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Visual Studies
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locative media and the digital visualisation of space, place and
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lrancesco lapenta
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ISSN 1472-586X printed/ISSN 1472-5878 online/11/010001-3 2011 International Visual Sociology Association
DOI: 10.1080/1472586X.2011.548483
Visual Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1, March 2011
RVST
Guest Editors Introduction
Locative media and the digital visualisation of space, place
and information
Guest Editors Introduction
FRANCESCO LAPENTA
Since its emergence as part of public culture more than
160 years ago, the photographic image has sparked a
series of intense debates revolving around its nature, its
functions and the ways it is perceived and understood: is
it a form of expression or an untainted mechanical
representation? How does it communicate? How do
images reshape our perception of the world? For decades
scholars across disciplines of art, linguistics, semiotics,
and film and media studies struggled in their attempts at
the investigation of still and moving images, their inner
characteristics, their systems of meaning and social
functions.
In the last decade we have moved into an era of what has
been called digital convergence. One impact of digital
convergence has been the revamping of interpretative
discourses and debates over the changing ontology and
epistemologies of digital images, their technologically
redefined nature and renegotiated cultural values and
social functions. On the same scale of the cultural
revolution driven by the emergence of analogue
technologies of vision, 160 years later, digital
technologies of vision are once again implicated in what
many scholars regard as a momentous technological and
cultural shift that is profoundly reshaping how we
represent and perceive the world.
A key characteristic of this shift is that the digital and
cultural changes it produces are nurtured by an
unprecedented scale of production, distribution and
circulation of images. This process has abruptly
transformed ways of engaging with images, thus creating
a shift from what might be seen as the voyeuristic
practices of those who in analogue times used to be
exposed to a selected number of analogue images
distributed by a handful of local producers, to those of a
contemporary active global community of digital image
producers and viewers. According to the 1993 Wolfman
Report, 17.2 billion analogue images were taken in the
United States between 1992 and 1993. Today we can
easily imagine the latter to be representative of the
number of digital images taken in a fortnight by all the
electronic eyes distributed around the globe. About
5 million pictures are uploaded to Flickr every day,
around 2.5 billion photographs to Facebook each
month, and YouTube alone serves 2 billion videos a day
to millions of viewers around the world.
While these numbers alone clearly point to the ever-
increasing fascination with and presence of images in
our lives, they do not, however, account for the
increasing variety of visual practices and applications in
which digital images are now embedded. What is really
changing has little to do with the increasing numbers of
images taken every day and more to do with the
increasingly differentiated forms of photographic image
production, aggregation and distribution of which these
images are part. MMS, digital maps (Google Earth,
Mapquest, Bing Maps), portable media players and
content platforms (iPod, Creative Zen, iTunes), games
consoles (Wii, PS3, Xbox), smart phones (iPhone,
BlackBerry, Google Android), social networking sites
(Facebook, MySpace, Orkurt), photograph- and video-
sharing websites (Youtube, Flickr, Photobucket,
Megavideo, Vimeo), location-based applications
(Foursquare, Gowalla, Bliin, Google Latitude, Google
Panoramio) and devices, countless still- and moving-
images editing software (Adobe Premiere, Corel
VideoStudio, Cyber Link Power Director, Adobe Photo-
shop, Corel PaintShop Photo, HIPerSpace) these
represent just some of the many new sites of image
production, aggregation, distribution and consumption.
This phenomenal evolution is once again twofold:
technological, based on a continuous development of
digital technologies and image-based software
applications; and socio-cultural, based on a range of new
social functions and meanings acquired by the image in
contemporary interpersonal communications and
mediated exchanges. The technological and cultural
revolution initiated by the analogue image is evolving
into a new technological and socio-cultural
renegotiation of the social practices, values and cultural
economies in which digital images are now embedded.
In a world increasingly mediated through digital
representations, an understanding of these new
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2 Guest Editors Introduction
technological and social evolutions of the image provides
a key to reading contemporary society and culture. This
special issue presents a selection of works by
anthropologist Sarah Pink, sociologist Francesco
Lapenta, media historian and critic William Uricchio,
and media theorists and analysts Lev Manovich and
Fabian Holt, to explore emerging issues of
representation, interpretation and consumption of
digital images in five key contemporary digital scenarios.
The purpose of the articles is to focus attention on some
of the newest forms of production, aggregation and
exchange of digital images that use location-based
technologies, or geomedia (Lapenta in this issue), and
digital visualisation technologies to constitute new
epistemologies of space, place and information. The
special issue as a whole attempts to problematise the
broader theories of the image, the social values and the
cultural economies that result from these new practices.
In the first article Sarah Pink sets the stage for the special
issue by exploring the recent sensory turn in visual
scholarship in relation to concepts of movement and
place. To theorise and discuss these interrelated
concepts, Pink relies on two examples taken from two
strangely complementary scenarios: the digital
photography of Google Street View, and the (now)
historical analogue photography of the Spanish bullfight.
She uses these two examples to suggest how new
understandings of analogue and digital photography
might be engaged through the analysis of the concept of
movement. Building on existing literatures that
(re)situate vision and visual aspects of culture in relation
to other senses, texts and global flows, Pink argues that
visual media can be understood as part of multi-
sensorial place events. To develop this argument, Pink
first outlines a basis for understanding images, the
environments of which they are part, and the processes
through which they are consumed and produced in
terms of multisensoriality and movement. Then,
following connections between sensory perception and
movement, she suggests that it is this very movement
and multisensoriality that we need to account for in
understanding the constitution of place (physical or
virtual) created by images such has those produced at a
bullfight or consumed on Google Street View.
