From mannerist situationism to situated media

Abstract

A decade ago, the convergence of GPS with mobile telephony first allowed media artists to map the city’s psychogeography. With such technology having now become widespread, the artistic novelty of this approach has somewhat diminished. While the field of ‘locative media’ has been and continues to be productive of both work and of critique, this essay questions some of its conceptual commitments and critical interpretations. As the technological assemblages upon which locative media are based are themselves constantly shifting, the essay considers adapting conceptual approaches accordingly. To this end, an argument is put forth for expanding the concept of locative media, built upon Bruno Latour’s recent engagement with new media and design practices which he characterizes in terms of the act of assembling rather than debunking. Drawing further on actor-network theory, an alternative interpretation of the metaphor of cognitive mapping is developed in which a core concept of locativity, that of proximity, is redefined in terms of tracing the connections of networked objects, this as opposed to the often repeated association of locative media with Situationist psychogeography. An assembly of practices are examined which trace logistics and give voice to multiple nonhuman ontologies.

Keywords

ANT cognitive mapping locative media Parliament of Nature post-critical proximity Situationism

Introduction

Space is a primary preoccupation of cultural theory. Theorists and artists alike have long been fascinated, for instance, by the performative act of drifting through a city’s streets in an attempt to reveal the unconscious ‘psychogeography’ of urban space (Benjamin, 1986 [1923]; McDonough, 2009). The convergence of location awareness with mobile networking in the early years of this century, allowed media artists, often fluent in such theory, to develop locative media as a means to map urban space from below. From its inception, this new community practice was thus connected to a critical tradition associated with the radical thought and artistic practice of the Situationists, who have been referred to as the last and ultimate avant-garde art movement (Wark, 2011). As was also the case with much ‘theory’ of this sort, the degree of critical engagement of these practices was however not only derivative but often rather superficial. And while the concepts and practices developed out of what we might here refer to as the locative media discourse have been and will no doubt continue to be quite productive, as a media art movement it must keep pace with change, since ‘there is no such thing as inertia for technology’ (Latour, 1996: 86). Thus, as the technological object of study has developed, too should the methods of analysis, from what Jaques Rancière (2006: 10) refers to as a Situationist tradition of critical thought that has degenerated into a ‘deliberation on mourning’, towards an appreciation of locative media as ‘tool[s] for a politics that doesn't yet exist’ (Bratton and Jeremijenko, 2008: 37).

As the technologies that make locative media possible themselves remain in a constant process of change, this article argues for a reassessment of the theoretical frameworks which have informed its study. We begin with a discussion and periodization of location-aware, primarily GPS-enabled media arts practices designed for mobile devices, a phase associated both with Situationist-influenced locative practice as well as with Situationist-type locative critique. The essay then shifts to a focus on new media practices which develop the notion of thing-as-gathering. These situated media are then considered through the lens of material semiotics, as potential instances of how agency can be read as being distributed into the environment and subject to design. Looking at Bruno Latour’s own engagement with new media, the article then goes on to consider citizen science prototypes for an Internet of Things in which a variety of non-human agents are rendered expressive of their own unique ontologies. Thus, as opposed to either delimiting the object of study as geo-media or tying it to one particular critical tradition, an argument is made for broadening the field through a consideration of related new media practices which emphasize the process by which associations are traced.

Mannerist Situationism

Hundreds of people gather in a department store to contemplate a single item vanishing minutes later leaving onlookers and attendants baffled; and thus a new and strange convergence of ad-hoc community and urban space was born (Shirky, 2008: 165). Although they first appeared in 2003, ‘flash mobs’ still evoke fantasies of resistance as a kind of ‘post-Left space … interrupting the smooth flow of our participation in the routines of daily life’ (Žižek, 2010: 363). This was also the moment when the street, to paraphrase William Gibson, found its own uses for the convergence of mobile technology and GPS, as media artists began to explore the ‘[c]artographic attributes of the invisible’ in the form of locative art (Gibson, 2007: 19).

