\n Summary In this paper, the two locative storytelling projects [murmur] and Urban Tapestries are analyzed from the perspective of performativity theory, as well as Harold Innis' categories of time- and space-biased media. The author perceives a danger in locative media, in that they may end up with \"a reductivist understanding of space: Eaket places these projects in the category of \"spatial annotation\", using the same terminology as Tuters and Varnelis (and before them, Russell). He includes a nice quote from Nick West of the proboscis group (behind UT): Part of the analysis seems a little lofty, compared with the concrete properties of the [murmur] system, for instance (my criticism of that is presented in \"textopia: designing a locative literary reader\"). But I find the following explanation of the performativity approach compelling: So Eaket is trying to emphasize the temporal dimension of place-based meaning - that meaning is something that is articulated not just in space but also in time, and the meanings attached to places are shifting and fleeting articulations in time. In other words, cities are \"patterns in time\" - and spatial annotation needs to take this into account, that what is recorded are temporal articulations which give temporal \"snapshots\" of the space. Following this argument, Eaket proposes to view projects like [murmur] and UT as \"'state spaces' whereby the data set defines not all the possible states of a complex system (as the term is commonly used), but rather everything that has been said about a particular place\" (12). In his conclusion, Eaket discusses the two projects as hypertexts, and here he makes some interesting remarks regarding links. He refers to the idea of spatial hypertext: \"As locative media projects like [murmur] and Urban Tapestries have matured and expanded, they become less like spatial annotation and more like place-oriented spatial hypertexts (cf. Shipman & Marshall 1999).\" (20) This use of words is very similar to the ones I have used to discuss textopia - at least in some drafts, I have been calling it \"place-based hypertext\" - but I have discarded these terms due to the absence of a link structure. In this light, Eaket's reasoning is interesting to me: So, basically, if we are to think of these projects as hypertexts we shouldn't think of links between nodes - in the material sense of a digital traversal function that literally takes you (or rather, your browser) from one text node to another - but rather a kind of shared set of semantic meanings? That is a nice thought, but what does it mean in practice? Should we consider [murmur] (and textopia) as hypertext systems without links (they do not have them, in the traditional sense) - or should we consider them something else? I have opted for \"locative literature\" so far, am still not convinced that hypertext is the appropriate frame to view this phenomenon in. Eaket states as a conclusion:\"These projects risk radically simplifying spatial dynamics and the subject into mere points on a grid, as well as reducing the complex interplay of mind, body and the social environment to sets of descriptive web pages delivered from a server. [...] When locative media projects become too reliant on data-driven representations and spatial coordinates, they fall back into a space-bias, providing content without context and information in lieu of meaning. The two projects I will be looking at here, [murmur] and Urban Tapestries, tend to avoid these pitfalls by incorporating performativity and social practices into their designs.\" (p. 4-5)
\n“To the extent that the annotations in such a system become spatial, it makes the authors of those annotations the co-creators of a new virtual vernacular that will more and more shape the shared experience of the city … The challenge is to find ways to embed cultural intelligence within the built environment – or, more precisely, alongside and within the pathways that we traverse from day to day” (Nick West, \"URBAN TAPESTRIES: the spatial and social on your mobile\", p.4
