Locative Media & the Possibility of Place
A “turning point”, for me, is when new technology lines up with larger historical shifts, unrelated to or predating by decades, the so-called “tipping point”. For example, I see a contemporary turning point in the new location technology of The Universal Address System and related Natural Area Code (NAC) System, developed by Dr. Xinhang Shen. His NAC Geographic Products, Inc., is a Canadian company founded in Toronto in 1995, and it is not simply a coincidence that this new mapping language was developed in Canada during that country’s peak crisis over: “Is there a place called Canada?” And: “how can we reference a country comprised of such different group identities?”
“How can we reference a country comprised of such different group identities?”Since the crises over unity of the 1990s, Canada has emerged as a pioneer in practicing how one place can belong to many. This multicultural country’s different constituent nations of the English, French, and aboriginal, as well as recent immigrants – each with their own history and structures of knowledge – have uniquely negotiated a way to collectively co-exist. The Canadian example of mediating between hard-won individual freedoms and the collective rights of radically different groups will undoubtedly come to be studied more and more closely in this our young but old, conflict-ridden, globally multi-cultural, twenty-first century.
How Canadians have choreographed this politics of recognition should be of great interest to designers, especially those developing new location based services. As GPS and other location data become a ubiquitous commodity, it will require another step to acknowledge the cultural dimension of social interaction with a place, and to invent a common physical language for a digitized landscape. It will be a design problem to show how locative media can best manifest the competing histories and identities tied to one place.
Among other things, the Canadian experience highlights the need to conceptualize a new standard for referencing place that will be seen as an acceptable multicultural compromise, arrived at transparently. In my opinion, it appears likely that the Universal Address System will become that new standard. A Universal Address is not any longer than a phone number, and provides a unified representation of GPS’s cumbersome longitude and latitude designation. For example, the Universal Address for the Statue of Liberty is 8SVM PRFC while a recent news event in Baghdad would occur in the range of LN-P NJ. The Universal Address System is flexible enough to refer to any size area, from a country down to a building, object, or any one-meter square location anywhere on Earth. With an additional character string, it can refer to any location in three-dimensions, from a sunken ship to a penthouse to a mountain peak.
Over the last fifteen years, the Universal Address System has continued to make slow but steady headway toward becoming an international standard. Its earliest adopters have been practical problem solvers directly confronting the 99% of the world’s locations that cannot be referenced by a street address. For example, the government of Mongolia adopted the Universal Address System as a new national standard because, among other things, it made sense for a vast country with many nomadic yurts at temporary locations. For world travelers, the company Travel GIS showcases how the Universal Address System can eliminate the gap between a street address and map, and provide cross-national, cross-language, turn by turn directions that are consumer friendly, especially when traveling in parts of the Middle East, Asia, or Africa where there no street addresses, or where, for other cultural reasons, Google Maps or Blackberry Maps ( before NAC enhancement) simply failed.
Business sectors like the petroleum industry recognized early on the ease of NAC codes for communicating precisely where remote resources were located. Other proposed applications include using the Universal Address as a new Global Postal Code that would facilitate mailing from “the world level to a final mailbox”. Probably the next stage of interest will be from the growing “Where” business, which seeks to monetize geodata. Obviously, this kind of internationally standardized place locater would be helpful in a variety of design application from visualizing the chain of food production to succinctly communicating cradle to cradle information on the resources used in manufacturing a product.
An earlier proposal was NAC founder Dr. Shen’s Time-Space watch, a product that displayed both the time and the Universal Address location. As he pointed out, a watch is just a mobile clock, and since accurate watches helped form the industrial age, Time-Space watches will symbolize our coming integrated, digitized world. That moment is here.
It is time to discuss new standards with which to talk about place, not unlike the way the euro was finally agreed upon by the distinct countries with distinct histories that comprise the European Union. It may well be that a proprietary place-naming system, like the Universal Address System, is a non-starter, but there are models for that with early road systems and utilities. It could be that any rational and mathematically based system would be too loaded for a broad consensus, for obvious reasons. But some system will become normative, and a critical conversation at this juncture seems overdue.
