Collaborative Cartographies, Situated Mapping

by Trebor Scholz
notes from presentation at Pace University
October 7, 2005

Not only new media art but all cultural production is political in its consequences. There is no artwork that is more or less political than any other (1). The political aspects of art do not only include content and aesthetics but also the relationships of power in which they are produced and circulated. Within the realm of traditional art production it is impossible to function on the outside as this would marginalize one's practice. Much of new media art is criticized for positioning itself in the larger world just like formalist art of the past: passively affirmative of the status quo, not reflecting on the forces that restrict it, locked away in galleries or university labs where the majority of visitors are art professionals or academics. New media work, more often than not is heavily invested in modernist object production, and is frequently neither critical, subversive, nor especially conceptual. There is little advanced debate around new media artwork and the pieces themselves seem forever indebted in demo designs with much of it never coming into being as artworks that "work." Here, the future of computers instead of the flaky reality of technology is sold. Occasionally media critics place all too much hope in the political potential of new media art, a demand they would not make as exclusively for traditional art practices.

New media art production is not exempt from historical appropriation, artists learn and are influenced by what was created before them but also need to look at the history of technology and playful bits of code that drift around online. Few critics are able to merge these discourses as it is often hard for cultural theorists or art historians to develop a non-suspicious appreciation of new media art. It's hard to write about it if you are not - on some level- an art fan.

Despite this dark smoky landscape just painted- new media art does open up hopeful avenues that are not just techno-optimist utopias falsely believing in unprecedented novelty of creation. Especially with networked art, the means of production often become the frame of display, for example. Distribution of artwork can fairly easily leave the walls of the white cube or university and occupy the desk of the office worker or turntable of the club vj. Over the past years we witnessed the burgeoning of software that supports group communication, connecting the 'smart mobs' to each other, establishing promises for the creation of collective knowledge radically different from traditional interaction. What do people talk about when they link up? What happens in these new channels of communication? These technologies support collective research and collaboration on creative projects as much as they allow the establishment of so called open content archives. Wikis and and blogs are the most common examples for these types of web-based applications. The FreeCooperation conference (2) and the Institute of Distributed Creativity that I founded in May 2004 (3) both highlight these issues, focusing on research in the field of collaboration studies. Cooperation/ collaboration in itself is not at all new or inevitably progressive. Hitler's Germany perfectly cooperated in his disastrous plan. But there are many examples of new media artists providing contexts for others to collaboratively gather and exchange content. These created contexts are often questioned for their validity as art. This examination of the definition of art is much more often put forward by curators or festival organizers than by the artists themselves.

The definition of a set of rules as we remember from the modernist art theorist Clement Greenberg (4), allows for a clear line in the sand that separates inside from outside, art from non-art. Media artists creating unique cultural contexts online or off are much less interested in these debates and are often ahead of those in the business of saying what goes into the box and what gets flushed down the sink of history.

A few examples: web-specific applications and wireless, context / location-aware devices are relatively new possibilities for the establishment of visibly functioning linkages into the "real life world." I'd like to concentrate here on collaborative mapping projects, an area in which I'm currently involved. Most of these projects, and I'll mention a few projects, make creative use of databases approached as archives activating (oral) histories, lively cross-referenced storage spaces.
Many urban projects, for instance, address the notion of place as it was prominently developed in an art activist context by Lucy Lippard. In "The Lure of the Local" Lippard (5) gives many examples of art that inscribes an area not purely defined by economic and geographical factors but projects that frame place as a story that is composed of mythologies, histories and ideologies by the people who live there. This story makes one place different from any other as each individual perceives it as a center of meanings, a locality of felt significance. Place is defined by the thinking, feeling, life and play of the people that inhabit it. Currently, there are many projects under way that use wireless and web-specific technologies to record the city, to make the city their own. These projects use narrative archaeologies that are collectively gathered and contested. Importantly, they link in different ways the networked virtual spaces with physical locations.