\nThe performativity of space can be understood as the “acting-out” of a place through social practices, specifically actions and utterances, which contextually and through repetition determine its functional meaning within a meshwork of social habitus (Bourdieu 23). Performativity in/of the built environment means the interrogation, reworking, and iterative deployment of signs and practices; this viewpoint implies that the city is not so much a normative set of objects, but rather a system which is discursively produced and materializes over time via iterative processes and actions. [...] The reified materiality of the built environment tends to blind us the fact that it is a “pattern in time” resulting from multiple acts of human agency, discourse, decision making and action (Johnson 76). Likewise, the performative model of the construction of meaning stands counter to standard representation, which we use synchronically (within a period in time) but rarely think about diachronically (across periods in time). [...] In this sense, we might say that the performative, in its ritual, temporal and discursive aspects is a form of meaning production that is time-biased, relying as it does on localized speech acts over a relatively long duration. Conversely, the standard view of static representation which allows us to manipulate symbols readily, without having to consider localized variations or past usage, tends to exert a spatial bias since standardization allows for faster and wider communicability. When we try to define what a place “is”—that is, to determine its meaning—we automatically run into problem of choosing between static representations which risk reductionism and embodied performativity, which is much less easily codified. (11-12)
\nWhat narrative spatial annotation projects do is map places linguistically in multiple dimensions at once, contributing to an overall understanding of the texture of a space. This texture, I would argue, constitutes a kind of state space that iteratively and aggregately serves to define its meaning in practice. (13)
\nConceiving of these projects as hypertexts risks falling into the same navigational metaphors that plague the Web and some databases more generally; such metaphors can lock us into the same space-biased framework that [murmur] and UT attempt to critique: static representations that ignore relational patterns, iterative changes and the social construction of meaning. While search engines, Web 2.0 applications and the Semantic Web attempt to overcome some of these difficulties, the problem is in many ways tied to our governing model of synchronic representation. Instead of links and lexia, edges and nodes, perhaps we should begin to think of links as a shared set between two state spaces (pages or lexia) that are performatively produced linguistically and temporally emergent in terms of aggregate meaning. (p. 20)
\nWhat might a database of meanings based on iterative performativity and socially emergent meaning (as opposed to static representations) look like? That question remains largely an open one, although I believe that metaphors like state spaces and spatial textures can help us think this question through. Locative projects like [murmur] and Urban Tapestries provide interesting case histories in the social production of meaning: meaning that spans both the real world and the imaginary spaces of digital media. Such projects are simultaneously time and space-based media, depending as they do on material sites and digital, narrative descriptions. As hybrid media, I feel they still have a great deal to tell us about how we ascribe meaning to places and objects over time, as well as providing parallel insights into the structural processes of meaning-production itself. (p. 21)
\n
This book chapter is an interesting discussion of a locative photo-sharing website called bliin.com. While not structured as a game in itself, the author discusses this site as a playground where both play and games may occur. He works from Montola's analysis of how pervasive games challenge the spatial, temporal and social boundaries of traditional games, and suggests this also happens with bliin.
\nHad a look at the website, and it looks dominated by dutch users (no public submissions elsewhere in europe, as far as i could see) - but the conclusions should be transferrable to similar services like gowalla our foursquare, facebook places etc.
\nHe suggests that bliin sets up a \"hybrid space\" between physical and digital space, in that \"movements and activities in bliin take place in both spaces at the same time. [...] Hybrid space abrogates the distinction between the physical and the digital through \"the mix of social practices that occur simultaneously in digital and in physical spaces\" (de Souza e Silva, 2006, p. 265).\" (p. 60)
\nTemporally, de Lange suggests that bliin.com is immersive, and challenges the temporal limits of game/play through its social character. He relates this to \"narrative self-publishing\" and further to de Certeau's ideas about tactics and walking in the city, coined as \"read/write urbanism\" by some Greenfield & Shepard.
\nFinally, he claims locative media expand social boundaries because they \"add a spatial sense of co-presence\" (where older technologies of long-distance communication only offered a temporal sense of co-presence). And since bliin allows interaction with strangers, this expands the social boundaries.
