In July 2003, a group of international
artists and researchers congregated in Karosta, Latvia on an abandoned
Soviet-era military city, united by a common interest in the social and
cultural potential of mobile ad-hoc social networks, and location based
technologies. The outcome of this meeting was the inauguration of
locative media, which according to Finnish artist and activist Minna
Tarka, is a sub-area within the ubicomp (ubiquitous computing)
environment and is a loose term for artists, developers and activists
exploring the possibilities of mobile, location-based technologies.
According to the event’s organizing group, the idea behind
the workshop was twofold: first, as “an explicit
acknowledgment of Virilio’s idea that ‘one cannot
understand the development of information technology without
understanding the evolution of military strategy’; and
second, as an attempt to locate the event outside of the global market
from which these technologies have emerged" (Locative Media).
Locative media connects to a longer
tradition associated with communication technologies and the arts,
notably artistic experimentation with telecommunications media in the
1970s. Yet, what sets locative media apart is a commitment, engagement,
deployment and articulation to Lisa Parks' query; “how might
Western controlled satellite technologies be appropriated and used in
the interests of a wider range of social formations?” (Parks,
2005, p. 10) In what follows, I will briefly outline locative
media’s relationship to and its radical break from
surveillance technologies. This diminutive analysis will in
turn isolate the intrinsic tension of locative media; its anomalous
position, as an appropriation and assimilation
of surveillance technologies.
Within the past several years,
surveillance technologies have received an increasing amount of
critical attention. While issues surrounding surveillance are
multidimensional and taken up within competing discourses, there are
two issues in particular that tend to resurface; the use of
surveillance technologies post 9/11 and the integration of tracking
technologies within mobile communications. In many ways, the
consequences of 9/11, notably the push towards enhancing international
security measures, has called attention to surveillance technologies,
particularly those less suspecting consumer products that are ingrained
within everyday life such as mobile phones, PDAs and laptops. These
technologies, also referred to as location aware, exemplify what has
been referred to as geosurveillance; a mode of surveillance concerned
with locations and distributions across spatial territories (Crampton,
2003, p. 137).
In Spying with Maps:
Surveillance Technologies and the Future of Privacy, Mark
Monmonier investigates the relationship between mapping practices and
geosurveillance, in terms of what he refers to as surveillance
cartography. As Monmonier explains, “[i]n the new
cartographies of surveillance, the maps one looks at are less important
than the spatial data systems that store and integrate facts”
(Monmonier, 2002, p. 1). Perhaps more compelling is the fact that these
spatial data systems, which are composed of a large number of readily
accessible databases, monitor locations in real time and also store
data indefinitely, which can in turn, be applied to reconstruct
movements of people and things (Monmonier, p. 1-2). In fact,
there are numerous technologies implicated in cartographies of
surveillance, many of which are engaged in locative media projects. In
what follows, I will briefly describe the Geographic Information
Systems (GIS) and the Global Positioning System (GPS), two examples of
surveillance technologies that are essential in locative media
practices.
Geographic Information Systems store,
analyze and display geographic data. Toward the end of the 1980s, GIS
replaced paper maps as the primary form of map analysis (Monmonier,
2002, p. 3). More importantly, this substitution encouraged American
governmental agencies to shift focus from making maps to compiling
electronic data. This change also filtered into academic institutions,
where GIS eventually replaced traditional cartographic courses
(Monmonier p. 3). An example of GIS is online mapping services such as
MapQuest.com. This application relies on a massive database that links
addresses to geographic coordinates1.
In addition, GIS relies on the global
positioning system (GPS), which is a worldwide satellite-based
radio-navigation positioning system that was developed by the United
States Department of Defense and is conveniently operated by the Air
Force (Monmonier, 2002, p. 12). This worldwide MEO (medium or
middle, earth orbit) satellite navigational system consists of a
constellation of 24 earth-orbiting satellites, which are situated in
six orbital planes, positioned 60 degrees apart and inclined 55 degrees
above the equator. The constellation is distributed in a circular orbit
with an altitude of 202, 000 kilometers, and the entire system makes
two complete orbits every 24 hours, tracing the same ground-track
across the earth approximately every 12 hours (Monmonier, 2002, p.
13-14; Brain & Harris, 2006, p.1).
A GPS receiver acquires positionality by
locating four or more of these satellites and uses this information to
deduce its own location. In order to calculate positioning, a receiver
requires two pieces of information: 1) the location of at least three
satellites; and 2) the distance between its position on the ground and
each of those satellites (Brain & Holmes, 2006, p. 2). This
operation is based on the three-dimensional triangulation of
intersecting circles (Monmonier 2002, p. 12, 174, 181), and each circle
expresses a range of locations equidistant from one of the satellites.
It is the point of intersection shared by the circles that situates the
location of a receiver.
A standard GPS receiver will not only
place an individual on a map at any particular location, it will also
trace one’s path as movement occurs; if the receiver remains
‘on’, it maintains constant communication with GPS
satellites tracking locational changes. The satellites transmit signals
that allow one to determine, with great accuracy distance traveled
(odometer), length of travel, current speed (speedometer),
average speed, a ‘bread crumb’ trail showing the
location traveled on the map, and the estimated time of arrival at the
destination (Brain & Holmes, 2006, p 1-3). Generally, GPS is
used in applications where precise positioning is necessary.
