ABSTRACT
My work begins with an invitation. Take a walk or a ride. Get out and explore the everyday environment in a new way, using the movement of the body as a means of releasing the mind, allowing it to wander-and to wonder, critically and aesthetically. In these works participants explore a site while carrying a portable computer or cell phone equipped with a global positioning satellite (GPS) receiver. The GPS tracks the participant’s movement and the resulting data is used to activate sound playback in response to their changing position in the landscape. Each work is a composition of geolocated sound regions specified in software that runs locally on the device, coupling virtual and physical space at the scale of landscape. Participants literally bring the work into being through the physical action of walking, bicycling, driving, etc. Through kinesthetic engagement, body and environment come into contact as if in a dance composed of everyday movements. The sound overlay in each work brings attention to the physical and social contours of the natural and built environment even as it challenges participants to unconventional habitations-a kind of reading against the grain of the physical text and context of the environment. Through the sound overlay I seek to tease out, highlight, and choreograph a sampling of physical and social elements, itineraries and events that are inherent to a site. However, the primary structure of the work emerges from the unpredictable actions of the participant herself who performs in dialogue with variable social and environmental conditions. This interaction of site and subject, where each emerges through the confluence of physical, social, cultural, and technological forces acting upon each other in situ, is a defining aspect of “locative media.” The term “locative media,” coined by Karlis Kalnins (Galloway and Ward 2006), emerged around 2002 as a way of distinguishing cultural uses of mobile media which critiqued the notion of “space” as an a priori or absolute abstraction and reinscribed “place” as a culturally specific and historically grounded concept. In this chapter I use the term “mobile experience” to refer to the broad domain of everyday experience that is mediated by location-sensing technologies, including commercial and industrial productions. “Mobile experience”
encompasses the full spectrum of technologies that wed physical and virtual spaces to each other geospatially via software, regardless of their claim to the more specific designations of “locative media.” Mobile experience involves the use of mobile media which engender a shifting of the sensorium that emerges as a result of our habitual use of these technologies in everyday life. Marshall McLuhan (1964) is credited with first observing that our interactions with media, as extensions of the body, have the effect of altering the perceptions and sensitivities of the human sensorium. For example, one effect of this shifting sensorium in response to the proliferation of mobile media is a heightened awareness of the reception quality of GPS, WiFi, and cellular networks (and their combination) as they relate to our perception of the built environment and our movement within it. Hence, mobile experience, not exclusive to the domain of locative media, is composed of a constant flux of physical, cultural, and psychological displacements where the hybrid physical and virtual contexts in which we increasingly interact create a third space, or what Sabine Breitsameter (2003) has called a hybrid space. This hybrid space can be disorienting, destabilizing, and decentering of the body as well as our sense of place and cultural identity. Rather than seeing these frictions as a negative effect of mobile media-something to be “designed away” or mitigated, I argue that acknowledging and embracing such instabilities actually forces us to productively negotiate what are alwaysalready shifting dimensions of a hybrid spatial condition vis-à-vis our perception and experience of place, and thus cultural identity. This constant process of negotiation underscores the inherently unstable condition of subjectivity which, while a given in all cultural contexts, may be exercised as a critical design agenda in highly technologized, mobile, and multicultural societies. Just as an increasingly technologized and global society entails increasingly complex collisions of cultures and identities, mobile experience compounds these effects not just at the level of the physical sensorium, but also at the level of cultural identity and subjectivity. Technologies, bodies, and subjectivities are inseparably intertwined in everyday experience, and mobile technologies further intensify these entanglements. Mobile interfaces couple bodies in motion with places in motion-as process-blurring local with global, public with private, physical with virtual, and the proverbial “here-and-now” with “there-and-then.” In this way they contribute to and intensify the constant displacement of bodies, sites, and subjectivities in highly mobile technologized society. Inherent to the condition of mobile subjectivity, such displacements frustrate constructions of place, subjectivity, or the body as stable or fixed entities. This instability extends to authorship, too, which becomes a shared act in locative media works, not just at the level of interpretation, but in the very physical process of bringing the work into being. Authorship, like meaning, becomes emergent, contextual, and kinesthetically inflected, especially in locative media works that tend to exploit the indeterminate conditions of moving bodies in hybrid spaces. In all mobile experience, whether acknowledged or not, displacements of bodies and meanings unfold like constantly shifting horizons of
context, meaning, and interpretation. In locative media such displacements are embraced and indeed emerge as unique qualities of this new form, medium, and genre. Through elaborating these effects as they generate and complicate meaning in artworks taken from my own practice, I present a position from which locative media may be understood as holding the potential for a kind of generative displacement. This chapter presents a practice-based conceptual framework for imagining locative media as a form of generative displacement. Weaving concepts drawn from process philosophy and affect theory through a narrative of my own locative media practice as it has evolved over the past fifteen years, I will aim to reveal locative media as a form of generative displacement where the body is reconfigured in its relation to itself (the sensorium), to the environment (through both physical and cultural perception of place), and to others, including human and non-human realms. Through Elizabeth Grosz’s (2008) reading of Deleuze and Guattari (1988) I will trace the ways in which emergence, embodiment, and the affective come together in the experience of the sensory-sensual body1 as it moves through and produces variously politically and culturally charged landscapes. Four projects that engage collisions of bodies and landscapes will be addressed: the shifting sensorium itself as a kind of landscape (Drift 2004); the affective experience of post-industrial waste landscapes (Core Sample 2007); perception and representation of landscape and cultural identity in globalized media culture (Elsewhere: Anderswo 2009); and the contested meanings of place and identity in post-colonial discourses about “wilderness” as it relates to landscapes of the Southwestern United States (No Places With Names 2012).