\nFinally the author speculates that because the locative medium \"makes us constantly aware that almost every place is suffused with human experiences and stories [...] may leave less room for a uniquely individual instant experience\", in other words \"the end of serendipity\". Not so convinced by this, but more interested in the introduction of the term \"geosophical\":
\n\n\n...Bliin adds a playful element of conquest. Earth can be mapped all over again. Not geographically but in a \"geosophical\" way, as J.K. Wright proposed (1947, p.9; also mentioned in Cresswell, 2006, p.21). Wright [...] stretched the definition of what constitutes geographical knowledge by acknowledging that artistic practices and local folk knowledge are different but also valuable ways to understand places. [...] Hybrid mobilities, playful immersion and pervasive co-presence in location-based platforms such as Bliin almost naturally bring such \"geosophical\" knowledge to the fore. These elements afford users the ability to inscribe their physical and digital environments with their own routes and experiences and get absorbed in playful ways of place making while in the enduring company of other people. Locative media open up new possibilities for mapping unknown territories while at the same time creating new terrae incognitae. (pp 67-68)
\n
Well put!
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\nThis chapter deals with the different ways of addressing the reader of a fictional work, typically through the use of the second pronoun, 'you'. Walker is particularly interested in how this is changed in the move from traditional media (literature) to electronic media such as hypertext and computer games.
\nShe starts out, however, by quoting Irene Kacandes saying that addressing the reader is an \"irresistible invitation\" - in the sense that if someone on the street calls out \"Hey, you!\" one cannot help but turn one's head. Walker later problematizes this, pointing out that the role that the \"you\" implies in a text may feel like a \"forced invitation\" or even a violation, and that the reader may reject that role. I think there is much to this idea: The 'you' is a strong invitation from the start, there is an urge to figure out what this 'you' role is, what does the text want from me? But as the initially openness of the address becomes closed in by the premises of the text, the reader may reject it - and furthermore, as the 'you' is all the more prevalent in culture ('you' the consumer, 'you' the voter etc) and in computer game marketing in particular (\"you are a lone marine stranded on mars\") the 'you' may be getting worn out as a special effect.
\nParticularly interesting, in relation to electronic texts, is what Kacandes calls \"literary performative\" - a phrase that literally describes what the reader is doing: \"you are now reading this\". In computer games, says Walker, \"it's Kacandes' narrative performative, but swollen almost past recognition. You have to enact the text's performative in order to play\" (94). So when afternoon. a story asks \"Do you want to hear about it?\", \"it's almost impossible to keep your distance to that address. If you click your mouse in answer to the question posed to you, you accept your role; you become \"you\". You perform an involuntary performative\" (96).
\nSo I'm thinking, how does this relate to the 'you' in locative literature? Ruset's \"Now you are the one walking here\" is clearly a variation of literary performative - if the reader hears those words, it is because now she is the one walking there. And in accomplished texts such as Rusets, Kielland's and Johansen's, the 'you' role is kept sufficiently open to allow the reader to fill it without feeling violated. Whereas Næss' version which puts specific thoughts in the head of the reader, is imposing and brutal and doesn't work so well because of that.
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Context awareness means to take the users' context such as location, time, objective, community relations, etc., into account when browsing, searching, annotating, and linking. Attributes constituting the context of the user may be sensed automatically and/or be provided by the user directly. When mobile, the user may obtain context-aware hypermedia support on a variety of small and medium sized computing platforms such as mobile phones, PDAs, tablet PCs, and laptops. This paper introduces the HyCon (HyperContext) framework with an architecture for context-aware hypermedia. The architecture includes interfaces for a sensor tier encapsulating relevant sensors and represents the hypermedia objects in structures based on the XLink and RDF standards. A prototype called the HyConExplorer created with the framework is presented, and it is illustrated how the classical hypermedia features such as browsing, searching, annotating, linking, and collaboration are supported in context-aware hypermedia. Among the features of the HyConExplorer are real-time location-based searches via Google collecting hits within a specified nimbus around the user's GPS position. 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\nThis paper is an interesting report on using mobile phones to create pervasive theatre. The authors appear to be mostly responsible for the technical setup, whereas the drama part has been created by a theatre group they collaborate with, and thus the paper is more concerned with the conceptual design and evaluation than any form of drama analysis, but is still quite interesting.