Some of these locative projects such as "34 North 118 West" in Los Angeles (6) and [murmur] in Toronto (7) are directly used and experienced by participants at locations in the city. "34 North 118 West" requires hardware and software provided by the artists on location in order to move through the urban landscape where then guided by a GPS system audio stories about the spot where they are standing are played back to the participant in the project.

New stories can be recorded. [murmur] allows urban dwellers to call a number prominently displayed at a location to listen to stories about this very place. Both applications are specific to their location, they are situated. Clay Shirkey in a different context talks of situated software (8). Notions of site-specificity from art history could be introduced here that compare modernist placeless artworks (ie. a Henry Moore sculpture) to software that can be plugged in and is context-blind. Site-specific art could be compared to highly localized specific applications. Few of the projects that explore urban areas pose very general questions probably in order to draw in the widest range of people. This includes PdPal (9), StoryCorps (10), Annotate Space (11), Street Stories (12), Interactive portrait of the Liberties (13), Memory Maps (14), Urban Texting (15), Songlines (16), Talking Streets (17) and Urban Tapestries (18). An example of an offline urban interventionist project is RepoHistory's Manhattan Sign Project (19). In April 2004 I developed a web-based collaborative mapping project for Lower Manhattan (20). The project is named after a film by documentary film pioneer Robert Flaherty "Twenty-Four Dollar Island," shot in 1927. This ongoing web-based project aims at the creation of free, complete, alternative, up-to-date and reliable material about Lower Manhattan. This community network application is specific to the area it 'maps.' Participants who log on to the project can contribute stories, and images under specific topics such as museums, memories and touristic information. Information in guidebooks is often stale, not updated, and organized in linear structure. Websites about Lower Manhattan are frequently corporate, or city-run. The role of the database, the archive is to give everybody the chance to share their stories, their histories, or tourist information. Anyone can add specific information about museums, strikes, demonstrations, reoccurring events, communities, bike paths, schools or news about the rebuilding process. You can add stories of personal encounters, information about inexpensive places to sleep, local unheard histories or narratives of your experiences in Lower Manhattan. In a few simple steps you can contribute to the map and tell your friends. The project started in April 2004 and now contains several hundred entries.

The problem with ongoing sustainable rather than one-off projects is community involvement. This may be the reason that many of the projects mentioned here are rather general in their approach to the city. This problem is shared by media artists from Amsterdam, New York, and Rotterdam to London who create works that provide contexts and rely on others to contribute content. The issue becomes particularly pertinent when technological artwork is not just a one-time technological spectacle but rather ongoing with the idea to make it a sustainable, semi-permanent. The same issue occur with Twenty-Four Dollar Island (TFDI). There is a lot of reluctance of people to get involved into public projects especially if they involve technology. People seem to retreat into the private. Technologists often underestimate the resistance with which much of these new cooperative technologies are met. Even the most easy-to-handle web-based technologies such as wikis are not embraced by a wide range of people. One reason for this is the complexity of demands on people in their everyday life to which they don't want to add. It's just one more thing. Another problem is of course the technology itself in cases where artists have to provide the hardware and software on location to make project interaction even possible in the first place.

Examples of entries to Twenty-Four Dollar Island include photos and descriptions of barriers created because of the fear of terror attacks, stories of immigration, the arrest of students on a school project for which they were assigned to film an area in which there federal buildings, and stories from labor struggles by Duane Reed workers and demonstrations by members of the NYC Fire Department in City Hall Park. Other contributions researched the sculpture on top of the municipal building called "Civic Fame." The woman who modeled for it was Audrey Munson. From the entry: "Supposedly there was a time when there were about 30 artworks based on her poses in the collection of the Met. After a while, I start to recognize her face in stone around town. She suddenly seems everywhere even though her name is hardly remembered: The Pulizer Fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel, the entry to the Manhattan bridge, the entry to Central Park at Columbus Circle, the relief above the Frick Collection entrance, at Madison Square Garden, in a park on the Upper West Side…." (21)

The development of Twenty-Four Dollar Island aims at interfaces in Lower Manhattan that allow urban dwellers to call in with their cell phone and leave their story about a location. These stories are added directly to the online map where they can be called up. But also cell phone users in the street can listen to stories by other residents, commuters or people who work here about a particular spot. As there are several database-driven mapping projects in Lower Manhattan I suggest to merge their backbone infrastructure to create a truly rich and comprehensive initiative mapping alternative material about the area.

