BaneCorp. Home || Orville Development Forum || underground Hi-Fi || FutureWidgets || inklip Media Services || Geotext Geographic SMS || Labyrinth || Rob Monk

GeoText: Resources for GPS-guided Text Services

Our places and spaces already are enmeshed in texts, such as our preconceptions about them from hear-say, news accounts, works of fiction in words, film and other media, and even ideosyncratic associations with place-names. Some places live more vividly in the mainstream historical consciousness than others, but everywhere, our sense of the real and the possible is informed by our sense of 'what has been here' -- both in a sense of what 'really' has been 'here' and in the sense of "What are people thinking about when they think of this place?". Computer networks, handheld interfaces and the world-wide Global Positioning System are converging to create new depths to the textuality of our places, in both senses. We are able to see street- and business-indexed satellite images of our geography, download the weekly podcast of a local poet, look up the best-rated mid-price sushi restaurant within x miles of our intersection, and read personalized reviews of all manner of place-specific goods and services.

For now, this site is a bookmark for my vision to provide organization, access and democratic forums for the development of this new textual depth in our geography. I hope and expect to see texts about texts about places, a bottomless dialog of word, sound, and image concerning where we live, and those who were here before us. Delving in will be an adventure, but with the help of smart, anarchic indexing and moderating, the evolving mass of twisting threads will become an elastic ball of local(ity) wisdom that anyone can access - easy as a number in a cellphone.

Meta Projects
Organic City creates a forum for text posts and downloads on the area of Oakland, CA surrounding Lake Merrit.
Annotate Space creates a forum for text posts and downloads on the area of NYC.
Media Portrait of the Liberties draws on the fiction of Malren Johnson and curated contributions to create a living portrait of place.
Mr. Beller's Neighborhood links the stories of what appears to be a significant slice of the Manhattan NYC literary community by scrollable, zoomable maps, as well as an index of participants, the "cast of characters".
Government FAQ for some kind of 'self-mapping text' project.

GPS-Enabled Projects
Invisible Ideas is a GPS-enabled Artwalk through the Boston Public Garden and Common.

One-off Projects (stand-alone works)
Her Long Black Hair fictionalizes one's experience of NYC's Central Park.

Pervasive Gaming Projects
IPerG is some kind of collaboration between academic departments training games-designers and device-manufacturers like Sony, Nokia, etc.