E-Totem, Digital Locative Media to Support E-Participation in Cities

The relationship between governments and their citizens has changed with the rise of ICTs. Even if these changes can strengthen the active role of society in the control and participation of public administration, there is a risk that this process can increase exclusion especially in developing countries, mainly because a large part of the population does not have access at all times to the facilities and services provided by ICTs. This article describes e-Totem, a software and hardware platform produced to support inclusive e-participation in large cities. It is also described three popular participation initiatives implemented using the platform, from which hundreds of thousands of citizen interactions were obtained from the platform. e-Totem is customized to be inclusive and suitable for use in such a wide variety of scenarios as well as being used by such a significant volume of people.

Developing the New Zealand Soundmap: An exploration of soundmap practice, site listening, locative media and the sound environment

<p>This text is an exegesis written in accompaniment to the development of the New Zealand Soundmap. The origin and development of soundmap practice and the emergence and development of related environmental sound practices are detailed. The exegesis concludes with an exposition of the development of the New Zealand Soundmap itself. Soundmap practice emerged from the sonic explorations of the World Soundscape Project, who coming out of Simon Fraser University of Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, pioneered the first soundmaps in the early 1970’s. From its origins soundmap practice has spread and developed into its current form as a new media practice. This thesis deals with the development of a regional web-based soundmap for New Zealand. Various discursive strains from media studies, sonic arts, and phenomenological philosophy are woven together to explain the impetus, and value of soundmap practice and related environmental sound practices such as soundwalks and site-listening. The thesis ends with a critical analysis of successes and failures of the project towards its stated goal: to facilitate awareness of an engagement with the local sound environment.</p>

Developing the New Zealand Soundmap: An exploration of soundmap practice, site listening, locative media and the sound environment

<p>This text is an exegesis written in accompaniment to the development of the New Zealand Soundmap. The origin and development of soundmap practice and the emergence and development of related environmental sound practices are detailed. The exegesis concludes with an exposition of the development of the New Zealand Soundmap itself. Soundmap practice emerged from the sonic explorations of the World Soundscape Project, who coming out of Simon Fraser University of Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, pioneered the first soundmaps in the early 1970’s. From its origins soundmap practice has spread and developed into its current form as a new media practice. This thesis deals with the development of a regional web-based soundmap for New Zealand. Various discursive strains from media studies, sonic arts, and phenomenological philosophy are woven together to explain the impetus, and value of soundmap practice and related environmental sound practices such as soundwalks and site-listening. The thesis ends with a critical analysis of successes and failures of the project towards its stated goal: to facilitate awareness of an engagement with the local sound environment.</p>

Locating Identities in Time: An Examination of the Formation and Impact of Temporality on Presentations of the Self through Location-Based Social Networks

Studies of identity and location-based social networks (LBSN) have tended to focus on the performative aspects associated with marking one's location. Yet these studies often present this practice as being an a priori aspect of locative media. What is missing from this research is a more granular understanding of how this process develops over time. Accordingly, we focus on the first 6 weeks of 42 users beginning to use an LBSN we designed and named GeoMoments . Through our analysis of our users' activities, we contribute to understanding identity and LBSN in two distinct ways. First, we show how LBSN users develop and perform self-identity over time. Second, we highlight the extent these temporal processes reshape the behaviors of users. Overall, our results illustrate that although a performative use of GeoMoments does evolve, this development does not occur in a vacuum. Rather, it occurs within the dynamic context of everyday life, which is prompted, conditioned, and mediated by the way the affordances of GeoMoments digitally organize and archive past locational traces.

"IT LOOKS BETTER ON INSTAGRAM": NETWORKED PHOTOGRAPHY AND PUBLIC ART IN MUMBAI

In this paper, I discuss networked photography practices and selfie cultures at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, an annual cultural festival in Mumbai, to demonstrate how global digital visual cultures are translated in the urban Indian context, and offer new ways of thinking about the conceptualisation and experience of art, the city and the resident. I argue that the desire for networked photography that animates the assemblage of installations, artists, visitors, curators, camera technologies and social networking sites, alters ideas of space and place, and object production and meaning making. I approach the selfie and everyday networked photography as a form of self-expression, labour (Abidin 2016), locative media (Hess 2015), embodied socialisation (Frosh 2015) and a mode of photography that collapses binaries of subject/object, spectator/operator and curated image/curator (Frosh 2015, Senft and Baym 2015). I use qualitative digital methods, interviews, audiovisual documentation and autoethnography. Through visuals recorded in the exhibition area at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival in 2020, I demonstrate how the unique sense of intimacy and limited field of vision offered by the lens and screen of the camera phone, turn the exhibition space into a space of embodied interdependence and collaboration. At the same time, as a result of the neoliberal logic of commodification of the algorithms of social networking sites, postcolonial place is rendered ahistorical and reinterpreted as a space for creative photography and the visual production of a global digital identity.

Walking the map & tracing the territory

"Walking the Map & Tracing the Territory" is a locative media project created to investigate the relationship between the visual representation and aural/physical experience of space through the roles of mapper and walker. Both forms of knowing a space have biases that privilege certain aspects of space. While visual representation on a map totalizes space and emphasizes the spatial relationship between objects, aural/physical experience emphasizes the evanescent quality of walking and narrative. This exploration has led to the idea that space is physical but also represented, experienced and recreated constantly through its use. The project has drawn on the work of various locative artists such as Janet Cardiff and Rimini Protokoll to understand the way that story, listening and walking can inform one's perception of space. The work of Michel de Certeau has also been used to understand how one creates space through the subjective negotiation of place. Finally, the creation process ofthe installation, using consumer electronics, open-source software and programming languages has also been used as a way of looking at how space is articulated through this technology and how it mediates the mapper's and walker's perception of map and territory.

Walking the map & tracing the territory

"Walking the Map & Tracing the Territory" is a locative media project created to investigate the relationship between the visual representation and aural/physical experience of space through the roles of mapper and walker. Both forms of knowing a space have biases that privilege certain aspects of space. While visual representation on a map totalizes space and emphasizes the spatial relationship between objects, aural/physical experience emphasizes the evanescent quality of walking and narrative. This exploration has led to the idea that space is physical but also represented, experienced and recreated constantly through its use. The project has drawn on the work of various locative artists such as Janet Cardiff and Rimini Protokoll to understand the way that story, listening and walking can inform one's perception of space. The work of Michel de Certeau has also been used to understand how one creates space through the subjective negotiation of place. Finally, the creation process ofthe installation, using consumer electronics, open-source software and programming languages has also been used as a way of looking at how space is articulated through this technology and how it mediates the mapper's and walker's perception of map and territory.

Documenting Social Change and Political Unrest through Mobile Spaces and Locative Media

In this chapter, I explore the media coverage of the Arab Spring and the reactions of Western media communities. Focusing on interactive documentaries and websites, this chapter clearly demonstrates to what extent media bring about individualized coverage to major events. Digital media especially have merged with cartographic competencies to provide topical information. Compared to the informational range of classic print media and television, these digital platforms and digitally distributed art forms create new and interactive forms of media participation.