References:
(1) Gregg Bordowitz (2004). Tactics Inside and Out. Artforum . September 2004, p212-215

(2) The "networks, art, and collaboration" conference, a.k.a. FreeCooperation, took place in April 2004 at the Department of Media Study, The State University of New York at Buffalo. The conference was organized by Trebor Scholz (New York/ Buffalo) and Geert Lovink (Brisbane/Amsterdam), assisted (in more or less free cooperation) by Dorothee Gestrich (now Banff Centre) and Orkan Telhan (Ankara/ Buffalo), Tom Leonhardt (Toronto/ Buffalo) and Arzu Telhan (Ankara/ Buffalo).
Trebor Scholz. (2004). networks, art, & collaboration. Freecooperation. Available: URL http://freecooperation.org. Last accessed October 5, 2004.

(3) Institute for Distributed Creativity (IDC)
The research of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (IDC) focuses on collaboration in media art, technology, and theory with an emphasis on social contexts. The IDC, founded by Trebor Scholz in May 2004, is an international network with a participatory and flexible institutional structure that combines advanced creative production, research, events, and documentation. While the IDC makes appropriate use of emerging low-cost and free social software it balances these activities with regular face-to-face meetings.
(2004). Institute for Distributed Creativity. Available: URL http://distributedcreativity.org. Last accessed October 5, 2004.

(4) Clement Greenberg (1978). Art and Culture Critical Essays: Critical Essays. 1st Edition: Beacon Press.

(5) Lucy R. Lippard (1997). The Lure of the Local. 1st EditionNew York: New Press. p32-33

(6) 34 North 118 West is an LA based project
http://34n118w.net/
34 North 118 West is a location-aware project which utilizes mobile technology and our custom software to deliver a unique media experience. Visitors to our site in downtown Los Angeles are met with everything necessary for the tour, including hardware and software.
34 North 118 West plays through a Tablet PC with Global Positioning System receiver and headphones. GPS tracks your location to determine how the story unfolds - in real time, in real space, as you traverse the sidewalks of Los Angeles.

(7) [murmur]
http://murmurtoronto.ca/
is an archival audio project that collects and curates stories set in specific Toronto locations. At each of these locations, a [murmur] sign will mark the availability of a story with a telephone number and location code. By using a mobile phone, users are able to listen to the story of that place while engaging in the full physical experience of being there.

(8) Clay Shirky. Situated Software. Clay Shirky's Writings on the Internet. Available: URL http://www.shirky.com/writings/situated_software.html. Last accessed October 5, 2004.

(9) PDPal
http://www.pdpal.com/
PDPal is a mapping tool for recording personal experiences of public space. On this site you can create a map, for example of Times Square. The piece asks people what is happening, what has happened and what could happen.

(10) StoryCorps
http://storycorps.net/
StoryCorps is a national project to instruct and inspire people to record each others' stories in sound.

(11) Street Stories
http://www.columbia.edu/~ws2138/StreetStories/
Street Stories: Designing Networked, Narrative Places of Community

(12) Interactive portrait of the Liberties
http://www.mle.ie/~Evnisi/liberties/indexLib.html
The ”Interactive portrait of the Liberties” is an interactive digital narrative application that provides multimedia content to individuals and groups. This content is relevant to them at a particular point in time and space – it is context-aware.