For Monmonier, a more contentious
application of GPS is its convergence with GIS, GPS and everyday
wireless communications. For instance, the GPS chip in a cell phone
calculates one’s coordinates, which is then forwarded by the
wireless network to a tracking centre, where location is plotted on a
map by a GIS (Monmonier, 2002, p. 175). Moreover, when satellite
tracking and commercial applications intertwine in the form of
location-based-services (LBS), location can be bought and sold,
resulting in the commodification of location (Monmonier, p. 175).
Locative media practitioners maintain
that one of the field’s defining characteristics is its
separation from Location-Based Services (LBS), those corporate to
corporate, business-to-business and business-to-user services such as
fleet tracking and in-car navigation. This distinction is significant
given that locative media shares technologies with location based
services, yet has a different agenda.
The inaugural workshop2 that instituted the conceptual
framework for locative media focused on plausible modes of harnessing
those technologies that evolved via military strategy and global market
forces. In accordance to the workshop mandate, emphasis was placed on
the appropriation and retooling of surveillance and control
infrastructures with the hope of distributing these technologies beyond
the ‘command and control infrastructure’ (Hemment,
2004, p. 3). CitiTag and GPS:Tron are two of the many locative media
projects invested in appropriating surveillance technologies in
location-based mobile gaming.
CitiTag
is a collaborative project between HP Labs and the Open
University’s Knowledge
Media Institute (KMi). Touted as a wireless location-based
multiplayer game, CitiTag was designed to, “enhance
spontaneous social interaction and novel experiences in city
environments by integrating virtual presence with the
physical.” Using GPS and WiFi3 enabled iPaq PocketPCs, players
roam the city with the intent to ‘tag’ opponents,
who can also initiate ‘tagging’. Accordingly,
players can tag and be tagged on the basis of one’s proximity
to opponents. Once tagged, a player is excluded from game play until
they are untagged by a team member.
GPS:Tron
is an adaptation of the classic arcade game for mobile phones, although
game play moves beyond the screen, unfolding simultaneously on the
mobile device and through physical play; as players move in real space,
they are tracked by GPS and are required to monitor their physical
location as detailed on the phone. This form of self-monitoring is
essential to the game as player ranking within the game depends on
physical location. That is, players are represented by a digital line
and must ensure that their line does not cross itself or a line
belonging to an opponent. If a line is crossed, the game crashes.
From a technological perspective,
locative media is an example of location aware computing, a combination
of mobile communications, such as Personal Digital Assistants and
mobile phones, and geosurveillance. Even though locative media projects
assimilate technologies associated with surveillance and control
infrastructures, projects are often cited as public artworks and
research-vehicles for location based technologies and applications.
A report summarizing the events of the
inaugural workshop in 2003 emphasized the social, cultural and
technological span of locative media. "Inexpensive receivers for global
positioning satellites have given amateurs the means to produce their
own cartographic information with military precision…the
focus here is spatially localized, and centered on the individual user;
a collaborative cartography of space and mind, places and the
connections between them" (Tuters & Varnelis, p. 1).
The democratic potential afforded by
locative media is that it, “at once exposes the operation of
surveillance technologies, and reverses, multiplies and diffracts the
gaze by giving people the opportunity to take ownership over the tools
and the data generated” (Hemment, p. 4).
However, the command and control
infrastructures challenged by locative media differ from seminal
theoretical models, most notably Foucault’s account of the
transformation from a discipline-blockade to a discipline-mechanism
that occurred between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The
discipline-blockade was modeled on an enclosed institution, meaning it
maintained a separation from the social body in the form of enclosed
institutional boundaries. The discipline-mechanism, however, signaled a
generalized extension of disciplinary measures throughout the social
body into what Foucault cites as ‘the disciplinary
society’ (Foucault, 1995, p. 209). In the disciplinary
society, mechanisms of domination are imposed within very specific
institutional frameworks that restrict and regulate behaviour.
Fundamental to Foucault’s articulation of the disciplinary
formation is his adaptation of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon,
which he refigured as a self-imposed disciplinary mechanism, in which
the individual, privy to the possibility of being watched, internalizes
the act of surveillance through self-discipline. Moreover, the act of
self-control is premised on the knowledge that one is potentially being
watched. In this sense, the mechanism of surveillance is contained
between seer and seen, forming a unified and contained structure. Even
as Foucault’s model continues to offer substantial insight
into mechanisms of discipline and control, his panoptic metaphor fails
to account for ubiquitous and dispersed modes of surveillance inherent
to locative media.
