great interview with me by Greg Smith in Serial Consign

snip of great interview with me at Serial Consign

http://serialconsign.com/2010/04/jeremy-hight-interview

Greg J. Smith: As a point of entry into this discussion, could you briefly describe your background with locative media — how did you start working within and considering this field?

Jeremy Hight: I came to it both as a writer, designer and an almost Meteorologist. It is a funky combo but let me explain. I was going to be a research Meteorologist working with making immersive and interactive 3D models of hypothetical weather events. That was the dream from about 11 or 12 till my last year of high school. I read every book I could find on any aspects of meteorology, climatology, related stories, historical accounts and pattern recognition in data over time from different contexts. The weather amazed me as a little kid (still does ) both for moments of detail, excitement or beauty and for its sheer complexity and amazing sort of physical narratives. It could be a single tiny cloud on a spring day or a thunderstorm being the one every few summers to survive the trip across all the deserts from an afternoon in western Arizona to arrive in the early morning hours here in Los Angeles. The high based thunderstorms were veined with lighting amidst the darkness of night, sometimes with the first hues of morning beginning on the eastern horizon; they also were stories to me, architectures. They moved across locations on the weather map as well as into experiences like the one of this boy (me) sitting in a front yard as everyone slept watching their slow, quietly majestic approach.

I had the PhD application for the University of Colorado at Boulder in my drawer at 14. I would take it out, almost pet it like a cat, someday… someday… I began publishing poems in school magazines at 15 or so and more than that surface blip of tiny recognition, I always was equally passionate about writing stories and the origins of language. I even wrote stories as a kid about some fantastic storm to hide away for some future me to find in some corner as an artifact during some dull clear day. It is funny now, but then it was wonderful and pushed me in elementary school on to write fiction and poetry more and more (how to capture some piece of those storms, those places…)

After graduating high school, I studied Literature and Creative writing and began teaching myself design and studying more and more art. I kept wondering how you could push narrative in interesting ways spatially and in new forms that tied to something else, something of science or history or something not in the canon. I was 19 or so when I when I walked across a parking lot after a fiction class stressing out about how to be experimental and still have those elements of "traditional" writing, a way to push text and space on the page (or off somehow) and still maintain a depth of narrative or layers.

It seemed absolutely impossible. I started doing things like running pages of old magazines from my grandmother's house as paper in my typewriter and working on new fonts. This was fun and exciting and began to make me wonder about what more this could do. I looked into writing on hills before storms, of making a novel that was just drawers of objects in a dresser, a sort of physical novel with "chapters" in the drawers but no text, just photos, buttons, ephemera. I started sketching stories as being made in museums from their signage linked throughout the building with directional arrows to take those utilitarian texts and reconstitute them as one moved.I planned how to write something and then leave it in the ghost town buildings near Route 66. I started writing poems that used multiple layers of parenthesis and brackets to form multiple readings kind of like code around that time too. It felt closer but not quite where I wanted to go.

In grad school at Cal Arts I made a web magazine that was triggered by storm images being rolled over with the mouse but needed more submissions to run it as I wanted. That was intriguing though. I started work on a book I am still working on off an on that analyzes language and text through the lens of meteorology, flux, patterns and shifts in time as independent study. My thesis project was what seemed to be a large painting in a black frame. I had read a lot of Roland Barthes and had my mind blown by his concept of the "Death of the Author" as I had been writing about something similar for a while and could not pin it down. The "painting" was a boy standing by a tractor with clouds behind him in the desert with some text. It was designed to be an illusion. The images were first shot in the desert on video, edited into frames in director and then printed on clear plastic with the backs painted with semi opaque white paint to give the illusion of brush strokes. When someone approached it there was a sign next to it that said to open it. The frame was actually hinged like a window and as you lifted it up you lifted the boy (the main part of the image and anchor of its asymmetrical composition) away. At that point, the text began moving behind the clouds; it was a short short of me watching storms as a boy and was being triggered by a simple motor hidden inside. When the person was done experiencing it/agitating it into being they closed the hinge at it stopped at some random point in the text (it rolled like the music on old player pianos) and appeared to be a painting. Experience was the interface and the work was never to be linear or "complete". Now I felt like I was getting closer.

In my last year of Cal Arts I started making notes of possible narratives that took hypertext and pushed it also into videos in hidden rooms in a text, of audio subtexts within a certain word if rolled over and of these being within floor plans and then rooms, of spatializing narrative. After I graduated, Jeff Knowlton called me and said he had an idea for a project looking at the similarities between GPS and railroads in early cities. This was late 2000, around Christmas and I knew there was something there. As we began researching the history of Los Angeles I first realized that with GPS you could write with the physical world. I then realized that it was much more important that with GPS and location specific information places could "speak" finally; lost histories and areas of study otherwise elsewhere in books could be right there. This to me was something really wild that I knew needed to be explored. As we were developing the project I began thinking more and more also about interface, maps and what else might be possible.

