ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of some of locative media’s forgotten genealogies. It explores the implications of “location-aware” augmented reality as a kind of “parasitic architecture” affording ordinary people the chance to re-script and re-interpret their physical environments in socially and politically radical ways. William Gibson’s prose references to locative media were an early signal of his own developing understanding of cyberspace as a virtual landscape which had “everted” into the real world and “colonized the physical.” The notion of “making the invisible visible” has long been a major concern of modern urban and cultural theory. Its currency can be traced, in large part, directly to the work of Walter Benjamin in general and his Arcades Project in particular. Both dialectical image and interface share a similar logic in treating the process of layering time and space as a politicized, deliberate act of radical history, and future-making. Locative media, extends Benjamin’s “literary montage,” beyond text, into sound and image.
