There is a fundamental difference between the notions of place and of location. A location is completely specified by its cartography; a place owes its phenomenology to its unique context of neighbourhood and individual experience, in time. Place is what becomes of locations when things happen there.

I admit this distinction escaped me when I was first writing about augmented realities, but it has been brought home to me by projects Ben mentioned today. mudengland and mudlondon are MOOs linked to geographic metadata — very similar in concept to my original Ku24 project in Tokyo, albeit utilising much more modern technologies.

The MOOs work, but they also highlight the differences between place and location. In mudlondon, locations feel strongly quantised - to get from Oxford Circus to Hoxton you ‘go east’, but there is a lot of conceptual work to be done before that ‘going eastness’ feels different to the ‘going eastness’ which gets you from there to say Bethnal Green. By which I mean something more than it simply being, say, one move east to HMV, two to Tottenham Court Road, forty-three to Liverpool Street. The MOO is a series of linked places, but in the physical world the map is not so conveniently the territory. Place is fuzzier — real-worldlier — than a digraph of interlinked GPS coordinates. Experientially, places are contextualised by their neighbourhoods, themselves nests of neighbourhoods. Likewise, distance, intentionality and velocity alter the scale of our attention. The technical challenge is to map this experiential lustre into metadata and interfaces to humanise an otherwise arid landscape of maps.

The slideshow accompanying Tetsuo’s presentation at the Tate was titled The Phenomenology Of Radio. He didn’t really develop that theme in his talk, but his website goes a little further, and touches on the phenomenology of reception, as experienced through very low power community FM. Reception, he points out, is active. To get a signal, you may have to go outdoors, or at least place your receiver somewhere unusual. You are not a passive consumer, you are involved in the process. This thought extends to wireless: you must actively seek out an open node, and locate yourself in relation to both it and your particular needs, in the moment. This reflects, of course, the currently few locations where reception is even possible, let alone appropriate to a given need. Community networking can exploit this phenomenology. The most simple location-sensitivity is defined through range: certain content can be kept local — accessible only if you are in range of the wifi segment on which it is hosted. Keeping content local to subnets may be the easiest way for communities to create location-specific experiences — exploiting the raw characteristics of radio reception to force the active presence of an audience.

Yesterday I attended the Wireless Cultures symposium at Tate Modern (archived here).

Two highlights: Tetsuo Kogawa’s ‘cooking show’ demonstration of Mini-FM, and Nancy Porter’s presentation. She works with Antenna Audio, who do audio tours for galleries. Last year they implemented a trial location-sensitive wifi guide system at the Tate using ruggedised iPaqs and some clever triangulation heuristics, with software from Pango Systems. Nice to see some people actually doing this stuff rather than just showing off vapourware and industrial design mockups.

A few thoughts on all of this to follow later in the week.