In his second novel to address the topic, Gibson (2010: 55) writes that ‘[l]ocative art probably started in London, and there’s a lot of it’. Indeed, while the neologism itself emerged from a flurry of activity within the media arts communities throughout Europe,¹ the canonical work of this period was likely Can You See Me Now by the London-based performance collective Blast Theory (2002), who used GPS-enabled mobile devices to turn the city into a game board, for which they were awarded the prestigious Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica for Interactive Art in 2003.

Since its inception at the beginning of this century, there has been a fascination amongst many locative practitioners with the Situationist concept of the dérive, a technique of wandering the city developed as a critique of urban control systems (Bleecker and Nova, 2009; Chang and Goodman, 2006; Flanagan, 2009; Greenfield and Shepard, 2007; McGarrigle, 2009; Mitew, 2008; Sant, 2006; Tuters, 2004a). By the 2010s however, locative media’s Situationist rhetoric had been turned on its head, with location-based services becoming a key tool in a corporate strategy to re-imagine the city and ‘the social’ in terms of ‘gamification’.² Indeed, Julian Dibbell’s (2006) notion of ludocapitalism astutely questions a key assumption at the base of Situationist theory: that the domain of play is somehow outside of capital. While this exceptionalist theory of play as ‘an occasion of pure waste’ (Caillois, 2001 [1961]: 5) may have held under a rigid Fordist regime of accumulation, in today’s new media landscape the idea of play as a mode of oppositional politics seems somewhat nostalgic. Following Simon Critchley, we might thus refer to this legacy of locative media practice as a kind of Mannerist Situationism ‘exaggerated … but ultimately decadent, compromised and slightly nihilistic’ (Critchley, 2006).

The relationship between locative media and Situationism is paradoxical as this radical tradition became both the inspiration for locative practice and the basis for its very critique. Thus, while early locative projects like GPSter (2002–2005. See Figure 1),³ which sought to use GPS ‘to connect pieces of digital information to a specific latitude–longitude coordinate’ (Lindgren and Owens, 2007: 202), can be seen to have grown directly from the artists’ engagement with cultural theory on urban space, to a number of art critics such projects seemed, metaphorically at least, to inscribe the emancipatory project of said theory within a calculative logic largely determined by this formerly military technology. Locative media, was associated with the emergence of a ‘machine-aided process of disciplinary attentiveness’ (Crandall, 2005), in which ‘the world is actively constructed in terms of relational information systems … [with] an emphasis on data patterns over essence’ (Crandall, 2006). In one such criticism, the GPSter project, along with Amsterdam RealTime (Waag Society and Polak, 2002) – the latter of which crowd-sourced a GPS-traced map of Amsterdam – were singled out as examples of how locative media co-opted the tactics of Situationism, asking: ‘Has the ideology of our time not become an erratic, wavering pattern of crisscrossing footsteps, traced in secure metric points on an abstract field? The aesthetic form of the dérive is everywhere. But so is the hyper-rationalist grid of Imperial infrastructure’ (Holmes, 2004). In the tradition of critical theory these critiques read locative media as an unwelcome imposition of instrumental rationality, implying the possibility of an autonomous realm outside (of capital, of techno-science, of unmediated reality).

Figure.1.

‘Songlines’ by GPSter, at Impakt Festival, Utrecht, the Netherlands, 2003.

Another line of critique, read locative media as the ‘avant-garde of the “society of control”’ (see Tuters and Varnelis, 2006).⁴ In contradistinction to the former, this latter perspective might be used to explain how current locative technologies, such as for example Foursquare, a mobile social app which over-codes urban space with a simple game logic based on the accumulating badges (Foursquare, 2011), can at once be enthusiastically embraced while at the same time being read as a kind of bottom-up mode of control. Taken together the aforementioned locative practices and their critiques can be seen as intertwined, the former providing an ideal object for the latter. In this analysis locative media adapts, Zelig-like, to the intellectual fashion of its time, a criticism from which the present essay is surely not exempt. So while the radical semiotic critique of the Situationists developed into a linguistic preoccupation within the American academy of the 1970s (Cusset, 2008), the field of cultural analysis appears currently to be trending towards what political philosopher Noortje Marres refers to as the ‘“ontological” or “object-centred” perspective’ (2009: 199), as signified, in particular, by the ascendancy of actor-network theory (See also: Farías, 2010: 1–24). While deconstructionists argued that there was no outside of the text,⁵ the current fashion in object-oriented philosophy would claim that there is simply no outside (Bryant et al., 2011: 8). In an intellectual environment concerned with the philosophical import of things, locative media seems ideally suited as the theory object of choice.

