Locative Media

Locative media and the digital visualisation of space, place and information
Since its emergence as part of public culture more than 160 years ago, the photographic image has sparked a series of intense debates revolving around its nature, its functions and the ways it is perceived and understood: is it a form of expression or an untainted mechanical representation? How does it communicate? Howdo images reshape our perception of the world? For decades scholars across disciplines of art, linguistics, semiotics, and film and media studies struggled in their attempts at the investigation of still and moving images, their inner characteristics, their systems of meaning and social functions.
In the last decade we have moved into an era of what has been called digital convergence. One impactof digital convergence has been the revamping of interpretative discourses and debates over the changing ontology and epistemologies of digital images, their technologically redefined nature and renegotiated cultural values and social functions. On the same scale of the cultural revolution driven by the emergence of analogue technologies of vision, 160 years later, digital technologies of visionare once again implicated in what many scholars regard as a momentous technological and cultural shift that is profoundly reshaping how we represent and perceive the world.
A key characteristic of this shift is that the digital and cultural changes it produces are nurtured by an unprecedented scale of production, distribution and circulation of images. This process has abruptly transformed waysof engaging with images, thus creating a shift from what might be seen as the voyeuristic practices of those who in analogue times used to be exposed to a selected number of analogue images distributed by a handful of local producers, to those of a contemporary active global community of digital image producers and viewers. According to the 1993 Wolfman Report, 17.2 billion analogue images weretaken in the United States between 1992 and 1993. Today we can easily imagine the latter to be representative of the number of digital images taken in a fortnight by all the electronic eyes distributed around the globe. About 5 million pictures are uploaded to Flickr every day, around 2.5 billion photographs to Facebook each month, and YouTube alone serves 2 billion videos a day to millions ofviewers around the world.
While these numbers alone clearly point to the ever-increasing fascination with and presence of images in our lives, they do not, however, account for the increasing variety of visual practices and applications in which digital images are now embedded. What is really changing has little to do with the increasing numbers of images taken every day and more to do with theincreasingly differentiated forms of photographic image production, aggregation and distribution of which these images are part. MMS, digital maps (Google Earth, Mapquest, Bing Maps), portable media players and content platforms (iPod, Creative Zen, iTunes), games consoles (Wii, PS3, Xbox), smart phones (iPhone, BlackBerry, Google Android), social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, Orkurt), photograph-and video-sharing websites (Youtube, Flickr, Photobucket, Megavideo, Vimeo), location-based applications (Foursquare, Gowalla, Bliin, Google Latitude, Google Panoramio) and devices, countless still- and moving-images editing software (Adobe Premiere, Corel VideoStudio, Cyber Link Power Director, Adobe Photo- shop, Corel PaintShop Photo, HIPerSpace) – these represent just some of the many new‘sites’ of image production, aggregation, distribution and consumption.
This phenomenal evolution is once again twofold: technological, based on a continuous development of digital technologies and image-based software applications; and socio-cultural, based on a range of new social functions and meanings acquired by the image in contemporary interpersonal communications and mediated exchanges. The...