On Locative Media

An augmented reality design fiction project (1 of 4)

In a ubicomp future, our virtual world is dispersed among the physical world.

Our online identities, social interactions and networks, creative output, self-documentation, organizers, reminders, business and financial interactions, and media consumption are all locative, married to place.

From the massive amounts of data and media, we can customize a series of maps to help us navigate the cyber-physical web. To map our cyber networks and histories to our physical world. To map our virtual identities and visions to out material ones.

On March 21, 2015 Writ Large Press set up one of our “Publish!” installations at the Great Park in Irvine. We were invited by Manifest Destiny: Engaging a Changing Landscape, a group from UC Irvine. We set up typewriters for the public to type up their response to “Where will you be?” then they pinned their future vision to a location in the Orange County map book.

From this data we could create a map that follows one person or a network of friends. We could create a map of a particular interest, business or artist. Maps would themselves be ‘books’ or ‘shows,’ media curated and packaged and sold as art, history, argument or entertainment.

Or we might sit in one place and read that place. We might take in the stories and traces of stories left behind by the people who have passed through it and have called it home. We might try to understand the ways our lives intersect.

Tarragona, Spain. Buildings built on top of ancient ruins. A mural painted on top of buildings.

Through augmented reality we can access to the virtual world as it is mapped on the physical world.

This vision of a cyber-physical web, has the same difficulties of every augmented or virtual reality experience out there — it separates us from the ‘real’ real world. It’s messy and difficult to interpret. It interrupts us and interferes with our social interactions. However my intent is to augment place, make it’s context and history easier to read. To reveal the layers of context-specific media and data, rather than, as is sometimes seems to be the case, to use the physical world as an extended computer screen.

In the following entries, I will write short fictions around a future technology with the following features:

• Allows individuals to tag media to a specific location in a physical space, for example, a booth at a diner.
• Media tags might be short or long form writing, video, images or audio.
• There is no physical tag (like a QR code) left in the physical space.
• Tags may be anonymous or could have a user publicly attached to them.
• When viewing the space through an augmented reality mobile device, you can view all of the tags in a location. Tags appear like stickers on the surface of the material world, inspired by the graffiti method of writing your tag on a “Hello My Name Is” sticker and tagging public walls.
• You can filter the “tag view” to see, for example, only the tags of your friends, or historical information tags, or tags posted before a certain date, or tags of a particular author.
• You can also curate multiple ways of looking at the world. For example, perhaps you have a worldview where you collect love stories from all of the places you visit, or you can create conversations between disparate pieces of media located in the same space, or you could track harassing media. Or perhaps you author a book or film by creating new tags in physical spaces.
• An individual user can choose whether or not to publish the worldview and whether or not to make the worldview editable.

…And addressing some of these questions:

• What if stories are told in multiple spaces? What would fan interaction be like in a physical space? Would it bring in business for the locations? Would it exploit or overburden the resources of a community? Spoilers?
• How does this affect turf wars–gang wars, certainly, but also commercial and cultural ones? How does the turf war play out in physical space? What impact does this have on the community?
• Who is using the activity and location tracking information? Can commercial entities buy add space in the location? Can banks monitor the viability of a local business? Can police and government agencies track fringe or criminal behavior?
• On a person-person level, how easy is stalking? Could you manufacture a relationship based on the tags without ever meeting the person?
• When someone dies or a relationship ends, does this artificially extend the relationship if you could call up a video of the person and layer that over the material world?
• Could this provide a deeper understanding of a locations rich history? How much noise is too much noise?