The post-critical

If we have identified locative practice thus far with a Mannerist Situationism in an attempt to move beyond, then, following Jacques Rancière, we might also do the same with locative critique, at least in its more nostalgic variants. To this end Rancière (2006: 9–10) discusses the effect of Situationism on art in terms of a ‘fatal capture by discourse’, claiming that ‘the tradition of critical thinking has metamorphosed into a deliberation on mourning’. In a recent issue of October, the same journal in which Deleuze’s concept of the ‘society of control' was first published, Hal Foster (2012) identifies Rancière as one of the two leading proponents of the current post-critical moment in art theory, along with Bruno Latour. According to Foster, both Rancière and Latour see critique as unable to turn its own anti-fetishistic gaze back upon itself. In contemplating the role of criticism today, Latour (2004c: 246), for his part, argues ‘(t)he critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles’, someone who adds to rather than subtracts from the reality of matters-of-fact.

Latour's approach has been characterized as ‘object-oriented philosophy’ (Harman, 2009), a type of metaphysics based on the fundamental principle that the world is made up of objects which gain strength only through their alliances, which are linked through translation, and in which ‘nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else’ (Latour, 1993: 158). ‘[R]eality’, for Latour, thus ‘grows to precisely the same extent as the work done to become sensitive to differences’ (Latour, 2004b: 85). If we compare this type of thought with that, for example, of the Situationist Guy Debord (1995 [1967]: 1), in whose critique ‘[a]ll that was once directly lived has become mere representation’, the contrast could not be more stark. Not only is Latour’s approach unconcerned with what is or is not ‘real’, he sees mediation as a means by which to strengthen alliances. As such it is appropriate that actor-network theory is increasingly considered a key concept in media studies (Gane and Beer, 2008: 27–31).

Following Latour I want to re-imagine the prospects for locative media after what I am calling the object turn, with special attention to an emerging traceability genre at the intersection of media art, industrial and system design. To this end, I will discuss how Latour’s theories and his recent engagement with design practices might help us to situate these emerging practices in terms of ‘composition’ rather than critique.⁶ I will consider a locative epistemology, which sees objects as composed of networks of associations, a concept of cognitive mapping that goes beyond geography. This entails a shift, both technological and theoretical, to a more relational notion of place defined in terms of proximity to local objects as opposed to the absolute system of reference.

Since the emergence of locative media, the notion of location-awareness has acquired an increasingly finer granularity from satellites, to cell phone towers, to WiFi triangulation to barcodes and RFID, all the while decentralizing and creating more alternatives. While the first locative practitioners had to build these technologies for themselves, these capabilities are increasingly black-boxed into contemporary mobile devices.⁷ In an attempt to reposition the discussion around locative media, this theoretical move draws largely on actor-network theory according to which ‘[i]ndividual agency is simply one possible form of agency, one that encompasses a wide variety of possible forms’ (Callon, 2008: 37). Rather than again discussing locative media in terms of ‘geo-media’ (Thielmann, 2010: 5), the argument is thus to consider these traceability practices as material enactments of theories of distributed agency.