(13) Memory Maps
http://www.localprojects.net/mmaps/mmaps.shtml
The Smithsonian FolkLife Festival gathers over 1 million visitors in two weeks on the National Mall by displaying exhaustive research of three specific locations’ cultures. As one of the 2001 cultural choices, New York City posed a special challenge-- the representation of a vibrant living culture where the mixing of many different cultures together into a small diverse city creates a larger cultural ecosystem. Reminiscent of a subway car wrapped in fluorescent construction mesh, Memory Maps was a system of enormous street maps of New York City which allowed visitors to share their stories of the city by anchoring memories to specific locations.

(14) Urban Texting
http://www.akav.dk/blog/archives/000324.html
People in the city SMS 4-5 words that are than mapped onto a map of the city.

(15) Songlines
http://www.impaktonline.nl/box/songlines/index.html
Songlines is an ongoing experiment in geo-annotation and collaberative cartography. Using handheld computers equipped with global positioning system (GPS) and wireless internet (GPRS), participants can explore the streets of Utrecht, simultaneously experiencing the real world and a world of virtual graffiti. Moving through the real space of Utrecht reveals hidden messages and locative media: text, images, and sound specific to that point in space.

(16) Talking Street
http://www.talkingstreet.com/
That's what Talking Street does. Using something as easy as your own cell-phone, Talking Street offers a completely new way to explore a destination. Let a celebrity show you around, and listen to history come to life around you. On your schedule, at your own pace.

(17) Urban Tapestries
http://www.proboscis.org.uk/urbantapestries/
Urban Tapestries is a Proboscis project exploring social and cultural uses of the convergence of place and mobile technologies through transdisciplinary research. To help us model emerging social and cultural behaviours we have built an experimental platform that allows people to author and access place-based content (text, audio and pictures). It is a framework for exploring and sharing experience and knowledge, for leaving and annotating ephemeral traces of peoples’ presence in the geography of the city.

(19) Lower Manhattan Sign Project
http://repohistory.org/lower_manhattan_sign_project/index.php3
Repohistory's inaugural project was inspired by the celebration surrounding the quincentennial of Columbus' "discovery" of the Americas. While the country planned to commemorate a carefully selected history of Columbus' legacy, REPOhistory created a project that presented alternative views of history.

(20) Twenty-Four Dollar Island
http://24dollarisland.net
The project allows community networks to create their own, topic-specific maps of Lower Manhattan. Information in corporate guide books or on city-run websites is often stale, linear and leaves out much of what is crucial to the history of the area. It aims to create free, complete, alternative, up-to-date and reliable material on the area, a platform at the which commuters, tourists and residents can exchange stories, and share their knowledge. Possible topics are also demonstrations, and strikes. Several hundred entries exist already. Until spring 2005 the piece will extend to include entries from cell phones, that are then mapped directly to the online map. Urban dwellers will also be able to call up stories at a location in town.
Also see the following projects:

Place Matters
http://placematters.net/flash/home.htm
Place Matters seeks to promote and protect places that connect us with the past, sustain community life and make our surroundings distinctive.

MapHub
http://hactivist.com/maphub/overview.html
apHub proposes to research the introduction of a geographic and historical data sharing application in an urban landscape. MapHub proposes to be a peoples. map . a map of an urban geography determined not by traditional methodology but instead by the members who participate and contribute everyday in the experience of urban life. MapHub proposes to be both a tool and a system that gives users pen and paper to record their unique and situated perspectives and then deliver that documentation to others.

Mr. Beller's Neighborhood
http://www.mrbellersneighborhood.com/
Since its founding in the Spring of 2000, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood has published nearly seven hundred pieces of writing on New York.
The site combines a magazine with a map. It uses the external, familiar landscape of New York City as a way of organizing the wildly internal, often unfamiliar emotional landscapes of the city dweller.

(21) entry into Twenty-Four Dollar Island by Andrea Geyer
http://molodiez.org/island/detailboth.php?id=262&LocationID=241&pid=2