In the second article Francesco Lapenta further explores
the relations that exist between images and virtual places
or spaces and theorises about the social and perceptual
shifts elicited by new location-based technologies, which
he calls geomedia, that merge user-generated images,
texts and sounds on navigable, live, interactive virtual
maps or augmented realities such as the ones generated
by Google Latitude, Foursquare, Gowalla or Layer.
Lapenta first interprets instances of digital synthesised
mapping (Google Earth, Photosynth, Autopano) as a
cause for a changing ontology of the image based on a
shift in the spatial-temporal relations that traditionally
characterised analogue photography. He then argues that
these software applications, when integrated with
geomedia technologies, favour a new epistemology that
interprets these live virtual maps not just as a mere form
of digitally synthesised representation of space, but as a
new social space and socio-regulatory system used to
organise and visualise the virtual identities and mediated
social relations of the users that contribute to their
composition. Lapenta concludes with a critical
interpretation of the organisational functions of these
new geomedia technologies and argues that while these
technologies can be interpreted as a form of social
adaptation to organise the complexities of the placeless
flow of information, they can also more problematically
be interpreted as the evolution of a new socio-economic
order in which user-generated images, sounds and texts
are commodified and capitalised upon. Geomedia,
Lapenta suggests, are to space what the watch is to time.
They regulate social behaviour, coordinate mediated
interactions and can be interpreted as the new tools used
to organise the production and exchange of the
immaterial commodities, images and information that
constitute these immaterial spaces.
The third article, by William Uricchio, further develops
and historically contextualises the increased use of
location-aware technologies and explores the digital turn
of the image and its cultural outcomes. These
applications, Uricchio explains, rely on algorithmically
defined relations, between the viewing subject and the
world viewed, that challenge western representational
norms dominant in the modern era. Departing from
Heideggers insights regarding the Welt-bild as a
metaphor for the modern era, Uricchio argues that the
algorithmic reconfiguration of subject-object relations in
the emerging visual regimes created by new digital
imaging applications (such as Photosynth or other
augmented reality apps) offer robust alternatives to
the visual economies of the past. Uricchio uses two entry
points to explore this reconfiguration of the value of the
image. The first is based on an evaluation of the
collaborative value, and the challenge to the concept of
authorship posed by applications such as Photosynth.
The second is based on an exploration of the relation
with a specific point of view of certain augmented reality
applications, which, by recognising particular spaces,
superimpose new images over real space. The two cases
stand in a rough reciprocal relationship, turning on
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Guest Editors Introduction 3
different notions of algorithmic intermediation of
subject-object relations and viewing positions. One
liberates the viewer from an authorised or correct
position. The other depends upon the correct
positioning of the viewer (and portable computing
device) in the world. Both pose questions about the new
regimes of values that the algorithmic turn of the image
constructs.
In the fourth article, media scholar Lev Manovich
explores the evolution of the practice of information
visualisation (infovis). Information visualisation
describes the practice of producing visual
representations of a collection of heterogeneous data to
advance the knowledge and understanding of their
systemic relations and internal correlations. Infovis,
Manovich states, from its original adoption in the
eighteenth century, traditionally used two principles to
achieve these aims: graphic reduction, characterised by
the use of graphic primitives such as points, straight
lines, curves and simple geometric shapes to stand in for
objects and relations between them; and spatial variables,
such as positions, sizes, shapes and, more recently,
representations of movement and space to visualise key
differences in the data and reveal patterns and relations.
Departing from these original practices, Manovich
describes a contemporary evolution of infovis, which he
calls direct visualisation or media visualisation, that
creates visualisations by using the actual visual media
objects (images, video), and not their graphic reduction.
Manovich uses well-known examples of contemporary
infovis projects to prove the advantages of direct
visualisation and to elaborate on the increased cognitive
potential offered by advanced infovis computer-based
techniques and applications.
In the final article of this special issue Fabian Holt
considers a topic that until a few years ago would have
been an unlikely focus for visual studies the music
industry. This has been made possible by what Holt
describes as the video turn in music. Music is one of the
most popular objects of communication and exchange in
the digital age. Following the explosion of user-generated
video content on YouTube and other websites, the music
industry has experienced a momentous transition, with a
new and more far-reaching integration of video in the
cultural consumption of music while also expanding
music consumption to other mediated forms and
experiences. In this context Holt outlines three types of
end-user experience that define the contemporary trends
in video distribution in the music industry: the online
concert experience; the extraordinary concert event; and
video blogs thus showing, through an analysis of the
role of video in the career trajectory of a music band,
how audiovisual media convergence and the exploration
of new re-localised forms of music consumption of live
events are playing a role in the development of the music
industry, in a context shaped by new media trends and
new consumer expectations.
The five articles included in this special issue move
forward an ambitious new agenda for visual studies.
Each article proposes a new way of understanding the
status of the image, its ontology, how we view images,
even what an image is, or the social, cultural and
economic roles images can play. Whereas visual studies
have often been framed by specialised fields and
traditions, the scholars who have contributed to this
issue take approaches that cross disciplines to converge
on one of the many emerging areas of inquiry that
involve the image. The scenarios presented in the five
articles of this issue suggest how digital convergence is
working also at an epistemological level by offering us a
range of new ways to understand the image, theoretically
and empirically. Digital images are embedded in
interconnected practices that at times reinforce, but
often also profoundly reshape, their history, nature and
traditional social functions.
On the one hand the digital era has opened the way for
new and unpredictable futures for the image. Yet on the
other, it offers us new approaches with which to rethink
these new images continuities with the past. This
special issue invites visual scholars to always engage with
the historical trajectories of the images that form part of
our visual memories, biographies and media histories.
Yet it also makes it very clear that, just as talking
pictures forever changed the silent movie era, digital
convergence practices equally signify a shift from
understanding the image as an isolated artefact to seeing
it as a point of access to a networked interaction of
representational, cultural, scholarly, social and
economic practices.
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