A survey of locative practices that replaces Situationism with actor-network theory as the conceptual reference point will result in a quite different picture. The key difference between the Situationist approach to locative media and the actor-network theory approach has to do with expanding the concept of a political assembly from a cosmopolitan urban ideal, that tends to focus exclusively on the human concerns, to the notion of what Latour calls ‘cosmopolitics’, in which artists and designers give voice to mute non-human things each of which can be thought of as having its own ontological reality. ‘Entities’ according to Latour (2004d: 452) may ‘all have the same culture but do not acknowledge, do not perceive, do not live in, the same nature’. These multiple natures populate the background against which we project culture ideals – Situationism being but one of the more radical visions. As discussed later, with citizen science protoypes for an Parliament of Nature, the Latourian approach to locative media attempts to give voice to these mute objects.⁸

Things-as-gatherings

This concept of multiple-ontologies grows out of science and technology studies work on scientific epistemology, in which Latour’s pioneering contribution was to bring anthropological methods to bear on the study of modern scientific, ‘fact producing’, institutions, through tracing the contingent material practices therein (Latour and Woolgar, 1979). This is not, however, a theory of difference in the post-Marxist sense. Latour’s project can be seen to be focused rather on what draws and holds things together than what separates and keeps them apart. This leads him and his colleagues to their most controversial and at the same time commonsensical claim that objects, read in terms of material-semiotics, can be profitably understood to exhibit degrees of agency in the world, such as for example in the classic example of the speed bump which encodes a certain morality into the built environment (Latour, 1992).

Latour's object-oriented philosophy emerges from his studies of the role of tools and mediation in practice.⁹ In this approach the social in Latour’s (2005a: 5) words ‘does not designate a thing among other things, like a black sheep among other white sheep, but a type of connection between things that are not themselves social’. These networks are thus transient, relying on actors to repeat the performance of their relations in order to sustain them, thus emphasizing the role of practice. While his preoccupations have remained the same throughout his career, Latour's sites of investigation have changed, focusing increasingly in recent years, on media art and design as exemplified by the Making Things Public exhibition which he curated in collaboration with Peter Weibel at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe and which sought to develop a concept of ‘representation’ that connected politics, science and aesthetics (Latour, 2006: 6). In curating the exhibition Latour applied Heidegger’s notion of das Ding as ‘a gathering’ to the objects of science and technology which the philosopher of science traces: things-as-gatherings.

Latour’s interpretation of new media, as represented by the collection of works that were displayed in this exhibition could be understood as an attempt to ground the non-foundational concerns of post-structuralist philosophy in the pragma, or thing in its Greek etymology, of American philosophical pragmatism.¹⁰ In this exhibition and in his more recent writings, he quite literally envisions the ‘design of politics’ in pragmatist terms of ‘collective experimentation’, in which the media arts¹¹ could play an important role in how scientific matters-of-fact are rhetorically constructed so that they may be debated and decided upon for entry into the public sphere. For Latour (2004b: 85) ‘[t]he more instruments proliferate, the more the arrangements become artificial, the more capable we become of registering worlds.’ Thus objects are judged for entry into Latour’s collective based on how well or how poorly they have been articulated. What Latour refers to as ‘matters-of-concern’ are to be carefully composed by drawing on these three notions of representation (political, scientific and aesthetic). For these things-as-gatherings then to gain entry into his ‘parliament of things’, which he also refers to as a ‘parliament of nature’ (Latour, 2005b), requires a ‘new eloquence’, in which fields of design and of the media arts play a pivotal role.¹²

Evocative illustration of Latour’s concept of a parliament of things, have emerged in years subsequent to the Making Things Public exhibition in several critical design projects that seek to portrays manufactured objects as a gathering of issues. One such project condenses all the products made from a single pig after being shipped throughout the world – from chewing gum to ammunition – into a single representation (Meindertsma, 2008). Another documents an individual’s attempt to manufacture a toaster from scratch – including mining and smelting the iron ore (Thwaites, 2010). In assembling these miniature cartographies of globalized capital, this traceability design genre suggests a kind of a technological solution to the metaphysical problem at the base of Marx’s labour theory of value (1982 [1867]: 125–137) by offering a vision of commodities connected to a representation of their means of production.¹³

