An interesting thing happens upon leaving. Another happens on return. You can leave a place that you are familiar with and as that happens it changes. The place becomes memory, fragments, layers, charged, agitated even as fading back from immediacy. The same place upon return is buoyed by change in context, a sense of collision of what has been remembered and the sheer physicality and its most and least mundane detail. This again is layers. The most immediate example would be when you leave home to go on a trip and then come back. This is also a key in near future applications of locative media. One of the new frontiers is context and another is adjustable data and interaction. An issue in locative media has been the “bowling alley conundrum.” Essentially you go to a location and by latitude and longitude an augmentation of that moment and that space occurs. This is fascinating and important, but it is also static. The trigger is the same the second time, it is the same the longer you linger after it is complete, then it resets (like spatial data bowling pins). What if the longer you stay there is more layered information that triggers? Files and information accumulate suggesting an awareness of your presence. What if it was different depending on if you are coming north to begin with or south upon return? What about the angle you turn and the elevation you are at and how it changes what you are seeing and your vantage point? This is made possible with a larger database of information and a deeper look at immersion and the place itself. A conversation of sorts emerges; immersion becomes a deeper yet more organic sense of the immediate and the augmented space. What about the time of day and of the year? This can easily be used to alter what is heard in a realistic exploration of a space, its past permutations and its usage patterns in a living city and/or society. Kids play in the morning and shops open. Certain events occur at night, and immersive sounds would occur in different weather and types of human interaction in that place. A physical place is charged and layered, but so is the nature of our individual interaction with the world around us. It is not just returning home after time away. It is more than saying goodbye and taking a last glance. That is important but is like Walden Pond to ecology; it is the immediate, the in-your-face beautiful, the obvious. The really interesting tension begins to emerge when you look at spaces that are unfamiliar, utilitarian, passed as something in the background. The mundane place is charged by semiotics, by physical detail, by previous experience devoid of sentimentality. This place changes as one sees detail move into focus, and interaction is sensory but is also of memory, expectation, context, a heightened awareness of detail by the distance it is interacted with, and it all is constantly shifting. Our field of vision is a process of continual multi-tiered number crunching. Bicameral sight is always being processed, interpreted, reacted to, focus adjusted, comparison made, it simply is always running even when it isn't about emotion and obvious beauty. This is the key to the bowling alley conundrum. It is also locative media. The engine in the software will work with a similar process. As one moves through a space the artwork will adjust based on the length of time spent at a place, upon return, upon how one moves. The space can thus be “read” far more deeply in much greater immediacy as though intuitive dialog as opposed to spots of static augmentation. The individuality of each person and their choices, interest, path and experience will come to the fore much more as the artwork and space as revealing greater depths and shifts of information as their movements, eyes and minds do the same. A study once revealed that patients who had recently regained their vision saw a flat plane in their field of vision. The doctors were puzzled. What was realized was that after a lifetime of partial sight there was no “table”, “television”, “pile of papers”. Sight is an interface of concepts, language, and space. The patients learned what objects were and their names and their sight gradually became nuanced and depth became clear and familiar as the rest of us take for granted. Locative media has the potential to do the same. The applications can also work well with architecture, history, education, science, etc. Augmentation of space is moving into deeper levels of interactivity and real-time interaction with layers, stories, information, history and sight. Sight is a linguistic, conceptual, spatial, and emotional interface. Interaction is individual and never the same twice, not in movement, not in perspective and not in expectation. It also integrates all of these things so to seem simple and immediate. The work is increasingly to do the same with great variety of forms, points of view and levels of play with what is available to interpret and experience. A wild example is a project I am developing that will have the participants moving in a section of a city wearing simple lenses with small computers connected and worn like the battery packs worn by reporters (these will eventually be small as hearing aids). As a person moves through an area they can adjust what layers of history that they want to augment their experience of the space with (layers researched about the place and its history, inhabitants, locations, architecture, etc.). As a departure from my other work it will be visual augmentation and sound. Sound files will trigger narratives and sounds that will adjust based on length of time at a location, movement, time of day and return. If the person selects, say, 1940-1950, there will be images of lost buildings’ façades overlaid in sections of their field of vision with information (both data and metaphorical) about what once was and what is now in the present. They also can adjust what percentage of their field of vision will be augmented. The way one moves through a place is never constant, nor is how it is seen, nor is the memory in time. This is also true of the places themselves. Spaces are imbued in time with shifting physical characteristics, effects of time, of events, of rebuilding, of decay. The same is true for our human sight and its interface. Even the emotional blankness felt upon seeing a place like a simple gas station or light post is imbued, chosen, and layered with memory, language and association, also an interface. The unfamiliar place is met in the same way as is the familiar, it is just the data that differs, the linkages, the associations selected and combined. Locative media can be the same, but from the place and what it has to tell in time and permutation. A conversation emerges, one deep and immediate. Immersion and augmentation are not artifice, they are intuitive and organic, be it at Walden pond beauty, city street unfamiliar or the gas station down the street. |
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