david fodel

Where is Love? is a playful locative media project that utilizes digital mapping technologies and psychogeographical strategies to encourage participants to explore their local environment, emotionally and physically.

Participants engage with the work using a standard web-browser, to input brief stories and to upload photos of someplace where they have experienced “love”; physical, emotional or otherwise.

The active project website is located here.

The artwork employs special software to collect and store this basic information, and to help guide participants through actual physical locations, via the emotional overlay created by their input and the input of other users.

Using a web-enabled cell phone, or any standard laptop computer users can plot personal trajectories through the “love-density” of the city. Users become physically aware of intimate encounters that others have experienced in their immediate physical surroundings. It becomes yet another layer of engagement in the topology of urban space.

The project playfully conjures memory, as it is embedded in physical space, using digital technology as social lubricant. The anonymous nature of the participation works to distance the acts, even as it renews the latent emotional content of the memory.

The physical acts recalled by users are less important than the emotional state. What is important is that we all contribute to an emotional map of our physical territory, and this project creates tangible traces of something always already there.

We all understand how vulnerable using these technologies makes us, and yet we share our most intimate stories and secrets using various social networking sites and photo-sharing sites. This project bridges the idea of intimacy, with this notion of technological vulnerability, using shared emotions as social currency.

To reinforce the playful nature of the project, specially packaged condoms with the project URL printed on them will be distributed at bars, nightclubs, and other festival locations around the local area. The condom serves to signify the physical act of love, connecting the ephemeral, emotional nature of internal experience to that of the external experience of the body navigating physical space.