Land­scape, Cul­ture, and the Phe­nom­e­nol­ogy of Tech­no­log­i­cal Me­di­a­tion


Symposium:


Session Title:
  • Site Specifics: Mobile Media Art and the Contexts of Place

Presentation Title:
  • Land­scape, Cul­ture, and the Phe­nom­e­nol­ogy of Tech­no­log­i­cal Me­di­a­tion

Presenter(s):


Venue(s):


Abstract:

  • Panel: Site Specifics: Mobile Media Art and the Contexts of Place

    Nei­ther re­flec­tion upon our re­la­tion­ship to the space sur­round­ing us nor tech­no­log­i­cal me­di­a­tion of this re­la­tion­ship are new. How­ever, GPS-en­abled tech­nolo­gies and their grow­ing avail­abil­ity in the past decade have de­cid­edly changed the ways we nav­i­gate, vi­su­al­ize, quan­tify, and ul­ti­mately com­pre­hend the world we move through. This paper will re­flect upon these changes through con­sid­er­a­tion of var­i­ous philo­soph­i­cal per­spec­tives, tech­no­log­i­cal de­vel­op­ments, and ex­am­ples of artis­tic prac­tice that uti­lize loca­tive media, in­clud­ing my pro­jects The C5 Land­scape Ini­tia­tive and Per­cep­tions of the Com­mut­ing Ethno­g­ra­pher. The grad­ual or sud­den ac­cu­mu­la­tion of all things tech­no­log­i­cal, from hard­ware to soft­ware, has gone hand in hand with a shift in think­ing about the human con­di­tion from a phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal aware­ness to an in­ter­sub­jec­tive con­scious­ness. (That shift has also co­in­cided with the grow­ing ur­ban­iza­tion of the world’s pop­u­la­tion: as of 2008, over half of the world’s pop­u­la­tion lives in towns and cities.) This in­ter­sub­jec­tiv­ity is in­creas­ingly me­di­ated by the ever shrink­ing, trans­portable, and in­stan­ta­neous media with which we have be­come en­twined. Loca­tive media have be­come in­creas­ingly lo­ca­tion-aware and com­merce-ready, po­si­tion­ing us in the ge­o­graph­i­cal and cul­tural land­scape. In other words, they are more and more aware of our phys­i­cal and psy­cho­graphic re­la­tion­ship to the world around us. The paper will ex­plore the na­ture of our phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal re­la­tion­ship to this tech­nol­ogy and the world that it me­di­ates.

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