\nThe system they have made is said to handle a variety of inputs, and be capable of delivering a variety of outputs. However, this seems to depend on more specific implementation. The ones presented here seems to rely primarily on semacodes for input, and audio and text messages (delivered through some JavaME application) as output.
\nAmong intersting findings:
\nIn their first case, a significant number of users requested more interaction with human actors, and a larger degree of personal influence on the play... not surprising!
\nSecond case: They put a lot of emphasis on place-specificity. Seems convincing, could be related to Messeter's article on \"Place-Specific Computing\". They also recommend \"not making the course through the city too complex.\" (p. 27).
\nIn their third case, which is located in a forest rather than a city environment, they note:
\n\n\n\"Working with Mobile Urban Dramas for nature areas and not for cityscapes turned out not to be a limitation but rather an advantage. A forest or a lake can also be very dramatic settings; and when the children walk through the forest and hear the plaintively voices of the trees in the play, it is an advantage that the voices seem to emanate from one tree for one pupil, and from another tree for another pupil, depending on the position of the children. (p.29)\"
\n
In conclusion, they say that their development plans include
\n\n\n\"...a general reconnaissance of what the possibilities are – technical as well as dramaturgical – when designing mobile urban dramas. Further, the plans include a larger degree of user influence; e.g. giving the users the opportunity to make more elaborate and detailed choices in the story line. Moreover, different types of sensors and actuators are being integrated in the environment to activate the physical surroundings of the play - such as the buildings and interior of the city – to become interactive. In this manner, the surroundings will to a greater extent become an active part of the play, e.g. by means of slamming doors, showers of water, ambient sounds etc. This may give the audience interactive experiences using the city as an interactive theatrical scenography.\" (p. 30)
\n
Should be very interesting to follow these guy's ongoing work!
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\nIn this article, Rita Raley is concerned with various poetic experiments that use mobile media, in particular SMSs - from SMS poetry competitions to public screen installations.
\nRaley takes as a starting point the prevalent debates about the \"end of reading\" in \"our over-networked culture\". Countering this, Raley states:
\n\n\nWe have been here before; indeed, one could say that reading has always been ending, in the sense that it implies a practice that is proper, correct, and standard. New genres, and new media, are by nature deviations and a deviation can always be freighted with ideological significance. [...]
\nTo legitimate poetic uses of mobile media, however, one need only think in terms of art-as-techne, which “appreciates” practices of making and construction rather than art objects with putatively objective aesthetic properties. But we might push further to identify the paradigmatic qualities of mobile media poetics and thereby articulate the practice as one that has not only physical constraints (character limits) but repeatable elements, which signals the beginnings of a mode, if not also a genre and a tradition. Reading in the networked environment particular to mobile media quite often involves a variety of cognitive and bodily processes not necessarily duplicable with a print text. “Reading” is thus “not reading” in the sense that the visual processing of linguistic signs is not necessarily granted priority over touching, listening, moving. (p.1, my emphasis)
\n
I struggle a little with what Raley means by \"mode\" - it seems that she is not only trying to promote an understanding of mobile texting as its own kind of textual/verbal genre, but something that goes beyond the verbal altogether. But it seems a little unclear: touching - sure, i touch my touchscreen to navigate in the text messages, but so what? I touch my paper books in order to flip the pages as well. Listening? No, I rarely listen to text messages (even if my phone does contain text-to-speech functionality). But the \"moving\" part I can understand, and I guess that is the important part here. More on that towards the end.
