Off a post in the informative Urban Tapestries feedback blog (which is good and refreshing reading for anyone considering a public trial of new mobile technology), I discovered Simon Pope's location-based media blog. Pope, who did some evocative "site specific" (in a truthful and nonliteral sense) work for the Venice Bienniale, has recently decided to take a closer look at location-based technology. Hence the blog.
A favorite entry
10. Previous notes: Why is location deemed so important right now?
I can tell i'm not in a specific location easily enough: if i watch the tiny symbols in the bottom left hand corner of my phone's screen, they're jumping about, turning from red to green to blue, displaying vertical bars of increasing length.
[...]
it knows that i'm moving, even though, whenever i look up, i see the same retail units: curry's, uci, tesco, morrisons, blockbuster...
the same location smeared all over the place.
Here we get to the significance of the name Pope has chosen for his blog: locative media. It's about locomotion as much as it is about location. I suspect Pope would refuse any hard and fast barrier between the two: part of a place is how you get there. I like his discussion of the differences between sedentary knowledge - the knowledge about places - and ambulatory knowledge - knowledge of the linkages between them. And I also like the way he jumps between the physical and the intangible, to see walking as hyperlink, and "location" as something that can be smeared like paint.
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