Locative Motive

The path to a concise and responsible definition of locative media contains within it the necessity to identify its antecedents. The simplest locative experiment requires taking any art practice, and allocating a location, or space, to it. For example, the ancient art of line drawing applied to a specific geographic location, transforms itself from a work of fine art to that of locative media art. In fact, with this simplistic outlook on the artform of locative media, all forms of art that are susceptible to a specific location or spatial relationship can be adapted to a locative art work.
Popular psychology teaches us that art is the external expression of inward, indescribable emotions and needs. Every stroke of paint reveals the accumulation and expenditure of angst. As the wheels of time turn inevitably onward, new methods of art manifest from new historical events and traumas and the need to express the feelings that accompany them. Consequently, as the world becomes more complex, so must our expression. Here we stand, now, on the verge of new media practices, discussing one of its offspring.
Locative media was conceived to express an inward emotion that all other present art forms could not convey. Our human existence, albeit grand and beautiful, is doomed to play the victim of the fleeting nature of time. It is the omnipresent notion that haunts our daily lives. We will be born and grow, learn, love, hate, fight and forgive; but we will all eventually die. Yet, we spend a great portion of our lives fighting this truth using the best available ammunition; media.
We fight to perserve ourselves in family photos and films, hoping that we can go on to live in the memories and lives of those around us. We relinquish the fruits of our lifelong labors upon skyscrapers, museums and hospitals in order to engrave our names in stone and iron. We strive to acheive heights that are deemed historically worthy to earn a few lines of print in the book of men.
We hope to give our lives a location.

Confusing the Locative Medium

As with any emerging new media art form, countless definitions and delineations are conjured from individuals who deem themselves avid practitioners, and the art community engages itself in a civil war of research papers until a single idiom is accepted by a majority. There is a grave need for a new method, a new form of scientific representation of defining new media of this sort. Unfortunately, I do not possess the necessary method, so I, too, fall in line to wage war on deciphering the very nature of what is known as Locative Media.

The three major elements in locative media are the user, the user’s environment, and the user interface that binds them together. The media generally refers to the developed interface or the specific usage of a developed interface in an artwork. However, any locative work that fails to incorporate the user and that user’s location, in turn, fails to capture the qualities of locative media. Julian Bleeker, in his essay concerning WiFi.Bedouin, highlights this point, stating that “simply providing access to the Internet via a WiFi node is not particularly innovative at this point in the evolution of access technology.” It is the context of the space providing the access, however, that can offer innovation, rendering it a work of locative media.

Contemporary technology has opened many new doors of possibility for artists in all fields. The most coveted technologies, for their accessibility and easy application, are those involved in Web 2.0, as described by Tim O’Reilly. It is in the use of these technologies that many artists strive to create locative works of new media. Yet, the simple usage of such applications does not infer any relationship to the space that the user occupies. That is the endeavor of locative media; to understand the spatial relationship between ourselves and the world around us.

Fellow practitioners, beware of art that claims locative roots while merely using elements of Web 2.0. While such applications can be stimulating and works of art in their own right, they lack the spatial insight that locative media requires. Think, calculate, design, program, but above all, explore the world around you.

New World Syntagm

A Short History.
The shores of the Aegean are a mere memory of my inquisitive childhood. The motion of the sinusoidal forms of salt and moisture gave way to the nature of my latter day studies: that which concerns locative media, and the virtual self.

After quickly rising to the forefront of this endeavor in my hometown of Thessaloniki, Greece, I began to realize that the answers to my lifelong questions and inquiries would manifest in America. The Grecian artworld lacks the motion that I strive to grasp, explore and discover. It was at this point in my life, that I began to perform my audio walks of Thessaloniki landscape. Little time passed after completing Shadows of Timbre Vol. I-III (the complete series of audio walks through Thessaloniki) before I was contacted by an American artist. My earlier desires were then confirmed, and I boarded a plane to the Univesity of California, in the year 2000.

Since my residency at the University of California, San Diego, I have continued to lead at the forefront of this developing new media and am now acknowledged as "one of the most controversial and challenging artists in Location-Aware media," (The New Media Report).

I am currently living in downtown San Diego with my wife Nona and continue to create new media in concert with the New Media Artist Enclave, Southern California.