As humans who move through space, our perception of the space we move through has changed drastically through time. For example, our vehicles to a large degree prevent us from smelling, feeling, and hearing our environment. Automated maps and directions force another level of abstraction on the space we move though. We have entered a time when travel has become as an abstract path between start and destination spaces. The personal space we occupy in the process is constant And this is not only true of vehicular travel but has become true of walking as well. As soon as one puts on headphones s/he puts on a sound barrier which detaches her/him from the surrounding environment. My question is how I can return the personal space back to the shared environment.

This brought me to consider how environment, and in particular land, is qualitatively analyzed. How do we describe space, especially without describing location? What is it that makes us perceive one space as similar to another? One answer to this problem is land use and land cover codes, which are land classifications used by business and government to specify qualitative properties of the land. The specific codes I used were the Level II categories of the Land Use and Land Cover classification system documented by Anderson and others (1976). These codes were used in a USGS survey that identified all the land use and land cover throughout the United States. With this data I can give a qualitative description of any location in the United States. It is with this data that I hope to return the individual to the space they are in. The form of this project is to have the participant wear a set of headphones and backpack and navigate through space while listening to audio samples of similar spaces based on their land classification codes. GPS data from a GPS device will run into a program in the laptop which will compute the code for the participants current location and then select appropriate samples to play.

Several artists have worked with locative media, but often these works are artist centric in that they discuss the location of the artist. Janet Cardiff’s audio walks are one of the first examples of work that is about the participant’s location, however, the participant must follow the directions on the tape to follow the artist’s “location” and the discussion becomes about past and present location and the relationship of the artist to the participant. 34 North by 118 West (http://34n118w.net/34N/) is a project about the history of a specific location. Audio recordings are rendered by the artist and are “placed” by the artist. The project works on the basis of where the user decided to walk; however, in many ways it is similar to an audio tour of a museum. The striking difference is that you are in downtown LA. Teri Rueb’s work Trace (http://www.terirueb.net/trace) is an audio work in which contributors sent audio samples, which she “placed” along a hike. The participant walks along the hike and encounters these memorial-like audio samples at appropriate locations, much like an invisible memorial park. However, in her work the agency of the experience which the participant comes into contact with is still arbitrated by the artist and her contributors. In my project, agency is given to the location and data about the location. What I am trying to communicate to the participant is their location,, as well as to consider what the government thinks about location and how that is reflected in the data that is conveyed.