Seeing What's Important- Mapping Strategies in Locative Media

8/13/2019 Seeing What's Important- Mapping Strategies in Locative Media.

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Abstract

This essay considers recent artistic appropriations of mobile GPS devices in terms of

their potential for producing new modes of representation of the virtual spaces of multinational

capitalism. In particular, it examines the conditions of possibility for an oppositional politics

articulated through these devices with respect to their self-conscious relationships to the

operationalized gaze of a massive military-industrial apparatus. These appropriations, called

Locative Media, are part of a wider trend to politicize virtual spaces by reasserting the primacy

and insolubility of the material world through the tropes of geography and mapping. The essay

investigates two projects: first, it examinesMILK, by artists Esther Polak and Ieva Auzina of the

Riga Center for New Media Culture (RIXC), which uses GPS to track the route of milk from

the udder of the cow to the plate of the consumer, and second, the art collective Blast Theorys

Uncle Roy All Around You, a game in which players collaboratively track the game character

Uncle Roy simultaneously in both a virtual city using a web application and on foot in an actual

city. Both of these projects foreground the assumption that the construction of alternative spaces

is complicated by the technological devices involved, especially when the devices are the

materially manifest objectives of control society. The essay concludes that Locative Media

projects often avoid reproducing a military aesthetic by drawing ambiguous, incomplete maps

that call attention to the inherent potentials for resistancethe blind spotsinside the gaze of

operational media.


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Seeing whats Important: Mapping Strategies in Locative Media

You look down there and you can't imagine how many borders and boundaries you cross,

again and again and again, and you don't even see them. And from where you see it,the thing is a whole, the earth is a whole, and it's so beautiful. You wish you could take a

person in each hand, one from each side in the various conflicts, and say, "Look. Look at

it from this perspective. Look at that. What's important?...You look down and see thesurface of that globe youve lived on all this time, and you know all those people down

there and they are like you, they are you and somehow you represent them. You are up

there as the sensing element, that point out on the end, and thats a humbling feeling. Itsa feeling that says you have a responsibility.

Russell Rusty Schweickart, Apollo9Astronaut; from No Frames, No

Borders, reflections on his EVA spacewalk.1

Everything is functioning. This is exactly what is so uncanny, that everything isfunctioning and that the functioning drives us more and more to even further functioning,

and that technology tears men loose from the earth and uproots them. I do not knowwhether you were frightened, but I at any rate was frightened when I saw pictures coming

from the moon to earth. We don't need any atom bomb. The uprooting of men has

already taken place. The only thing we have left is purely technological relationships.Martin Heidegger, Der Spiegel Interview, 1966.

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In a strange sort of way, both Rusty Schweickarts ecstatic revelation and Heideggers

characteristically dismal pronouncement construct similar images of the earth. In each the planet

is figured as a whole: national divisions cease to signify for a moment and the images of the

earth that the Apollo missions afford serve as an occasion to speak of mankind in the broadest

terms, in each case gesturing toward some ultimate and imminent destiny. The difference

between these two images lies mainly in the roles played by technology. In Schweickarts case

the earth is re-presented as a home; for him, from this particular perspective, the earth is

transformed into a particularly homely and inviting place it is filled with potential.

Importantly, technology falls away into the background, and he seems unaware that while he is

up there (or, more precisely, down here reflecting on the time he spent up there) he is not simply

the sensing element for all humanity, but he is also more literally the sensing element of a


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large technological system born out of the global-political territorial disputes of the Cold War.

In the quotation above, the technological devices of the Space Race, in their absence, take on

the appearance of mere tools, and thus become unproblematically commensurate with human

progress: this new technology which allows us to explore outer space also allows us to assume a

perspective from which we can finally see whats important.3 Schweickart, although afforded

a privileged vantage point from which to assume this perspective, was not alone in feeling

enraptured by the appearance of the new globe. As David Nye notes in his bookAmerican

Technological Sublime, the Apollo Program sprouted the last great moment of near-universal

liberal instrumentalist optimism the assumption that technology is an entirely neutral

instrument of human progress that Americans had enjoyed since before the invention of atomic

weapons.4 The image of the earth as seen from space during the mid-60s and early-70s often

came to stand in for human potential as a whole; who could disagree that this powerful image, at

once sublime and beautiful, could be anything but uplifting, and indicative that we are meant for

something more?

