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TechArt: Journal of Arts and Imaging Science, Vol. 3, No. 3, August 2016
Post-virtual Geophilia
Kok Yoong Lim* and Joonsung Yoon
Soongsil University / Seoul, Korea
*Corresponding Author (limkokyoong@ssu.ac.kr)
Abstract: This paper examines the emergence of increased hybridity in our experience of spatiality, in physical
and virtual space. I argue that locative media acts as a cognitive extension of our mind and this realm of the so-
called “extended mind” purported by Andy Clarke affords an extension to our body into the virtual realm. This
reciprocal function between the extended mind and extended body allows for self-correction and self-
consciousness in space and can be understood as a kind of feedback loop. Our interaction with locative media
is perpetuated by this feedback loop that allows the body to adjust its operation according the
interconnectedness between the actual and virtual. This synchronous feedback loops between three spaces: (1)
mind or the mental space, (2) reality or the physical space, and (3) virtual space. My aim in this paper is to
provide a new context in which to interpret the notion of geophilia – the love of the earth, by examining the
geographical proximity of locative media. We shall then see wider aesthetic implications of the hybridity in
locative art.
Keywords: locative art, locative media, feedback loop, embodiment, post-virtual, geospatial
Received Jul. 14, 2016; revised manuscript received Aug.07; accepted for publication Aug. 09, 2016; published online Aug.
31, 2016. DOI: 10.15323/techart.2016.08.3.3.1 / ISSN: 2288-9248.
1. Introduction
Yoon et al. described the post-virtual as a metaphysical
entity that resides in the computer for a material object in
the post-virtual is non-existent in reality even though it
manifests in physical form [1]. The metaphysicality in
post-virtual reality is defined in an ontological sense: the
“post-virtual is an entity in reality from the virtual, in
which the output of media artworks follows the physical
condition based on physical computing [1]”. On the other
hand, the metaphysicality of the post-virtual can also be
clarified with a philosophical notion when we contemplate
the cause and effect of this entity. This metaphysical
entity’s niche in post-virtuality is also evident in locative
media artworks whose existence in the physical domain
originated from the virtual domain. The sense of place that
is elicited from this kind of creative endeavor is only a
human perception of space, in both physical and virtual
domains. For instance, when we are navigating or finding
our way in physical reality with the assistance of locative
media, we are encountering an interlocking of virtual
position and physical position, with which we maneuver in
space, by calibrating both of them. The result is a seamless
experience that requires us to merge the virtual and
physical as one. This exemplifies what Mark Hansen [2]
called mixed reality, which is also referred to as hybrid
reality, similarly connoting the merging of real and virtual
worlds for real time interaction. This concept can be traced
back to Steve Mann’s concept of mediated reality [3] as
implemented by various wearable systems he created as
early as the 1970s. Today, mediated reality purported by
Steve Mann can be experienced by using a smartphone, as
the smartphone is becoming the singular, ubiquitous
computer. Since the late 20th century just about every
aspect of our real life experience has a virtual counterpart,
yet, just as anything reaches its extremity it reverses its
course. We notice what Yoon et al. called “a repatriation
of the virtual” to the physical in his paper that introduced
post-virtual as the second phase of media art [1]. Locative
media aligns with this phenomenological development of
media art when it repatriates to real life, providing an
added metaphysical dimension to an ordinary embodied
movement. Therefore, locative media artwork, which taps
into this tendency may be regarded as geophillic,
demonstrating its geographic proximity over virtual
proximity.
2. Geophilia of Locative Media
Locative media articulates its specificity to geography
through geographically contextual authoring and
experience of media content. In their attempt to build a
bibliography and taxonomy for locative media, Bleecker
and Knowlton sketched out locative media with a
connection to the earth. The purpose of locative media,
writes Bleecker and Knowlton, is about “creating a kind of
geospatial experience whose aesthetics can be said to rely
upon a range of characteristics ranging from the quotidian
to the weighty semantics of lived experience, all latent
within the ground upon which we traverse [4].” Locative
media harness the capacity of Geographic Information
Systems (GIS), e.g., Global Positioning System (GPS) and
Google Maps that is ubiquitous in mobile devices for “site-
K. Y. Lim et al.: Post-virtual Geophilia
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specific capture, tagging and display of media content [5].”