34 North 118 West

GJS: …and this of course set the stage for your 34 North 118 West project (pictured above). You've described this piece as addressing "the early history of the telecommunications and transportation industries" as told by 6 voices in what might be described as a GPS novel. How did this project inform your research and thinking about space and narrative?

JH: I did things in developing it like laying out the historical narratives on a map and moving them around to see the experiential interface, to see not any line or traditional sequence like when I work as an editor, especially at a literary magazine. This was really interesting as I worked for months to see how to leave it open and imagine all the paths people might take and lengths of time they might spend. This was really exciting as I saw back to Barthes and Milorad Pavić and mostly saw the place tellings its stories so to speak with this.

One bit that we recorded but unfortunately were not able to place in the streets, map and project was a bit that to me told so much about this possible locative narrative. The analogy was of putting a needle on a record, but at random. The needle is a point, a place and it moves and the record is also a place and it moves, yet both can be held still. When you drop that needle and that random sound emerges it was recorded at a specific time, and of a certain moment, people playing etc, but it also defies time as long as it can be heard, or triggered really. So… a place is the same, and any place has many such moments, people, places, events and they can be also be subtle, humble, quiet, and yet important. We used to talk to people about 34 North… as also a story of the quiet moments, lost moments and their resonance and how it could even be the hidden ones, suppressed ones, or what what was not seen as "history" by the media or the sexy semiotic of celebrity and big events. What about local people ? What about jobs no one remembers? What of the Latina women in the 1940s who helped build a city and no one remembers them now? A city can have a botoxed face, the past can often be obscured or lost. I walked out of the Downtown library one afternoon dazed after hours of looking at microfiche of newspaper articles from the early 20th century. It hit me finally with full force that this was not only a new kind of writing (progressing from many other forms of course… not out of the blue) but more so it was to give places a voice. It was an odd feeling seeing something so big and knowing that it does not exist yet and how grandiose it would sound to call it such.

GJS: One of the most exciting passages in Writing Within the Map sketches out the history of iconography and mark making as a spatial discourse that allows travellers to share insights about the same site across time. Making trails, leaving warnings, scrawling graffiti or even creating cave paintings all bundle together as means by which humans annotate their experiences with places. How would you contextualize emerging augmented reality (AR) tools and applications given this extended history of location-specific mark making?

JH: Ah, great question. Well, we are seeing a new period just emerging of location awareness and annotation/augmentation, but also of the map and of augmentation both of spaces and the map itself. It is very exciting and I have waited 11 years for this to happen. Will see how it all plays out. We now are seeing many people annotate maps with photos online as a few years ago we saw this in locations with GPS. We are seeing the hikers that marked trails on signs translate more and more to ways to notate things like good bike trails in the hills both to follow in real space and increasingly on maps as well to see at home and then follow. Communities are building along such things. We are now seeing streams of live data on maps and bundling of multiple online activities at once. This is beginning to move into a deeper and more immersive interface and into the rich possibilities of multiple annotations, simultaneous and dynamic annotations and archiving that is to be geospatial. The tantalizing big what if may end up being a spatial Internet altogether, no longer of inaccurate spider programs like a google search but an intuitive interface that learns as you use it and can lay out answers to your queries on maps as well as with related video streams, images, etc. The possibilities are astounding. We also are seeing what really excites me as a writer and researcher which is new ways to write and publish within maps and their augmentations, so not just locative narrative but even as I mention in the essay, a literary journal in the augmentation where Route 66 once ran or inside an immersive visualization of an abandoned building that is placed on its space in the map. These are wild new places and very exciting.

Pranav Mistry - Sixth Sense

GJS: Could you identify and contextualize some contemporary AR applications or mapping projects that you consider particularly rich - what do you consider to be some exciting contemporary projects?

JH: It is a very exciting time right now. You are seeing apps popping up all over the place that were only speculative theory a year ago.

Layar is huge as it opens a thousand doors and is a massive step into the wilder areas becoming inter-connected and growing. ARwave is another giant door opening and it will allow publication within maps and layers as opposed to the popular concept of augmentation as being an added layer (i.e. single layer only). Sixth Sense [pictured above] and its use of a projector is one of those so complex it is simple works that show how great leaps come often with older concepts and tech as inspiration for new interface.

Imawik(imagewiki) is the visual search I have been writing about for several years come to fruition. The ImageWiki is a visual search tool for mobile devices – it creates the ability to turn images into physical hyperlinks.

I really love your image from Kosmograd [photo-collages by Sergei Larenkov], I also really dig Phantom City. That is the idea that is so key to layers in history as a database and multiple layers in a place. Places have histories, stories, people, local communities, layers of architecture over time etc etc… this is a place being given voice as in locative narrative, but now the technology can soon tell many stories, make a place its own database of its rich information and we can then visually search from this sort of map as internet. Also a place can be layered with artworks and stories as well as layers of past history and architecture. This is fascinating and very important. These ideas and projects will become even more rich and nuanced and in multiple layers. The more works that are made and the more voices of place we are able to build and "read".

