Mobile technologies and locative media: Affective geographies of place

Mobile technologies and locative media can provide strong support to the emergence of new cultural objects. By enabling the annotation and visualization of competing cultural interpretations inside a specific territory, mobile technologies and locative media enable users to create an affective geography of their individual and collective perceptions about a specific cultural issue. Mobile technologies and locative media give maps a new emotional life, and may provide a tool for the visualization of different or even competing cultural interpretations.

Our hypothesis is that, by allowing people to collect and describe their perceptions by means of locative technologies, and then visualize and modify these perceptions in both an individual and collective manner (on the web or in the public space), locative technologies and location-based content can substantially impact individual and collective perception and ultimately co-creation—especially in the context of local communities.

In Silence of the Lands, location-based content is provided by the ambient sounds recorded and geo-referenced by participants. These sounds represent subjective interpretations of the soundscape of the urban or natural settings that affect the everyday life of the community, and act as conversation pieces of participants' dialogue on natural quiet.

Our sociotechnical architecture is purposely designed to create affective geographies of place that encourage and support processes of social dialogue and cultural negotiation. We look at digital cartography as a form of storytelling capable of pervasively feeding back social debate over long periods of time.

More on geospatial annotation and mapping in Silence of the Lands.