The technological framework of locative media is tied to
the GIS. Tracing the development of GIS, Lo and Yeung
explained the semantics of “geographic” in GIS: “The
word ‘geographic’ carries two meanings: ‘Earth’ and
‘geographic space’ […] By ‘Earth,’ it implies that all data
in the system are pertinent to Earth’s features and
resources, including human activities based on or
associated with these features and resources […] By
‘geographic space,’ it means that the commonality of both
the data and the problems that the systems are developed
to solve is geography, i.e., location, distribution, pattern,
and relationship within a specific geographical reference
framework [6].” The emerging locative media reinstates
the importance of place and acts as a counterpoise for the
“placelessness” advocated by the cyberneticians. By the
same token, we purported that this new field of media art
has precipitated media arts into geophilia – a love for the
earth.
A. “Geo” Hyphenation
The geographical reference framework in locative media
makes locative media artwork unique among media arts. In
their survey on the chronological history of locative media,
Bleecker and Knowlton pointed out an early approach in
producing locative media is what they called a
“hyphenation” approach in which an existing (media)
practice is augmented with location awareness or location-
enabling-technology, thereby earning them the geo- prefix
and resulting in a hybridity in the media expression [4].
Given the already proliferating media landscape, geo-type
media hit the domain of everyday users amid a storm of
Google Maps hype [7]. According to Bleecker and
Knowlton’s taxonomy of locative media [4], we can
outline at least six geo-types of locative media:
1. Geo-Storytelling
2. GPS-Drawing
3. Geo-Graffiti
4. Geo-Caches
5. Geo-Note Taking
As a matter of fact, the hyphenation approach involves a
breadth of practices and techniques of geo-referencing
existing and established media. Hence, it is hard to capture
the prolific geo-types of locative media within one list.
3. Between Cognition and Reality
Most locative media rely on maps as graphical
interfaces to present databases of geographical data, such
as longitude and latitude. In human culture, maps have a
very long history as a symbolic representation of the
spatial environment. Maps follow the law of both reality
and imagination just as the post-virtual is an entity in
reality from the virtual. Hassan calls maps our supreme
fictions of the world, the surveyed side of our dreams [8].
Extending from Hassan’s view of maps, maps are not only
tools of the eye and extensions of the foot [8], but also
imagination in cognition. In tracing the origin of mental
maps, Huth laid out much evidence that demonstrates our
mind’s capability to assimilate, store, and recall what are
effectively mental maps [9]. Shido refers to the mind as
noetic space, which simulates our reality space wherein
movement can be planned, tried out, revised, recorded, and
erased. The notion of transvergence allows our mind to
hybridize, to extend, and to actualize blueprints in dynamic
interactions [10]. Herein, cognitive mapping denotes a
process that takes place when a mental map is created in
our mind. This appears to be an intrinsic ability. The well-
known experiments of mapping the brain of rats by
neuroscientists John O’Keefe and Edvard Moser, which
led them to the discovery of place cells and grid cells in
our nervous system, respectively, suggest a fundamental
linkage between our brain’s memory function and
perception of space. Speculating on Clarke’s notion of
extended mind, the spatial consciousness elicited from
cognitive maps loops out into the world and gets recorded
in a medium, such as a map. Today maps appear as digital
code, available on any digital interface, which can be
considered a simulation of their creators’ mental map.
These days, digital maps have benefited from, and work
in tandem with, GPS technology to extend our conditions
of perception. They are instrumental in shaping a new
space-time consciousness or, perhaps, unconsciousness. In
this “No man’s land,”
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the body loses all references:
inside/outside, giant/miniature, spectator/object,
part/whole [11], echoing Richards’s description of her
project titled Virtual Body. Descartes’s Cartesian view of
man is simultaneously the subject and object of thought.
Observation is useful to elucidate this duality, but the
problem of the mind and body has progressed in the
neuroscientific understanding of the brain: the discovery of
place cells and grid cells in our hippocampus accentuates
the qualities of embodiment and it has the merit of being
able to account for the view that locative media is an
embodied media. The corporeal user is the active instigator
in this technology, instigating the dispersion of events.
