Inclusiva-net Digital Networks and Physical Space 2nd Inclusiva-net Meeting Directed by Juan Martín Prada March 3 - 14, 2008. MEDIALAB-PRADO. Madrid www.medialab-prado.es Publisher: Área de Las Artes. Dirección General de Promoción y Proyectos Culturales. Madrid. 2009 Under Creative Commons License: Attribution - Share Alike (by-sa): This license permit commercial use of this work and any possible derivative works, the distribution of which must be done under the same license that governs the original work. © Texts and images: the authors INDEX <NET.GEO> THE EMERGENCE OF THE GEOSPATIAL WEB AND LOCATIVE MEDIA (Introduction to the Second Inclusiva-net Meeting “Digital networks and physical space”) Juan Martín Prada 4 LAND, MEANING AND TERRITORY: THE GEOSEMANTIC EQUATION Diego Cerda Seguel 10 LOCATIVE MEDIA AND INFORMATIONAL TERRITORIES Mobile Communication and New Sense of Places. A Critique of Spatialization in Cyberculture. André Lemos 25 THE INVISIBLE STRIKES BACK. NEOANALOG TENDENCIES IN CONTEMPORARY MEDIA ART Ewa Wójtowicz 44 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE SEMANTICS OF (VIRTUAL) SPACE. Three proposals for interdisciplinary research and a challenge Joaquín Borrego-Díaz 52 MAPPING PROJECTIONS; INTERACTIONS BETWEEN THE SPACES OF THE MAP Sadhna Jain 69 NOTES, CLARIFICATIONS AND A CRITIQUE OF “THE GEOWEB IN THE AUDIOVISUAL ENVIRONMENT OF THE 20TH CENTURY: GEOSCOPE AND THE EARTHSCORE NOTATIONAL SYSTEM”. Paz Sastre Domínguez 80 PUBLIC SPACE AND ELECTRONIC FLOWS SOME EXPERIENCES BY HACKITECTURA.NET José Pérez de Lama 99 POTENTIAL OF LOCATIVE MEDIA IN PRACTICE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE (2005 - 2008) Liva Dudareva 107 A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO PARASITIC BEHAVIOUR Michelle Teran 129 M1ML, SEND ME A MESSAGE LATER Un proyecto de sin|studio arquitectura 143 THE CITY: AN INTERFACE FOR ALL José Luis Pajares, Francisco Utray, Ángel García Crespo 158 SPIP GIS Horacio González Diéguez 167 ARCHINAUTA: THE DEVELOPMENT OF A SYSTEM FOR INDIVIDUAL LOCATION AND AUTONOMOUS NAVIGATION. Alfonso Cuadrado Alvarado 181 FRONTIERS AND TERRITORY IN CYBERSPACE. METRIC PRINCIPLES FOR GEO-LOCAL INDEPENDENCE ON THE WEB Jesús Moreno Hidalgo 191 <NET.GEO> THE EMERGENCE OF THE GEOSPATIAL WEB AND LOCATIVE MEDIA (Introduction to the Second Inclusiva-net Meeting “Digital networks and physical space”) Juan Martín Prada In contrast to the widely held supposition that telecommunications networks make no territorial distinctions, political power systems today are responding worldwide by strengthening geographical ties to their decisions, through new divisionary tactics, territorial separations, and barriers to prevent people from moving. Migration is becoming increasingly difficult, almost always subject to illegality and suspicion. Tactics continue to focus on localization and using borders for political ends. “To inhabit” still means to inhabit a specific place in the economic and political hierarchy. In the last few years it has become evident that the Internet is not a system that truly transcends borders. Instead, territorial limits have a strong influence on it. Clearly, equal access to the Internet is not available in all parts of the world. In addition to radically different speeds, possibilities and costs of connecting to the Web in different places, political factors may also limit free speech (e.g., in some countries, many bloggers are tried and sentenced) and access to certain information (results vary among countries for certain key words on the most popular Internet search engines, and there are even places where no results whatsoever are shown in searches for terms of a delicate nature). This turn toward physical space is intensified today by the enormous development of new technological applications for everyday use that highlight the relation between information and place. Several years ago, portable communication systems, such as mobile telephones or electronic diaries, began to include visual tools like photographic or video cameras; today, many come equipped with GPS (Global Positioning System)1 devices that provide geotag coordinates, as well as all kinds of applications designed to manage geographically contextualized information. Large telecommunications companies have realized that, to offer efficient service, users’ spatial location is of tremendous significance. Information technology media have become so portable that the “desktop phase” when users accessed information through home or office computers has become a thing of the past. Digital information Inclusiva-net · <NET.GEO> · www.medialab-prado.es · now “finds” users wherever they are, in a variety of settings and times. That is why huge possibilities for new business developments are opening up in “location-based services”, which provide