ABSTRACT
With Quotidian Record (2012), I interpret a year’s worth of my own geolocation data, gathered via mobile phone, as a musical piece on a vinyl record. This chapter describes the process behind the piece and explores some of its critical implications. Dominant modes of data-driven, locative media practice draw from visual and cartographic paradigms—Quotidian Record, however, invokes music, which is concerned both with performance in time and the intrinsic relationality of sound as a medium. The piece suggests that the musical qualities of our habitual geographic patterns are a relational, rather than representational, data science, and that daily rhythms might evince everyday politics. Idiomatically, it draws from the process-based composition of mid-century minimalism and bases its musical form on the physical dimensions of the 12” record itself. Additionally, the surface of the vinyl is designed as a visual index to its playable content. That the record may be collected and fetishized connects the value of mobile phone location data today with the history of popular music culture, and it embraces the performative aspects of its own material degradation. The transitions from embodied action to digital information to analog media are sites of both aesthetic and political contention—Quotidian Record is an example of an expressive and embodied alternative to the state and corporate interest in classification and control.
