Russell (1999) headmap manifesto
From Inventiopedia
Russell, Ben (1999?) the headmap manifesto. http://headmap.org.
(The webpage is dead - old versions can be seen at the [http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://headmap.org Internet Archive.)
headmap describes itself as "a sequence of text fragments dealing with the social and cultural implications of location aware devices" (headmap 2 locali(s)zation, 2002(?) p. 5).
It is a series of fragments, quotes and ideas developing a vision in which
location aware, networked, mobile devices make possible invisible notes attached to spaces, places, people and things...
[...]
It manifests a world in which computer games move outside and get subversive.
Sex and even love are easier to find.
- places can have histories ‘attached’ to them (i.e. the collection of notes left at a given place sorted according to when they were left).
headmap manifesto (1999?), page 4
- inanimate objects can become more animate (if you know where a tree is and you know when someone is walking past it you could make it burst into song).
Tuters and Varnelis refer to the headmap manifesto as the "ur-text" of locative media. The crucial idea of the manifesto is the combination of the growth of the mobile internet, which makes it possible to access the internet from any place; and the growth of positioning technology, which makes it possible for the networked device to sense the user's physical location, and thereby provide information based on this location. It is the most detailed and elaborate vision I have seen of the idea of locative media (although that specific term is not used).
The integration of these two technologies, high bandwidth internet access as a basic component of cell phone functionality, together with location awareness (the cell phone knows it’s geographical location) is leading somewhere.
The step beyond ideal, but dislocated communities, is to add a geographical layer to the mobile internet. A geographical layer would add a spatial address to information and people (longitude and latitude), so that proximity could again become a pervasive, useful but not constraining, utilitarian factor in organising community or in a searching for information.
[...]
It is already possible to annotate space.
a). touch a button on your device to determine and log the location
b). add a note linked to that location to a networked database.
Leave a note at that geographical location.
[...]
The whole world will become an annotated space, which links from the real to the information space and back again. The world as interface.
headmap manifesto (1999?) pp. 30-31
The headmap website, headmap.org, referred to headmap as "a new quarterly publication, a website, a collective, and a location aware software project". It mysteriously states that "headmap was put together in san francisco, kathmandu, berkeley california and London", but doesn't give any names or institutional affiliations. Ben Russell is often referred to as the author, and the website claims the first version was published in 1999 - although the oldest versions of the manuscript I have come over all refer to events in 2000, so presumably what I have seen is not the earliest published version. My quotes are from the versions available from the earliest versions of the website in the Internet Archive, which date back to 2002.
--Anders Sundnes Løvlie 00:01, 16 October 2009 (UTC)