Increasingly taking on the mantle of political philosopher in his recent work, Latour (2004a: 69) claims that, ‘[h]alf of public life is found in laboratories’ a fact which scientists intuitively understand, since complex matter-of-fact can not be assembled without the chains of reference supplied by their instruments.¹⁴ Indeed, as media artists are themselves used to dealing with complex technical instruments many are increasingly coming to frame their work in a Latourian manner as public or citizen scientists (da Costa, 2008: 365–386). Thus while mainstream science is supported by and in turn supports a stable social and political order, citizen scientists are more like Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987 [1980]: 362) ‘nomad science’, composing experiments which contest the claims of ‘royal science’ and upset the established order.¹⁵ Contra Latour (2004c), it would therefore seem as though critique amongst these citizen scientists appears not yet to have run out of steam.

Parliament of Nature

While the concept of ubiquitous computing has been around since the early 1990s (Weiser, 1991), new standardized communications protocols make it possible for every single object on the planet to be part of an Internet of Things.¹⁶ The concept of the latter been embraced by interaction designers as an alternative to the more centralized vision of the former (van Allen et al., 2007). It has likewise piqued the interest amongst designers over non-human things acquiring the ability to comment on their own environment, thereby affecting human behaviour and gaining a degree of agency. A notable example is Beatriz da Costa's PigeonBlog (USA, 2006) a project that equipped pigeons with GPS-enabled electronic air pollution sensors in order to remotely map the air quality of the city in real time to Google maps. In Julian Bleecker’s (2006: 5) enthusiastic reading PigeonBlog signified a radical shift in perspective in which the pigeon went from ‘a disgusting menace, to a participant in life and death discussions about the state of the micro-local environment’. The same might also be said about Joshua Klein's Crow Box (USA, 2008) that leverages the intelligence of crows in order to get them to collect litter. When we consider John Berger's (2003) claim that modernity begins when people no longer directly depend on animals and they become symbolic we can appreciate how such citizen science prototypes for a Parliament of Nature are fundamentally Latourian in so far as they seem to be design iterations on his famous claim that we have, in fact, never been modern (Latour, 1991).¹⁷

For Latour, concepts from ‘Nature’ to ‘the public’ do not exist a priori (nor for that matter does ‘space’), rather they are actively produced in relation to things-as-gatherings, for which the challenge is to design them well. He thus criticizes any theory which takes ‘nature’ for granted as the backdrop upon which politics takes place. To this way of thinking, there can be no settlements based on a notion of ‘common nature,’ in which the full range of ontological antagonisms are not acknowledged (Blok, 2010). Consider the failure of the 2009 Copenhagen talks on climate change to achieve international consensus while bank bailouts were globally passed in spite of seeming ideological and political differences. To Slavoj Žižek this signified the fact that it is easier for us to imagine an environmental apocalypse than any real change in capitalist relations (Žižek, 2010: 334), while for Latour, the failure of Copenhagen stems from what he considers as the failure of the idea of a ‘Nature’ itself (Latour, 2010: 473). He thus criticizes the ‘Green’ ideology of mainstream ecology as using a romantic vision of nature apart from technology to, in fact, ‘abort politics’ (Latour, 2004a: 19).¹⁸

A recently concluded pamphlets series of conversations on the topic of ‘situated technologies’, published between 2006 and 2012 by the Architectural League of New York, framed the critical discussion of locative media in terms of a Latourian cosmopolitical model of relations between humans and non-humans (Bleecker and Nova, 2009; Bratton and Jeremijenko 2009; Frei and Böhlen, 2010). One such exchange between the citizen scientist Natalie Jeremijenko and the architecture theorist Benjamin Bratton, for instance, framed the role of the artist as giving representational agency to things ‘that otherwise would not have a parliamentary representation’ (Bratton and Jeremijenko, 2008: 36). Recalling Hal Foster’s pairing of Latour and Rancière earlier in this essay, Bratton draws on Rancière’s (2006: 37) notion of ‘the distribution of the sensible',¹⁹ to interpret Jeremijenko’s work. Rancière (2006: 18) claims a historical constancy with respect to ‘the ways that figures of community are aesthetically designed’, specifically ‘the level of the sensible delimitations of what is common to all community, the forms of its visibility and of its organization’. This interpretation is particularly apt when applied to Jeremijenko’s (2003) project OneTrees: An Information Environment, which critiques the construction of nature as existing outside a network of relations by planting genetically identical trees in various socio-economically different neighbourhoods in order to question the logic of genetic determinism. While the trees themselves featured no sensors or actuators at all, they were effectively ‘visualization’ of the contingent environment, by thriving in rich areas while struggling in poor neighbourhoods. This work thus offers a way to think of locative media beyond the latest convergence of mobile networking and context-aware technologies in much broader terms as a kind of epistemology through which to examine, in the tradition of Deweyan/Latourian pragmatism, how habit is shaped by the environment, and how it can in turn be changed.