specifically“territorialized” 2 information, such as geographically contextualized advertising or the location of nearby services like restaurants, shops, etc. Therefore, the advertising directed at us will soon be related exclusively to the place where we are or where we live, and we may even have to get used to the daily presence of “locative spam”. Networks increasingly function through the confluence of principles of synchronicity in time and coincidence in space. In the field of technology today, we are experiencing an intense relationship between calendar and cardinal points. All the tools and applications on the Web currently are quickly adapting this link to physical space, the place and the territory3. The growing interest in geotagged information is strongly reinforced by a rising public awareness of environmental data like pollution or climate change effects, as well as by new needs for information linked to physical spaces such as the traceability of consumer goods, that is, tracking the location and geographic route of a product throughout its production, manipulation and sale. Great progress has occurred in Web applications related to the field of geographic information systems (GIS), that is, those designed to manage geographically referenced information, which usually function as databases generally associated with digital maps. The boom in services like MapQuest or Google Maps, or the acquisitions by large Internet companies of Keyhole, GeoTango and Vexcel are proof of users’ growing interest in geographic data and information and spatial navigation. Among all the “geobrowsers” (applications for consulting geospatial data and managing geolocalized information), some of them, such as NASA World Wind, Google Earth or Microsoft Live Local 3D, have taken on great relevance and are used by a huge number of people, as well as the vast proliferation of blogs and websites related to these geobrowsers, e.g. Google Earth blog or Google Maps Mania. Given that the majority of geobrowsing platforms offer APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) or XML scripting for carrying out services on their platforms, creating applications to generate geographic contents is a booming field today. A “geospatial web” can be said to exist now, made up of all these types of applications and geographic data management services4. There is also a boom in the development Inclusiva-net · <NET.GEO> · www.medialab-prado.es · 5 of mapping tools based on “open standards” and “open-data” services such as Geonames, which consist of vast geographic databases available for download under Creative Commons licence that users can edit and expand using a wiki interface. There are certainly numerous communities for “open source” geosoftware and there are countless areas open for work: “GMAP hackers”, “OpenMappers”, “MapServers”, “GPSmappers”, “GeoServers”, “RDF mappers”, “terrain mappers”, “geobloggers”, etc. There are also companies like GeoCommons that enable anyone to generate maps that geographically represent the data that interest them, also using data contributed by many other users. Linking certain geographic points to the photos and videos taken there, historical data, and all types of personal comments and anecdotes has become an everyday practice among the multitude of users of social networks. Therefore, geotagging activities are becoming more habitual on the Web, that is, assigning spatial coordinates to certain files, such as georeferencing photographs on platforms such asFlickr , Google Earth, etc. or assigning geographic identifiers to text files and even video and audio documents (geoparsing). Geo-referencing images is an activity already performed by photographic cameras that include GPS systems: the date, place, or type of event photographed are metadata included in the photographic document at the time it is created. There are even “in-site” applications such as GeoNotes that allow users to “tag” physical space, leaving notes in the places where they are located or reading the notes other users have left there. The popularization of actions to “annotate the planet” is one of the most significant processes in the development of the second era of the Internet. The expression “The Earth as universal desktop”5 is even becoming popular. Geo-referencing practices understand geographic localization not only as a coordinate, a dot on a map, but also in relation to the experiences of the persons who were there. The result is generally the generation of open maps, a sort of update of maps showing “points of interest”. Actually, the “Geo-spatial Web” brings depth and richness back to geography after many years when the field provided merely cartographic, objective descriptions of places. The texts and other information added to satellite photographs of the territory inevitably