I recently finished William Gibson's 2007 book Spook Country which is a continuation of his previous novel, Pattern Recognition which has a really nice take on Locative Art.
Wikipedia defines Locative art as art which uses location-based media such GPS or Wi-Fi as its medium. It is a sub-category of interactive art or new media art, which explores the relationships between the real world and the virtual or between people, places or objects in the real world.
Some of the more interesting Locative Art related characters:
- Odile Richard -- A curator of locative art. She is Parisian, but speaks a flawed English that often provides comic relief.
- Jimmy Carlyle -- A troubled, deceased member of The Curfew. He was addicted to drugs which eventually killed him.
- Bobby Chombo -- An expert in geospatial technologies. His background is troubleshooting navigation systems for the US military. He provides the technology necessary for creating locative art. He refuses to sleep in the same place twice.
- Alberto Corrales -- A locative artist living in Los Angeles. His art often recreates the deaths of celebrities such as River Phoenix.
During a 2008 European tour in support of the novel, Gibson commented that "If the book has a point to make where we are now with cyberspace, is that cyberspace has colonized our everyday life and continues to colonize everyday life."
There is also a very interesting Q&A with Gibson in the Boston Globe The key points were as follows:
"Locative art, a melding of global positioning technology to virtual reality, is the new wrinkle in Gibson's matrix. One locative artist, for example, plants a virtual image of F. Scott Fitzgerald dying at the very spot where, in fact, he had his Hollywood heart attack, and does the same for River Phoenix and his fatal overdose. But locative art isn't all funereal. Much is comic: Archie, for example, a giant virtual squid, causes Hollis, a main character hired by a mysterious billionaire to write about all this, to exclaim "gorgeous, ridiculous."
It's locative art that leads spooks and counterspooks directly to the cash.
IDEAS: Is locative art really happening now?
GIBSON: No. There is a locative-art movement, and if you Google it you'll see a lot that's mostly very conceptual, and has to do with mapping. I wanted something more lowbrow. It wouldn't work for me otherwise. I wanted locative art that was almost like graffiti."
