My earlier post was a little unfair on mudlondon and other geolinked MOOS, I think. By my own definition — location is what becomes of places when things happen there — sites such as mudlondon may well become places, assuming stuff actually does happen there — people gathering, talking, building. My hidden bias and agenda, which I should have articulated at the beginning, is that for the geolinkage to mean much to me personally, the experience of the virtual place must in some way play off, rather than simply representing, its real referent — the fascination for me is in the dissonance between the experience of real and virtual places, the experiential moire generated from the interplay of knowledge of the real and experience of the virtual. I’ve always felt that the resulting fracture is what makes possible a poetry of augmented space — something similar to the effect of lexical ambiguity in textual poetry, shimmering between interpretations. Tokens, not metaphors.