\nRaley starts with the \"literary uses of mobile media\", in sms poetry competitions etc. She points out that SMS poetry implies a form of \"controlled reading\" because the text doesn't fit all in the screen at once, but scrolls from top to bottom. (Well sure, on oldfashioned phones they did, but not since iphone came along...) She then notices the importance of \"movement and place, necessarily crucial elements of mobile media\":
\n\n\nCars on a city street and connecting railway stations: as we are reminded, SMS poems might be written and read while one’s body is in motion, the temporal gap between production and consumption closed so as to approach nearly synchronous communication and to produce the effect of liveness. (p.2)
\n
Reviewing some literature on mobile media, she emphasizes the importance of poetics:
\n\n\nAs a critical language, poetics brings to the fore not only the techniques and technologies of construction – bringing a poem into being – but also the materiality of mediation and issues of performance. Mobile media poetic practices can be oriented both toward the single screen, as with the SMS poetry competitions, and large-scale public projection spaces. What is most compelling, and indeed transformative, about poetic practices that involve large-scale public interaction is the twinning of poiesis (making) with aesthesis (perception), which suggests a communicative, relational, inter-subjective aesthetic experience. [15] As we will see, SMS-enabled performances such as TXTual Healing precisely enact such an experience, incorporating the viewer’s responses into the signifying field of the text: response both in the sense of perception and in the sense of co-production, contributing to the text that drives the work. (p.2, my emphasis)
\n
Raley has a rather clever little paragraph about \"electronic English\", that is the particular dialect used in text messages where:
\n\n\nWhat is inefficient and not useful is removed in order to form new dialects wherein all that matters is a basic meaning, a standard communicational template (see: Controlled and Simplified English). However, it is by no means the case that a resolute literalism precludes the figurative. Just as the literary experiments with Basic English were designed to illustrate the rhetorical flexibility of an 850- word, basic language system, so, too, do texts such as “@ 1ST URE MSGS XITED ME” remind us that all languages, all symbolic information systems, contain the potential for deconstruction and play. This, at least, is not a subject for db8. (p.3)
\n
Discussing \"Poetics in motion\", Raley emphasises the liveness of text messaging, pointing out that
\n\n\nInterpretation must necessarily be affected by the environment in which one receives a “live” text message. A live, albeit asynchronous, text creates situations in which the chance meeting of text and reading environment would produce unexpected effects and affects. Receiving a poem about rail travel while waiting in a station brings environment and landscape within the signifying field of a text, as would receiving a text message-poem entitled “Quiet is the New Loud” while sitting in a library [...]. The chance meeting of text and reading environment, or reading circumstances, depends upon the disjunctive experience of receiving a text itself, which interrupts the flows and rhythms of both activity and inactivity. It is this element of chance and the unexpected that makes liveness paradigmatic for mobile media poetics, while at the same time complicating formal analysis. [...] For this reason, mobile media poetics must be understood as a practice, one with clear analogies to performance and conceptual art. (p.3)
\n
Raley describes a project linking up locations - Poem points - in Leeds and Antwerpen, from which users could send text messages to each other. \"In an exercise of transpositional geography, Stadschromosomen and CityPoems linked locations in Leeds and Antwerp, such that participants could use their mobile devices to reflect upon their particular location as well as the location of their urban counterpart.\" (p.3) Relating this to projects like [murmur] and YellowArrow, Raley calls these
\n\n\ninstances of geo-annotation, the composition and archiving of micro-texts that record an individual’s impressions of place. [...] We might situate all such artistic projects under the rubric of “City Poems,” subjective atlases that emphasize the situatedness of the users’ texts and their ties to place. (p. 4)
\n
Not sure - personally I prefer \"locative literature\", but what's in a name.
\nRaley refers to Philip Auslander in speaking about liveness in a way which \"does not presume a binary between the live or real on the one hand and the mediatized on the other. In other words, in this context, liveness cannot be stabilized ontologically or practically as either live or mediatized. [1] It is instead mixed or hybrid.\" (p.4) I think that Auslander is a good reference, not just for thinking about liveness in the sense of simultaneous communication over distance - as in phone conversations, text messages or \"live broadcasts\" - but also when thinking about locative media, in which message and receiver are spatially co-present, but not temporally - what Auslander elsewhere has termed \"live recording\" (similar to lip-syncing and playback in concerts).
