LEA Special cfp: Locative Media - Deadline 7 March 2005

LEA Special Issue: Locative Media

* Worldwide Call for Submissions *

Guest Editor: Drew Hemment
[email protected]
http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/LEA2004/authors.htm#lmedia

The Leonardo Electronic Almanac (ISSN No: 1071-4391) is inviting
papers [and artworks] that deal with the emerging data-based
spatial practice of Locative Media.

Across a broad range of contexts the interface between data
environments and location has emerged as a central concern,
reversing the trend towards digital content being viewed as
placeless, or only encountered in the amorphous space of the
internet. Artists have long been concerned with place and
location, but the combination of mobile devices with positioning
technologies opens up a manifold of different ways in which
geographical space can be encountered and drawn. An emerging field
of creative practice is coalescing around artists and
technologists who are exploring the use of portable, networked,
location-aware computing devices for social interfaces to places
and artistic interventions in which geographical space becomes a
canvas.

Submissions are sought which foreground not the technologies but
rather issues to do with participation, perception and process
they raise. What is Locative Media's relationship to dominant
logics of representation, and how does it forces a reassessment of
accustomed ways of representing, relating to and moving in the
world? How may methodologies within Media Art and other
disciplines be developed to meet a convergence of geographical and
data space? How can collaborative or user-led mapping and
cartography offer new possibilities for community organisation?
What metaphors are available for these new kinds of spatial
experience other than mapping and navigation? How may artists
respond to the abstraction inherent in Locative Media as a
data-based form, and look beyond the reductive understanding of
location that comes from Geographic Information Systems - in which
place is considered as a set of geographic coordinates or a
wireless cell - to explore, for example, context, co-location and
material embodiment? What is the relationship between this
emerging critical art practice and both the surveillance and
control technologies it deploys and wider mechanisms of
domination? What taxonomies of Locative Media projects can be
discerned, and how may terminology evolve to meet this new
interdisciplinary environment?

Locative Media is in a condition of emergence, simultaneously
opening up new ways of engaging in the world and mapping its own
domain. For this issue, submissions that present the exploratory
movements of Locative Media in historical context are of equal
interest to submissions that offer a snap shot or polaroid of its
current state of emergence.

Topics of interest might include (but are not limited to):
- Antecedents and historical context
- Taxonomies of Locative Media projects
- Art and technology collaborations
- Social applications
- Critical analyses
- Cultural analyses
- Scalability and ownership issues
- etc