GJS: Another provocative soundbite from Writing Within the Map reads as follow: "The newsstand is to also be within that red dot. You are here." As a symbol the red dot (and perhaps "x marks the spot") is universally understood but I'm wondering if you can unpack the significances of the newsstand and describe how it relates to the intersection of location and narrative.

JH: Absolutely. The newsstand is both a location, archive and interface. It was a place to go to (still is ) to get the news, to be entertained, to look for something in different areas of interest that is text or text and image. The newsstand also is a point on a street, in a city or town where many come by choice for the experience, ease and particular selections and availability. The map soon must be this. My earlier paper Immersive Sight looked at locative narrative and augmented reality as needing to see the pre-existing model of the eye to cerebral cortex as a strong example of interface, multi-layered data, interaction, fast processing speed and archive as active.

The same is true for something that is complex and endangered by current buzz and hype (which can also be poisons if over-saturating into backlash and sending a myopic dumbed down sense of what is possible at the same time) like AR and mapping as interface and archive. The newsstand is a great example of something that seems simple but is much more layered based on your interaction and shows that these new things are not out of the ether and hopefully will help show that they are not sent to kill the old like the fears historically of so many new technologies, tools and forms

Everyblock - Interface

[Everyblock Los Angles - interface ]

GJS: It is kind of odd to start reconsidering simple sites like the newspaper box, or corner newsstand in light of mobile technology and "pins on a map" because these were venues that accommodated very specific distribution and social function for decades - and they were definitely taken for granted. Now they seem quaint, not unlike the image of newsboy hollering headlines on a street corner to hawk papers at the beginning of the 20th century. If we start to consider the newsstand as an object that is manifested within the granular, red dot on a map or the infinitely customizable RSS reader on a phone (a moving target), where do traditional models of print media fit into your vision of the near future?

JH: Yes, that very oddness is to me an important point. What seemed odd before was to compare AR and processor speed issues, massive data sets, multi-tiered immersion and complex issues of semiotics and movement with a look at the quaint old eyeball but it is a succinct model of what is needed, a metaphor and cross reference at once. The news stand at one time was a node, an archive (albeit current info), a stream of possible avenues of data if one perused and an augmented spot often within a larger architecture of a store front or just in front of it, a "hot spot" in a crude sense. Data needs to be more dynamic, maps need to be more dynamic, data streams in locations need to be options with user end adaptability and choice. The near future will increasingly see map points streaming data like plumes and they will be ribboned on to places and maps as desired, as channels of overlay with almost infinite range.

That quaint little news stand had a range and was a spot full of data. Now imagine this being overlaid over landscapes and your internet is not a google search but an increasingly intuitive search that learns as you use it and lays out active data and icons as you wish.

This also has a crucial function as I laid out in another essay Rhizomatic Cartography in crises like the recent massive quakes and Hurricane Katrina. The news as we know it is slow and blogs and twitter feeds are increasingly the fast and crucial streams of information during such events. Doesn't it make sense to place these spatially so people can know what is happening and where, even down to a street by street (live) level as happened in the flooding parishes in New Orleans; wouldn't this also lead to faster, more accurate and localized assistance?

GJS: You just participated in the "The Next Wave of AR: Exploring Social Augmented Experiences" at the O'Reilly Where 2.0 conference and presented the ARWave project (with Tish Shute, Joe Lamantia, Sophia Parafina, and Anselm Hook). How was this conversation?

JH: It was very interesting. We each come at AR ( and maps and real time and layered information) from very different places. It is a confluence and nexus which to me makes a lot of sense. Tish comes from a background in motion graphics initially and graphic effects, Anselm comes from art as well as gaming, Sophia comes from coding, science, GIS and geography and Joe comes from information architecture, design and tech consulting. We have all been interested in AR for a while.

The format was such that we had a quick discourse (5 min each), but the sense of passion in each speech and the manner in which these components come together was exciting. AR is exploding now and as someone who has known its huge potential for over ten years it is a wild time but also one to watch with caution.

The rush to monetize must not create a sense of one dimension as being what is on the table. The need also is to see that there is not a backlash as people see this one common conception of AR and see the other threads and developments as hype. I saw this happen to a degree in VR and then in Locative Media. Locative Media is now so much more than providing information while fishing or driving directions in a car, it also is ubiquitous. When we did 34 North 118 West it was one of a few experiments; this is happening now in AR too even while many see things like Hallmark cards you hold up to your computer camera. The future is wide open. It also, like in so many moments in the past (motion pictures, radio, television, cable television, the net itself…), is one where we are to see those wild experiments grow roots, cojoin, fuse and eventually lead to things far beyond what at the time seemed even possible. It is all a progression. It always is, always will be.