Conclusion: Situated media

In his critique of postmodern hyperspace, Fredric Jameson (1991: 38–45) famously questioned the subject’s ability to position itself in relation to an externally mappable reality. In the postmodern historical period Jameson considered architecture to be a privileged aesthetic form for its unmediated relationship to capital. Yet, he characterized our phenomenological experience, as one of ‘bewildering immersion’, a ‘mutation in the object unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject’, making wayfinding the key problem of cultural theory, and initiating a debate across a great number of fields, though perhaps nowhere more so than in architecture (Martin, 2010). As new media overcome space, they should permit us to rethink its design free from recourse to Euclidean thinking according to which space is a pre-existing container for social relations.

The idea of information seems fundamentally at odds to an embodied conception of being. Locative media is therefore conceptually valuable in so far as it bridges the digital with the analog, thereby seeming to give information a body. Yet while an entire discipline, namely human geography, is premised on the distinction between abstract space and embodied place, from the perspective of code, location is just another arbitrary value. Setting aside the vast environmental impacts of computing, if the goal of locative media is to bring context to information, there is no reason why it should remain wedded exclusively to location. In its approach to cartography, actor-network theory does not especially privilege geography over other forms of connection.²⁰ Cognitive mapping should thus think of proximity in terms of strengths of connections rather than location as actors separated in space may always be more strongly connected in some other more significant capacity. As a linguistic concept, locative media refers to a grammatical case corresponding to notions of proximity, not absolute location in the Cartesian sense. As such, it should not be misinterpreted as an overly instrumental reference to some abstract system of geographic coordinates. If, however, locative media has become identified with the absolute space of GPS and its critique within a media arts discourse, how then might we refer to a more relational concept of location, in an environment where everything is in flux?

The projects explored earlier situate an actor in proximate relation to the network issues by which they are effected, in order to generate affect. While locative media has been defined as ‘communication functionally bound to a location’²¹ the expanded conception explored in this essay would replace the concept of geographic location as the core concept of locativity, with the more relational notion of proximity, not only in relation to place but also in relation to matters-of-concern. What we termed situated media, refers to digital artefacts that represent agency as distributed in the built environment, thereby contributing to the ongoing dialogue between actor-network theory and human–computer interaction design (Suchman, 2007). This could accommodate locative media’s traditional geographic concerns (the physical location of one’s body will always be relevant), but also, traceability projects and citizen science prototypes for an Parliament of Nature, in which information is functionally and meaningfully bound to the thing-as-gathering.

As location-awareness continues to develop and become standardized into our media devices and embedded into the environment, what emerges is a much more relational notion of proximity to objects. In addition to physically locating us in relation to them, objects become positioned in relation to one another, and crucially, they become represented as gatherings of issues, in relation to which we can formulate cognitive maps. Through the careful work of representation every object could thus carry with it its own unique chains of reference, thereby revealing the substance of ‘the local’ to be composed of an endless variation of scales.

Context in locative media has typically been defined in rather absolute terms as geographic location. But ‘context is what actors constantly do’ (Latour, 2005a: 186), what is at issue, is the position from which to measure.

Footnotes

Funding

This research was generously funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes

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