The Locative Commons: Situating Location-Based Media in Urban Public Space

At last month's Transmediale festival in Berlin [1], the Utrecht-based arts collective Social Fiction received the festival's prestigious Software award for their .walk (dot-walk) project, that combines computer code and "psychogeographic" streetwalking. During the walk, participants carry out an algorithmic series of instructions derived from computer code, that "calculates" the city as a giant "periapatetic computer" [2]. It may seem amazing that such a simple idea can even be considered software, but the concept behind it is the clever part, based, as it is, on a metaphor for how order emerges from chaos, borrowed from the ant colony, which generates maps through the brute force, random exploration of a territory.