Artists Hijack Space!
“There are scores of contexts – for instance the clothes you wear are one aspect of your everyday context but they do not take into account where you live, your age, your sex, et. cetera. Media and technology that respond to you, that is ‘context-aware’ – the new hip term in the tech world – that is where the promise lies next for commerce and for art.”- (Jason Harlan qtd in Ekman).
Augmented spaces are differentiated from virtual space in that a user interacts with a physical space enhanced by information. Augmented spaces raise new questions regarding ideas of body and location. Blast Theory’s game, Can you see me now?, has players interacting in virtual space and physical space simultaneously. Virtual players use satellites to track players in physical space, therefore virtual players can chase icons representing their image in physical space on an online map. Players in physical space have to chase down their virtual opponents and take a picture of them in physical space in order to “capture” them. They do this by tracking them with a handheld scanner while moving through physical space. GPS has created a new way to define the body in space as well as track it. Artists are using GPS to access dataspace and create new types of images. GPS receivers allow artists to record digital lines of their movements through space. As Jeremy Wood explained in a RES magazine interview, “It is digital geograffiti by using the landscape to scrawl and scribble over with a GPS receiver.” Wood has created images such as a dollar sign over Vegas, a spirograph from a circular stroll, as well as mapped his travels with GPS. Artists have also been created works to help people contest the surveillance culture that has arisen along with technologies like GPS. The Institute for Applied Autonomy’s iSee has placed maps of surveillance spaces online so that a person can use the very technologies that track them (like a PDA) in order to avoid these spaces. The Bureau of Inverse Technology (BIT) uses augmented spaces to contest and critique Surveillance Culture. BIT uses wireless GPS based infrastructure on taxicabs’ display units to present the public with location-based information, such as toxic residue level. The taxicab example demonstrates how presenting geospecific information in real-time in public spaces can be used to raise awareness. The unusual presentation of such information on a cab draws the viewer’s attention to not only relevant public information, but also the untapped possibilities of using technology for new forms of communication other than corporate advertisement.