With the advent of the internet, we moved beyond the ancient saying that geography is destiny — but that came with a cost. Now we can probably experience being online from anywhere, but it is too easy to forget where we are. Being constantly trained to think of everything on the page as a digital object, while code in our browser re-constructs our experience as a collection of assets, organized just for us, the natural world tends to fade into irrelevance. This is a dangerous illusion and it pulls us out of ourselves, and leaves us vulnerable to uncentered states. Unfortunately, we have all become used to accepting this uncentering as the cost of being online. The fact remains that our bodies were not made to be deconstructed and reconstructed based on instructions moving at the speed of light — in the present mode of living, working, playing where all has become digital, reduced to a pile of assets and instructions to use them, we have a tendency to lose sight of what is immediately in front of us. With prolonged internet use the natural world can even cease to hold our interest at all.

Geodes uses locative media to keep the content where things happen. The platform fuses the context with the digital space organically, so the location remains tied to the creative act — everything on Geodes has been geo-tagged with the location of where it was physically at the time of its making.

Geodes is a web app that centers around where you are. You load Geodes in your browser and view what is around you. Or Teleport to other places to see what is there. Some content is restricted to local actual-space, depending on the intention of the creative, and to see it you must locate yourself — if you are close enough, you unlock the work.

You might also be on Geodes after clicking a share-link on a social media page — locate yourself and explore what is around you while you are at it.

Geodes started out as an electronic notebook to capture immediate observations tied to where they happened. Since then, the platform has evolved into a web app for a variety of locative media — text, image, audio, and iFrame-enabled works are represented on the platform today. We hope to add scripted locative features for animations and XR content soon.

As an experiment in locative media that provides a platform for creatives to map their work in spacial ways, Geodes has been used for workshops and group events, distributed and virtual happenings, and hosts private and public works by poets, writers, visual artists, musicians and media creatives.

Geodes is a non-commercial project and makes no money off any posts. Because we aim to be a model web citizen, no cookies or trackers are used on the site, no user identifiable data is captured with any pages. Creatives own all their content and decide what is private or public, what can be shared, and may build collections for their projects.

As spacial computing goes mainstream, Geodes has resolved to pursue the path of mobility, privacy, connectivity, creativity and accessibility.

That means Geodes requires no app download or software downloads even if pursuing a sharelink on social media — an internet connection and browser is the only requirement for viewing any page on Geodes. No trackers or scraping by crawler-bots or AI harvesting engines are allowed, and the content is protected by design and the code from automated technologies. We never use cookies, trackers, or any technologies that enable advertising or third party commercial platforms. We use analytics for site performance purposes, and log some traffic to monitor platform performance and to help with resolving software issues. Overall, the goal is to be helpful and non intrusive, and let people do what they want.

Geodes is social-media adjacent, and sharablee on a variety of social sites. It's a great resource for creatives to make unique born-digital art, site-specific works and archival memoir wherever they go.

We are grateful for receiving funding from the following sponsors —