Technologically then, the movement from
whole to dispersed modes of surveillance is connected to third
generation computing. First articulated in 1991 by Mark Weiser and his
research team at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), it accounted
for the transition from large mainframe computers of the 1960s and
1970s, to the desktop computer of the 1980s and 1990s, towards
ubiquitous computing (Gow, 2005, p. 1). Weiser traces the emergence of
third generation computing as a shift towards computing devices
embedded in everyday objects and places; to the development of
intuitive, intelligent interfaces to make computing devices manageable
and unobtrusive for users; and finally, the development of
communications networks that connect devices for anytime, anywhere data
communications (Gow, 2005, p. 2). In terms of surveillance practices,
the difference between Foucault’s panopticon and
Weiser’s articulation of third generation computing is that
in the panopticon, technologies of surveillance are visible and
immobile, which is to say, consciously apparent to individuals.
However, in third generation computing, technologies of surveillance
are invisible and pervasive – nowhere and yet everywhere
– reconfiguring the dynamic between seer and seen; one is
‘watched’ all the time, yet by no one and from
nowhere is particular.
The agenda purported by locative media
practitioners, that being to democratize accessibility to the tools and
the data generated via surveillance technologies, is complicated by the
fact that surveillance and control technologies are necessary in the
formation of locative media. As Donna Haraway urges in “The
Persistence of Vision,” “one cannot relocate in any
possible vantage point without being accountable for that movement.
Vision is always a question of the power to
see” (Haraway, 1988, p. 287). The act of appropriation
necessitates assimilation. Therefore, a redirection of
surveillance and control technologies demands that one examine the
extent to which locative media might challenge or be complicit within
the operation of power (Hemment, 2004, p. 4). In order to meet its
democratic agenda, locative media should, in the very act of
appropriating, disrupt rather than secure the act of appropriation. The
radical potential of locative media is situated in revealing its
processes of production, and locating and situating the terms of access
to military infrastructures and capitalist ventures4. It is only from here, from a
position of located accountability, that artists, activists and
researchers will be able to reveal locative media as a process of
social negotiation involving multiple actors and complex power relations5.
1.
Specifically, GIS uses address ranges (on both sides of a street) to
locate a specific address (Monmonier, p. 3-4). Yet this address-to-map
technology, although not directly tied to the military, nevertheless
has it origins in a tool used by the U.S. Bureau of the Census in the
1960s for tabulating census returns (see Monmonier, p. 5).
2. This workshop was hosted by RIXC,
an electronic art and media center in Latvia.
3. WiFi: Wireless Fidelity. WiFi is
a limited-range wireless networking protocol based on the 802.11 family
of standards. As such, it uses spectrum in the 2.4 GHz range to
exchange data at broadband speeds. Often used in WLAN (Wireless Local
Area Network), which is a local area network that uses high frequency
radio signals to transmit and receive data over distances of a few
hundred feet.
4. One locative media project that
exemplifies this is MILKproject
by Esteher Polak, Leva Auzina, and RIXC.
5. For further readings please consult the Leonardo
Locative Media Bibliography, collaboratively produced by Drew Hemment,
Steve Bull, Elizabeth Goodman, Pete Gomes, Derek Hales, Hana Iverson,
Paula Levine, Ann Morrison, Teri Rueb, Alison Sant, Leslie Sharpe, Jen
Southern, Nick West, and Nisar Keshvani. And, http://www.mobilegaze.com/art_links/locative.html.
Brain, M., & Harris, T.
(2006) How GPS Receivers Work. How
Stuff Works.
Crampton, J.W. (2003). Cartographic Rationality and the Politics of
Geo-surveillance and Security.Cartography and Geographic
Information Science 30(2),135-148.
Deutsche, Rosalyn. (1996). Evictions: Art and Spatial
Politics. Cambridge & London: MIT Press.
Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon.
Gow, G. A. (2005). Privacy and Ubiquitous Network Societies:
Background Paper. International Telecommunication
Union Workshop on Ubiquitous Network Societies.
Haraway, D. (1997). The Persistence of Vision. Writing on
the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Eds. Katie
Conboy, Nadia Medina and Sarah Stanbury. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Hemment, D. (2004). Locative Dystopia 2.
Lyon, D. (2001). Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday
Life. Buckingham & Philadelphia: Open University
Press.
Locative Media (and Ad-Hoc Social Networks). Online
posting. 17 Feb. 2006.
McGrath, J. (2004). Loving Big Brother: Performance, Privacy
and Surveillance & Space. London & New York:
Routledge.
Monmonier, Mark. (2002). Spying with Maps: Surveillance
Technologies and the Future of Privacy. Chicago &
London: The University of Chicago Press.
Parks, Lisa. (2005). Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the
Televisual. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
Russell, Ben. TCM Online Reader: Introduction. The
Transcultural Locative Media Reader.
Tuters, M., & Varnelis, K. (2006) Beyond Locative Media.
Andrea
Zeffiro is a P.h.D. candidate in the joint programme in
Communication Studies at Concordia University, where she is in the
preliminary stages of developing her dissertation on locative media.
Having spent a number of years actively involved with the Maquila
Solidarity Network, drafting and implementing garment-purchasing
policies for the public sector, she turned her creative energies
towards AMBUSH, a line of clothing, which she designed and created from
second hand garments. Interested in pursuing academic research, she
channeled her interests into an M.A. thesis and examined the cultural
politics of the fashion runway space.
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