4. Between Reality and Virtuality
Technology affords us the ability to confront a world
that is formed at a point where physical reality intertwines
with virtual layers. In his revelation of Russell’s Headmap
Manifesto, the alleged precursor to locative media, Zeffiro
disclosed Russell’s vision on the social and cultural
implications of location-aware devices, “these ‘location-
aware’ devices would interact within the physical world
such that computational relationships would no longer be
confined to the computer screen [12].” As Zeffiro details,
this shift in computing would simultaneously mark a shift
1
This term commonly connotes a land that is under dispute between
parties who leave it unoccupied due to uncertainty, especially in war
zones. In this context, I refer to a digital map in locative media as No
man’s land to suggest that (1) it is uninhabitable, and (2) it presents the
representational politics of the demarcation of lands in cartography.
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TechArt: Journal of Arts and Imaging Science, Vol. 3, No. 3, August 2016
from an inside view towards an outside view, what Russell
unapologetically describes as “a recolonization of the real
world [12].” Bolter offered the transparency and
immediacy concept for this effect, widely adopted by
augmented reality or mixed reality technology. The
underlying technology, such as GPS tracking, ubiquitous
computing, and the enhancement of display technology,
ultimately pushed locative media towards transparency and
immediacy. Transparent digital applications seek to get to
the real world by bravely denying the fact of mediation
[13]. The development of media is motivated by an
increasing appetite for an unmediated relationship between
the user and the represented object. It justifies how we can
easily anthropomorphize the “blinking blue dot” on any
map interface that represents our current location and
project ourselves onto it. Writing about virtuality, reality,
and digitality, Munster claimed that virtuality does not
exist in the realm beyond or transcend corporeal
experience [14]. Rather to draw an analogy from Jean-
Jacques Rousseau’s “alert reverie” as O’Rourke did,
locative media experience in a psychogeographical sense,
is a kind of double presence that is both in the here and
now and in the imagination [15]. With locative media, we
witness actual movement through real space translated into
corresponding movement in the virtual world. Our
habituation to corporeality and embodied movement is
responsible for this reification. Munster claimed this form
of duplication does not resemble reality, rather it
corresponds with the actual sensory world that is subjected
to fluctuating degrees of variation, the general mutability
and contingencies of sentient life [14], (which can be
captured by various sensors forming a perpetual flow of
data) one which does not transgress the geography. Thus,
we often find geographic data in locative media
supplemented by other data captured by gyro sensors and
accelerometers leveraging on our proprioception,
suggesting the corporeal dimension of virtuality.
5. Geoscape: Negotiating the in-between
Echoing post-virtual theory that purported information
has a material property, the post-virtual allows us to
experience locative data as a tangible element. The post-
virtual theory postulated a phenomenon negotiating the in-
between: the geographic proximity and virtual proximity
of locative media are not mutually exclusive. The tension
between geographic/virtual of locative media cannot be
constructed as a choice of either/or, but rather has to be
understood as a new reality of “both/and,” as Yoon et al.
says, “the ephemeral repatriation of the virtual is neither
the virtual as it was, nor reality as it was – it is a new
reality [1].” In this sense, the new reality that we inhabit
resonates with Miller’s notion of “geoscape,” which he
defines as the planet’s life zone, including everything that
lies below, on, and above the surface of the earth that
supports life [16]. He asserted that most data, at some
levels, is spatial and that all type of data (physical,
biological, social, cultural, economic, urban, etc.) can be
geo-referenced [16].
Now I turn to the practice of three media artists working
in locative media technologies to explain more
discursively the extension of our geographic space. The
public sculpture Data Cloud (Fig. 1) created by Jeremy
Wood, the pioneer of GPS drawing, is an overt example of
locative artwork that is located in the new geoscape,
annexed to many different stacks of reality. Data Cloud is
composed of public benches all at different heights and
positions, overlapping and intersecting with each other and
with the ground like a visual glitch [17]. It illuminates the
discrepency between our geospatial data and our actual
whereabouts. Inevitably, it lures viewers into a hybrid
space conjured up by cognitive space that enables a
metaphysical speculation, a physical space where the
viewer is habituated and the virtual space where
technology thinks the viewer is. This underlines the fact
that these spaces are nonetheless imbricated.
