Thursday, September 29, 2011

Slice the Orange, Cut the Pastry, Anarchy is for Beginners

So as for our reading assignment, I chose to read the Headmap Manifesto, a pretty long, but worthy read because it gets a lot of it's points straight and to the point, considering the massive material that is complied.

Here are a couple of ideas that stood out as I drudged through this art manifesto:
-Locative media tries to distance itself from net art
-We are using mobile devices to coordinate places itself from net art
[From our eye, we can only see limited space around us, not what the mobile can function as an aerial eye of the land surrounding us.]
-"We make money, not art."
[I've heard of this quote before somewhere. If the possibility of researching new technologies in order to further advances to faster labor, thinking, etc., then we could find quicker ways of making works of art. We can build machines that are more efficient and quicker than a labor's/artist's hand.]
-Locative media is either annotative (virtually tagging the world) or phenomenological (tracing the action of the subject of the world.)
-It's a social knowledge on a landscape. Audiowalks, space is agitated, history of the place played back to them (alive without unseen history, stones, layers).
[Hearing someone's voice through these audiowalks gives you a sense of perspective of history, a sense of visuals that are stuck within the location's past, but time changes, people shift, but the voice telling it's history will be stuck, reliving the past.]
-Web lacks concept of identity. You may have an address (email, phone #, function as a persistent extension, of you, collecting and facilitating the exchange of messages), but they don't facilitate more sophisticated transactions on your behalf. Webpage is state entity, a symbol, rather, than a transaction mediating entity.
[I feel that this is a pretty good description of the web, which describes that the web doesn't have a brain, it cannot function as a full human being, but it can replicate it. A human being grows, thinks for itself, shares ideas; the web does all of the same things, expect we're the ones making it function. It lacks depth in human emotion and voice. It does not sympathize or empathize. It's function is to give a stifle of external communication that we could not otherwise get when communicating with an international audience. The web is a rational being, not a romantic being.]
-Leave a note at a geographic location.
[There are certain things that we psychologically leave traces of ourselves geographically in terms of one's memories, but physically, we input a memory into a human being, thus leaving a "note" on the person's life. Sometimes the note, whether it be a sticky note or a permanent scar to name a few, it can stick with us for long periods of time or not much.

In terms of geographic location, as populations change, buildings rise up or blown away for any reason, the only thing that is left of the "note" is how we interpret it in terms of size, event, or meaning of loss or gain (Holocaust museums, concentration camps, World Trade Center, hospital where a birth of a newborn was).]

I also read Locative Media in Brazil by Andres Lemos, which focuses on how location-based technologies could improve social networking, shifting towards to a industrial labor economy, and spreading ideas in a now, newly industrialized country. Compared to the reading of the Headmap Manifesto, seemed to be quite engaged in the reading because of it's discussion on how a developing country is expanding its technological endeavors. Here again, are some points that I found interesting in this article:

-Place is no longer a problem of accessing and exchanging information in cyberspace "up there", but an opportunity to see things "down there".
-Public interventions could occupy advertising panels, creating tension between the market and the "world of life."
-Electronic annotation is like electronic graffiti that allows people to speak about their urban environment.
-Locative media could generate forms of social appropriation, citizenship, and sociability through locative media.
-The desire to find and locate everything is a way to rationalize space and to shut down the possibility of surprises. It's technical way to fight the fear of the stranger and the imponderable.

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