ABSTRACT
We frequently encounter locative media today not as experimental artworks or speculative prototypes but as commercial services or obfuscated security systems. From the Apple iPhone to Google Maps, location-based technologies are now deeply integrated into the corporate collection of spatial analytics, along with the widespread privatized annotation of landscapes and urban environments. 1 Parallel to these developments has been what has been described as an increasing militarization of space through location-aware profiling systems and antiterrorist premediation. 2 These transformations in the political economy of mapping and the asymmetries of “dataveillance,” taken together, arguably complicate a number of essential ambitions that defined early locative media art, despite this movement also having always held close links with industry and having utilized military-supported devices. To be sure, disentangling such aspirations from the aspects of surveillance, capture, and spectacle was always a major challenge, especially for creative engagements with sociotechnological assemblages that are bound by uneven terrains of power and capital. It has also included recognizing the agential destabilization that follows trends toward ubiquitous computing or the Internet of Things, not only through gadgets but also the embedding of digital sensors, automated computational mapping systems, and algorithmic devices throughout everyday life. These environments suggest a rearrangement of sense, perception, and memory in the spatial deployment of calculative procedures. 3 As N. Katherine Hayles notes, the infrastructural shift raises important ontopolitical concerns because “the relations between human, animal and thing come up for grabs, functioning as a chaotic nexus in which technological innovations, anxieties about surveillance and privacy, capitalistic and military exploitations, and creative storytelling swirl together in a highly unstable and rapidly changing dynamic.” 4 One task, according to Hayles, involves somehow conceptually moving beyond discourses based on anthropocentric politics of resistance to rethinking the limits of human subjectivity and behavior for purposes of collective empowerment. This is a critical project because the frequently masked operative scope of these systems from user populations means that changes are often affectively experienced only through a creeping sense of paranoia, rather than being approached directly in conscious and active experimentations. As Eric Gordon and Adriana de Souza e Silva put it, “while we are location aware, we are riddled with anxieties about it.” 5