\nRaley goes on to an interesting discussion about art installations that use large, public displays:
\n\n\nUsing a building façade as a projection screen during these performances, Notzold distributes numbers to passersby and invites them to text messages that fill in the writing spaces he demarcates with speech bubbles or geometric shapes. In this context, the cell phone becomes a device to explore public space, rather than a device to remove oneself from it, or a means of enveloping oneself in what Michael Bull has called mobile media bubbles. Bull recalls prior readings of the church as “a zone of immunity for the citizen, an ordered place in which the subject could feel secure. [But today, he notes] this zone of immunity and security is a mobile one, existing between the ears of iPod users” and, we might add, in the invisible zone comprised of a user and her handheld device. [4] A text message can both create and puncture this zone of immunity, this zone of intimacy. (p.4)
\n
I relate this to some similar projects I have seen that put twitter messages on public display. Taina Bucher has a nice blog post about these called \"Out of context - tweets gone wild\".
\nIn the final sections, Raley returns to the idea of mobile poetics as surpassing the verbal.
\n\n\n...reading in the strict sense of processing linguistic signs is only one of the activities one performs when engaging the work; there is also listening, watching, sensing, remembering, playing, and of course texting. In this respect they expand the signifying field from the purely textual to the multi-sensorial. A full analysis of the poetic uses and effects of mobile media, then, must account for form, content, code, context or location, as well as somatic response. (p.5)
\nWhen we participate in an SMS project or performance, we are making, using, decoding linguistic signs, but we are “not reading” in the sense that these activities are not necessarily given priority over seeing, listening, touching, and bodily movement. Just as Marshall McLuhan saw electronic media as a “total media environment” and therefore a challenge to the hegemony of vision, we might come to understand literary practices with mobile and networked media as, paradoxically, a challenge to the hegemony of words. (p.6)
\n
On a general level, I agree; and in particular when thinking about the relation between mediated text, liveness and the situatedness of the reader (that is, the place and the physical surroundings).
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Summary
\nThis paper has a broad scope, reviewing a large body of literature on design research, with a special focus on Research by Design. The main thesis is twofold: the author argues for a more \"holistic view\" of practice in research, by which he seems to mean that one needs to consider the many ways in which practice is an important part of research outside of the design field (e.g. clinical research, engineering etc). At the same time, the author urges design researchers to be more specific and detailed about the relations between practice and research.
\nThe author starts by going through various concepts and their definitions, criticizing terms such as \"Practice Research\" and \"Practice-led research\" for being too broad in scope and poorly defined. He seems to favour the term \"Research by Design\", defined as \"A special research mode where the explorative, generative and innovative aspects of design are engaged and aligned in a systematic research inquiry.\" (p. 11)
\nIn section 2, Sevaldson goes on to review a series of contributions to the questions of practice-based methodology both within the design field, and in other fields (e.g. activity theory and actor-network theory).
\nNote to self: I like the concept \"fuzzy fields of investigation\" (p.16). other concepts discussed: Grounded theory and \"Wicked Problems\" (p. 17).
\nIn section 3, the author broadens the scope even more, and discusses the \"world views\" (by which I think he means to refer to epistemology) in design research. The discussions of important concepts here feeds into the last section, in which Sevaldson outlines his suggestions for more specific models of the the relations between research and design practice. He outlines nine variables, by which design research can be conceived:
\n1. Descriptive vs Normative vs Generative Research
\n2. Basic vs Applied vs Clinical research
\n3. Library - Lab - Field - Gallery
\n4. Process oriented - Result oriented
\n5. Stable vs dynamic
\n6. 1st - 2nd - 3rd person
\n7. top-down vs bottom-up theory building
\n8. Retrospective vs contemporary vs forecasting
\n9. Isolated vs contextualised
\nBy combining these variables in different ways, the author is able to set up a series of different \"prototypical design research processes\". This is to detailed to summarize here, but the variable setup seems like a very interesting starting point for conceptualizing one's own research by design.
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