ABSTRACT The Exploratorium's Invisible Dynamics project seeks to manifest the inevitable and reciprocal relationship between art and science that is at the heart of the museum's mission. An attempt to visualize invisible, often cartographic, systems in the San Francisco Bay Area, it places various elements of Bay Area life in a context that can then proportionally be used to relate San Francisco to the greater Pacific Rim in a similar scalar relationship. The paper analyzes one part in particular of the Invisible Dynamics project— Hidden Ecologies , a photographic, cartographic collaboration between a microbiologist and an architect. The flexibility between artistic and scientific processes is expressed by those involved in Hidden Ecologies as well as the “artists” of the other three projects that make up Invisible Dynamics.

ABSTRACT The author discusses the field of locative arts, focusing on works and interests from 2003 to 2004. An overview is presented of the artistic project types found within this field, and the author considers in depth a number of issues such as how projects are shaped by their reliance on positioning technologies and the importance of the social within this area of practice.

ABSTRACT The adoption of mobile devices as the computers of the 21st century marks a shift away from the fixed terminals that dominated the first 50 years of computing. Associated with this shift will be a new emphasis on context-aware computing. This article examines design approaches to context-aware computing and argues that the evolution of this technology will be characterized by an interplay between top-down systems for command and control and bottom-up systems for collective action. This process will lead to the emergence of “contested-aware cities,” in which power struggles are waged in public spaces with the assistance of context-aware systems.

ABSTRACT Locative media has been attacked for being too eager to appeal to commercial interests as well as for its reliance on Cartesian mapping systems. If these critiques are well founded, however, they are also nostalgic, invoking a notion of art as autonomous from the circuits of mass communication technologies, which the authors argue no longer holds true. This essay begins with a survey of the development of locative media, how it has distanced itself from net art and how it has been critically received, before going on to address these critiques and ponder how the field might develop.