes on a derive, one is supposed to free oneself from “their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” This freedom of derivé sounds like providing less restriction for one’s movement in a city. I had never had a chance to derivéd until I teamed up with Melissa to do our locative media homework—deriving from Niagara Square and mapping our walk. Melissa and I set out separately on a direction given by flipping a pencil. I didn’t learn how hard it is to derive until I really did it.

I find it a pity that we never really get to talk about the film “Run Lola Run” in the Locative Media class, since I am really interested in how everything related to “locative media” works in the narrative development and the film analysis for “Run Lola Run.” In the film, under the creative script writing of the story, we got to see Lola run three times, with the same stressful goal of gathering 100,000 marks to save her boyfriend’s life within the next 20 minutes. With the slight various elements in the space, time and chance, the plotline or the life of Lola and her boyfriend is totally changed. I would like to share some thoughts about how the elements of space, time and chance interact with each other to resonate with the physical and psychological world of the running Lola. In all these “20 minutes” of Lola’s running, it is hard for either Lola or me to have any heart to map the city. However, interestingly, Lola’s running and halts on the same routines along the streets create a psychological mapping for the part of the neighborhood she ran through. Mapping here for me is a way of interpreting the space with direction and description.

I enjoy reading “Social Space,” though Henri Lefebvre’s writing is a bit too loose to me. It’s hard to catch the entire flow of his thoughts. But one thing he does keep me thinking is the logic of producing space through the production and reproduction of representation, especially visualization. My thoughts started from the “visible” to the “invisible,” then the sounds of “Play Time” (Jacques Tati, 1967) knocked at the door of my mind. Hm…How does sound play its role in representing a place? We often ask: “Hey, how does this place look?” How about “how does this place sound to you?”

It is the first time for me to read something about locative media, I find it difficult to follow some of the concepts in this article “Beyond Locative Media.” However, this article does help me start exploring some major theoretical and practical issues that locative media has encountered on its self-identification and development, such as its autonomy as art, its collaboration with corporation, its relationship with human subject and so on. I am particularly drawn to Marc Tuters’ notion about the complex in the relationship between locative media and human subjects. Tuters pointed out that locative media projects like “Can You See Me Now” and “Milk” involve people in the process of exploring the production and distribution of technology, which makes the project transform from a scientific and technical phenomenon to a social and cultural issue. So to what degree can human subjects involve in the production process of the locative media project? How can human experiences be documented and represented in the process of locative media project? I am also interested in how locative media can benefit people in the society, which should be one of the first questions that I have as a beginner in locative media. I want to explore these questions further in this response paper by looking at the project “Can You See Me Now.”