Proximity is a simple iPhone app that works as an alarm clock except the alarm is not set for a time but rather a location. It is aimed at commuters and others that end up sleeping while they are moving in some sort of transport. It is a great mobilization of two things that are usually understood as fixed: You sleeping in bed and your alarm clock on the bedside table are in a fixed location. A standard proximity sensor that is fixed in location sensing when moving things get closer than a pre-selected distance threshold.

I really like the transposition of a specific location where one would usually have a specific time, attaching an alarm to a where rather then a when. It is a bit of genius.

Proximity by Geoff Pado

Walking home the other day I decided to play Mariolife, a real life GPS game on my iPhone. Playing in this case, is walking around in the real world gathering up virtual coins and mushrooms and rescuing princesses. In my quest to gather up coins I found myself walking on streets I had never walked, at least with any kind of noticing, and running into bits of street art I had not yet seen as well. My real life adventure was being guided by the placement of coins that existed only on the screen of my iPhone. So in spending a couple of hours wandering around collecting virtual coins and real street art (in photos) I realized that there was something really special about the collision of very different real world expereinces that was happening here.

Mariolife on iTunes

What struck me was that locative media practitioners often refer back to the situationists as some kind of ancestors, as if they’re working in the same vein. The situationist love for traipsing about town is shared by locative artists who similarly enjoy taking computing ‘outside’, into ‘everyday life’. Just like the situationists we must reclaim the street, and this time we’ll use computers to do it!

But that, to me, seems to be where the similarities end. As alive-and-kicking situationist muse Jacqueline de Jong pointed out during the evening, the situationists wanted one thing above all else: to destroy and disrupt our cushy society. They were sick of it, vowing never to work a day in their lives. They probably would have laughed if they had seen that their ideas had been cherry-picked for ripe concepts. The derive, the detournement. All simple concepts that they purposefully packaged in complex and artistc jargon. And we fell for it.

So, we have two options. Either we stop pretending the situationists are our forefathers, or we actually do see them as our forefathers, and start using computing to disrupt instead of streamline society.

Locative Media and The Situationists – The Mobile City

I printed my portrait on various maps. Then I started to orientate the maps following the lines on my face. On my arm I carried a satellite recorder (GPS) drawing the path that I walked.

Artist Antti Laitinen Walk the Line Project