To date, every article about the Universal Address System has focused on its utilitarian functionalities. Alongside these pragmatic and market-oriented initiatives in location services, there needs to mature a cultural expression worthy of being called locative media. And to achieve this transformation, I would suggest going back to the founding historical context of this new technology. Our Earth’s survival requires us to find ways to co-exist, with each other, and with the planet. Adopting something like the Universal Address System is not meant to erase the history of place, but rather to provide a “neutral” platform so that many can speak. And after that it is up to all of us. Locative media can become nothing more than the digital cemetery of the twenty-first century. Or locative media can envision a new theater mediating the possibility of place and making the polis whole through shared stories. What will that theater look like?
A few examples will suggest the pitfalls and possibilities. The European cultural heritage initiative, iTactitus, is a prototype augmented reality tool for visualizing the physical appearance of a site at another time in history. As a model, it is one of many “stop and pop” passive interaction projects that provide site-specific content on demand, but with no social interaction. Here, the introduction of a Universal Address would primarily facilitate identifying and locating the site where the content then becomes relevant.
More playfully, the coming domestication of GPS will let people visualize their life as a sketch upon the landscape. We should expect to see more sites like Everytrail, where people can, among other things, upload routes designed to draw abstracted patterns in the landscape. The appeal of GPS drawing on the planet already has inspired a BMW media campaign.
But a more substantively social and conceptual approach is suggested by the work of the Amsterdam-based new Media artist, Esther Polak. For example, her recent project, NomadicMILK, used GPS to document the two Nigerian dairy economies that co-exist in the local marketplace. One is nomadic and the other corporate, and the performance of the life cycle of milk production makes visible to the other the different worlds each group inhabits in the same country. An earlier project used a GPS diary to trace milk production from the cow in Latvia to the consumer in the Netherlands. By visualizing this knowledge, Polak asks, “Can you see what I know?”
It was only ninety-two years ago that the US Congress formally recognized the standardized time zones we rely on today without thinking. This “tipping point” occurred decades after Greenwich Mean Time was adopted, and this agreement was only reached after decades of confusion caused by the new railroad networks trying to arrive on time at the hundreds of locally determined time zones in effect across America. Since the 1990s, we have been at a turning point in how to talk about location, just as we were more than a century ago talking about time. As this conversation goes forward, I hope it will be joined by a broad coalition of thoughtful people committed to exploring the broadest range of possible implications: popular, poetic, political. We need a common understanding of a sustainable future. Talking about “where” will be part of it.
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I recently watched Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey projected
in a theater for the umpteen millionth time. I reflected upon how I saw the
movie as a eleven year old 41 years ago and accepted the plausibility
that as pedestrians we certainly would become accustom to moving outward into space by this time.
After reading this article on the potential of the Universal Address System
I realize this dream may have been achieved through our ability to either physically plot or conceptualize any point within our “inner space”,
as illustrated in Arthur Harsuvawakit’s accompanying image
“You are here”.
The ideas Nancy Austin shares, also made me think of the centuries it took to move from the notion that the world was flat to spherical. And how it took additional time for astronomy, mathematics, religion, commerce, governing bodies and every individual to ingest, accept or use just a new shape to
re-navigate upon
I also think of those first images of the earth photographed from space,
caused a lasting impression that we were a humble blue spot within a infinite space and how vulnerable we are too, because there seems to be no immediate place to travel to with the appropriate resources to support our global life forms.
Exploration and journeys on the earth are usually first charted as linear.
Yet actual physical journeys and explorations of the terrain have been costly and actually more zig zaggy.
What could happen now that anyone could potentially navigate this globe?
What happens when we make our own connections to a spot?
What kind of pastel shaded shapes will be configured or delineated to define new countries understood by other conditional attributes or places no longer defined as property. Would it cause us to physically discover or
visit one another more?
I too, would be most interested in connecting it all with time. A running accumulative human history journal where anyone could contribute,
“Here on this NAC I once…”
Thanks for the invitation to imagine.
Lane Myer
Artist/Designer
One additional amusing thought I had, was when the continents eventually
shift, one meter, does the grid compensate? Time will tell.
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