Reading the book I imagined a somewhat hacked together rig (electrical tape meets off the shelf) that would let you see the locative art. The art itself conceptually was fun to imagine. Would it look slightly ghostly like some sort of transparent hologram or would it in fact, look real. This handheld viewer seems to fit the bill, although obviously not a head mounted display. There is that weird effect of the motion tracking & positioning being slightly less than perfectly accurate. What did everyone else imagine as the product when looking through the VR/gps headset?

Also, someone needs to do a Cloverfield art piece in NYC. Looking up as you walk down the street you suddenly see teeth.

The city where I live (Fredericton) has free public wifi coverage with access in most areas. Ever since reading SC I've been dreaming up ways to take advantage of the existing infrastructure to add some locative media.

For instance this town does a fair amount of touristy crap based in recreating aspects of local history. How cool would it be for them to offer Virtual tours, information overlays, interpretive augmentation or even a "window into the past" with alternate views of city streets and buildings and people and stuff?

Not really my cup of tea but it seems like the sort of thing people would go for here.

I babble.

I think it would look something like this . It fits in with Mr. Gibson's idea of locative technology being used by the Juxtapoz crowd, though it doesn't look like it has GPS element. Check it out.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: PotatoLove,

Excellent find, PotatoLove. That's practically it, only they're using three cameras to triangulate a small space. Chombo relies on GPS and then, indoors, wireless networks or cell-phone reception to narrow down the coordinates needed to render the art.

That's seriously cool.

I used to go to VR shows in the early 90's so I saw a lot of the tech then, although the locative side of it did not exist. I imagine a simple locative rig being a homebrew PSP with GPS and EZ video eyewear.

Slightly on topic, although not quite up to tech, I noticed Kew gardens were trialing an sms text based guide to the Henry Moore sculptures, although I don't think it was locative text, I think you had to send a text to get a text.

However, I also saw an article somewhere about Disney planning to use Nintendo DS as a guide to its parks, which is likely to be more locative, if not immersive VR.

quote:

Originally posted by Justy:
Excellent find, PotatoLove. That's practically it, only they're using three cameras to triangulate a small space. Chombo relies on GPS and then, indoors, wireless networks or cell-phone reception to narrow down the coordinates needed to render the art.

That's seriously cool.

I agree , grand find.

Is it just me or did you all want him to make the blobs attack the people working?

He has excellent self-restraint.

I would have been all: "Arrr!! Arr!! I'm crushing your head!!! Arr!!!" and stomping around the office.

quote:

Originally posted by Justy:
Excellent find, PotatoLove. That's practically it, only they're using three cameras to triangulate a small space. Chombo relies on GPS and then, indoors, wireless networks or cell-phone reception to narrow down the coordinates needed to render the art.

That's seriously cool.

I should mention that I found the video on the wonderful Wooster Collective blog, which is very much worth checking out.

Do I want to know what "potato love" is?

That'd be a 'no' then...

quote:

Originally posted by ContritePuppy:
Do I want to know what "potato love" is?

It's a reference to Saul Bellow's Herzog. It has nothing to do with inordinate potato consumption, or sexual acts involving potatoes. It's just useless, undirected, vague, love for everyone and everything. It's never spoken of admiringly.

quote:

Originally posted by PotatoLove:

quote:

Originally posted by ContritePuppy:
Do I want to know what "potato love" is?

It's a reference to Saul Bellow's Herzog. It has nothing to do with inordinate potato consumption, or sexual acts involving potatoes. It's just useless, undirected, vague, love for everyone and everything. It's never spoken of admiringly.

I am ashamed that I have never read Herzog.

quote:

Originally posted by ContritePuppy:

quote:

Originally posted by PotatoLove:

quote:

Originally posted by ContritePuppy:
Do I want to know what "potato love" is?

It's a reference to Saul Bellow's Herzog. It has nothing to do with inordinate potato consumption, or sexual acts involving potatoes. It's just useless, undirected, vague, love for everyone and everything. It's never spoken of admiringly.

I am ashamed that I have never read Herzog.

It's a great read, but there's no shame in never having read it.

As an existentialist there is.

I imagine that once you had the headset or other UI device working it would look like this

The increasing distance between fashion shows and anything having to d with clothes one might wear is always fascinating.

Dave, is that your site on your sig? The entry down a ways on "monitor paper"... that stuff looks awesome.

Yup, that's my blog. The guy you see holding the 'monitor paper' is my work collegue Jon.

Sadly the monitor paper is just a laptop connected to a projector which is projecting onto a peice of A4.

Awwww. That's a bummer. Thought you had something incredible there. Nice hoax though. ;-)

The best example of locative art that I know was made by Janet Cardiff in 1999 for the Whitechapel Art Gallery. The Missing Voice (Case Study B) (1999) is one of a series of audio walks she has made in response to a particular location. These site-specific sound works take the listener on a physical and psychological journey. They overlay everyday surroundings with auditory 'hallucinations' in a process which messes with reality itself. Leave the Gallery and enter the peeling splendour of the Whitechapel Library. The story ends forty minutes later at Liverpool Street Station having immersed the walker in the 18th century streets and histories of London's East End, and in the memories and paranoias of a complete stranger.

quote:

Canadian artist Janet Cardiff's work The Missing Voice (Case Study B), ... is part radio play, part performance poetry, part sonic design and part portable installation. In London's Whitechapel Library, I am given a Sony Discman. Through the headphones, a woman begins talking. She seems paranoid. There are sounds of other library-users: scuffling feet, brushes of paper against paper. Soon the woman tells me to go outside. I am led through the rainy, mazy streets for 45 minutes, following a fragmentary, surreal detective story. I am never quite sure if a police siren or a passing lorry is real or only on the CD. At one point gunfire erupts; inside a church, a heavenly choir sings out of nowhere.

The history of recorded music is a history of creating virtual spaces. Classical CD recording, for example, places you in a prime stalls seat in a nonexistent concert hall, by virtue of the way the instrumental sections are distributed in the stereo field. Much abstract sound art is interested primarily in the structure of the virtual space itself. And then there is Cardiff's work, which projects a virtual space - the recorded sounds of a walk through Whitechapel - on to the original space from which it was modelled. You experience two realities at once. And you can begin to play this game afterwards, imagining that the apparently random street scenes around you are carefully choreographed and soundtracked to a mysterious design.
[Steven Poole loses himself in the world of the sound artist
The Guardian, Saturday November 17, 2001]

From an interview with Janet Cardiff (linked above):

quote:

"I think computers and cell phones and discmans are about taking us to different worlds. They are the Tardis of Dr. Who. I think we could all use a little more exercise but I find it stimulating and exciting, the idea of us being wired up to the net and doing dishes at the same time. I love the character in Snow Crash that is constantly wired in. It doesn't dull your senses, it just increases them because you have to experience things in a more multidimensional way."

David Toop writes about Sound Art here:
The Art of Noise