Fig. 1. Jeremy Wood, Data Cloud, 2008. Public sculpture exhibited in
Beatrixpark, Amsterdam for the Checking Reality exhibition at
Platform 21. (© Jeremy Wood)
Aram Bartholl’s public installation Map (Fig. 2), which
has been installed in multiple city centers since its
inception in 2006, transcends the boundaries between what
we see on screen and what we see in reality. The
installation comprises a life size red map marker that we
find on the ubiquitous Google Maps interface. The size of
the life size red marker in physical space corresponds to
the size of a marker in the web interface in maximum
zoom factor of the map [18]. Map suggests a perplexing
perception of reality ramified by the increasing influence
of locative media in our daily life, where we see digital
data annotating the physical space.
K. Y. Lim et al.: Post-virtual Geophilia
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Fig. 2. Aram Bartholl, Map at Kasseler Kunstverein, “Hello World”
solo show, 2013. (© Aram Bartholl)
Geotagging provides a linkage of information with
location. By doing so the media content will be overlaid on
real-world settings and can only be experienced by users
equipped with mobile phones or other mobile device with
GPS and media playback capabilities at the same location.
Hemment used the metaphor of “person as ‘cursor’” to
explain that the navigational structure of media content
digitally annotated in the world is predominantly a
database with the environment itself turned into a medium
and interface for browsing [19]. This metaphor is taken
literally by Sebastian Campion to bring the Urban Cursor
(Fig. 3) before the public in Figueres, Catalunya in Spain.
Urban Cursor is a GPS enabled sculpture in the form of a
three-dimensional computer cursor that can be used as a
bench in a public space [20]. Urban Cursor responds to
input from people touching it and moving it around the
city, analogous to the cursor movement in a computer
screen. The trail of Urban Cursor throughout the city can
be seen on Google Maps. On the map, you can also find
photos uploaded by participants. The photos are spatially
arranged by matching the photo’s digital time stamp with
the GPS coordinates of Urban Cursor. Urban Cursor is
partly in the physical space and partly in the virtual terrain,
but the sum of all parts is reconstructed in totality in what
O’Rourke called a “hybrid datascape [15]” – a synthesis of
digital and embodied world.
Fig. 3. Sebastian Campion, Urban Cursor, 2009. GPS enabled public
sculpture placed on a public square in Figueres, Catalunya in Spain
during the festival Ingravid (© Sebastian Campion)
6. Conclusion
Locative media is modifying our relation to spatiality.
Our daily muse in cognitive space and our daily lives on
earth and in cyberspace are inextricably linked. As
Richards’ Virtual Body suggests, the heightening of
corporeal and affective experiences through the very
dispersion of bodily location has become a key aspect of
information aesthetic [14]. Information arts put forward by
Stephen Wilson has transgressed its virtual boundaries into
physical reality. With the locative media as affordance,
locative art permits us a re-evaluation of the aesthetic of
reality, guiding us to see virtual as reality and vice versa.
This hybridity brings a new dimension to Land art
pioneered by much-celebrated land artists such as Robert
Smithson, Hamish Fulton, and Richard Long. I claim that
locative art continues the legacy of Land art to celebrate
the harmony between the landscape and art and to protest
against the perceived artificiality of modern art, but
transgressed to give way to the virtual world. Half a
decade after the Land art movement, we see the earth is
newly exposed to various layers of reality that is not just
virtual, but also cognitional and philosophical. Locative
artists are exploring a new reality by assembling different
layers beyond our familiar environment. Their creative
endeavors can facilitate our contemplating where we can
locate ourselves in the age of cybernetics.
References
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[2] M. B. N. Hansen, Bodies in Code. New York &
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[3] S. Mann, “Existential Technology: Wearable
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TechArt: Journal of Arts and Imaging Science, Vol. 3, No. 3, August 2016
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Biographies
Kok Yoong Lim is an Assistant Professor at the
Global School of Media at Soongsil University,
Seoul, Korea. He received his bachelor’s degree in
Digital Media from Multimedia University in
Malaysia and his Master of Arts degree in Fine Arts
from Norwich University of the Arts in the UK. He
is a Malaysian media artist. For more information
about his work, please see: www.simply-simple.net.
Joonsung Yoon is a Professor at the Global School
of Media at Soongsil University, Seoul, Korea. He
received his PhD from New York University. Dr.
Yoon is doing interdisciplinary research in art and
science.
