A review of locative media, mobile and embodied spatial interaction

Mobile phones have become a mundane and well-established communication device in the everyday lives of many people. Their promise is to connect us to anybody, from anywhere at anytime. Mobile communication has contributed to a shift of people’s role towards ‘networked individuals’ in urban environments (Wellman, 2001, 2002); our person-toperson relationships have become more complex affording a seamless transitioning between being physically present at a particular place and being digitally connected at all times. Mobile media support people not only to connect to distant others, but also to coordinate and initiate social interactions in their physical proximity, e.g. spontaneously organising collective actions (Rheingold, 2002). The advent of GPS enabled phones has given rise to what today is referred to as ‘locative media’. The first use of the term is traced back to Kalnins and Tuters in 2003 (de Waal, 2012; Galloway and Matthew, 2006), who selected ‘locative media’ as a title for an international workshop of artists and researchers (International Workshop ‘Locative Media’, 2003), aiming to explore how wireless and location-based networking affects people’s notions of space and social organisation within space. Later, the term became a synonym for media that blurred the barrier between the physical and the virtual world, in particular mobile media that augment people’s experiences in real places through relevant geo-tagged information from the Internet (Espinoza et al., 2001; Kjeldskov and Paay, 2005; Lancaster University, 1999; Proboscis, 2003).