For Heidegger, the liberal instrumental attitude toward technology only demonstrated

conclusively that man has been irretrievably locked into the horizon of a fully technological

lifeworld, and hence that we have nothing left but purely technological relationships. The

modern subjects world is disclosed through a technological perspective, or a way of

encountering objects in the world as standing reserve. Heidegger calls this perspective

Enframing, which treats the world as a cache of resources to be ordered efficiently for use in a

technological manner. Thus for Heidegger, the Apollo photographs signify that humankind

has been uprooted, that being-in-the-world has become uncanny in the literal sense of the

German word unheimlich: un-homelike. Unlike for Schweickart, here technology can never fade


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into the background, because its logic serves as a sort of filter through which the world is

disclosed to the modern subject. Further, Heidegger argues that the subject itself is incorporated

into the technological frame, and is thus, along with all other objects in the world, reduced to the

status of a resource to be organized, optimized and ordered about. It is not difficult to see that

both Schweickarts and Heideggers images of the world are limiting in the sense that each

essentially lies on an assertion of totality. Schweickarts subject supposes, on one hand, an

ahistorical and apolitical humanism, which necessarily accepts a priorithat man is a rational

animal who can act in the best interests of the community by applying rational principles (if only

he could adopt the correct perspectiveso he can see whats important). Heideggers subject,

on the other hand, is limited insofar as the technological mode of world disclosure is its only

possible option; thus, as Andrew Feenberg says, for Heidegger, technology rigidifies into

destiny.5

It is perhaps interesting to note that Heideggers nightmare of an un-homelike world

prefigures very nearly the so-called postmodern anxiety about the ubiquity, omniscience, and

omnipotence of global-technological systems: the uprooted man becomes a node in a

rhizomatic network of power, no longer only the subject of repressive domination from above,

but also of a network of ideological prescriptions that serve as a distributed disciplinary

apparatus. More and more it can thus begin to appear that both the subject and the space it

occupies are informational constructs: the human genome project, cloning, virtual reality,

artificial intelligence and psychopharmacology all point to a version of the human which can be

measured and ordered efficiently for use. Similarly, the emergence of geo-locative technologies

that can pinpoint position on the surface of the earth to the scale of centimeters suggests a virtual

dimension to the space of lived reality. Not only the human genome, but the entire surface of the


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earth, to the smallest detail, can be coded, tracked, surveyed, and mapped from space. Both

inner and outer space converge in the sense that both are translatable into equivalent data, and

thus we can imagine something like the representation of the world of The Matrix, in which the

mind and the lived environment could be read, in all their complex dimensionality, as a series

of eerie green symbols streaming across a computer terminals screen.

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a ring of twenty-four satellites encircling the

earth, controlled by the United States Department of Defense, which was originally designed to

enhance US military effectiveness through an increase in missile targeting precision and the

locational awareness of people and resources. Since May 2000, when the general public was

given free access to a much more accurate version of GPS through the removal of an artificial

degradation of the system, consumer demand for GPS-enabled devices has skyrocketed.6

Creative appropriations of these technologies began almost immediately after they became

available, and in 2003 Karlis Kalnins dubbed this emerging area of exploration Locative

Media during the now-famous Karosta Locative Media Workshop in order to distinguish these

new artistic representations of space from the location-aware devices that make them possible.7

In the broadest terms, according to Drew Hemment, Locative Media (LM) consists of the use of

portable, networked, location-aware computing devices for user-led mapping, social networking

and artistic interventions in which geographical space becomes a canvas.8 The central

argument of these projects is that place matters: it asserts itself against the dis-locative character

of the virtual, the space of infinite exchange and circulation of data. While the reinsertion of

geographic information into the digital realm can be understood as a cultural trend in general

(most recently in the appearance of geo-tagged media including photos, video, music, blogs,


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etc.), LM specifically explores the possibilities these new technologies can offer for constructing

alternative spaces.

It seems clear that the return of the materiality of things and places in this burgeoning

avant-garde (and also in general) is in large part formulated against the fundamentally apolitical

virtuality of the postmodern. Arguments about the unlikelihood of a politics that exists within

the society of the spectacle or hyperreality need not be repeated here; suffice it to say that

the systemic schizophrenia that is cultural logic of late stage capitalism leaves little room, as has

been shown again and again, for an effective oppositional politics. In his well-known book

Postmodernism,

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Fredric Jameson argues that the reason we cannot locate a stable foothold from

which to construct political resistance is that we lack the perceptual apparatus the organs10

to locate ourselves within the spaces of multinational capital. He suggests that a politicized form

of postmodernism may emerge that confronts head-on the global-technological networks we

are sucked up into by offering the subject a heightened sense of its place in the global

system.11

He calls this strategy an aesthetic of cognitive mapping, which achieves a

breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing [the world space of

multinational capital] in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and

collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our

spatial as well as our social confusion.12

In other words, cognitive mapping requires the

development of a perceptual apparatus (organs) that can help to develop a locative strategy for

the subject which will not only articulate the subjects capacity for autonomy in relation to

global-technological systems (read: a multinational information economy), but will also serve as

a relatively stable (or strategically unstable) foothold from which one can make a statement,

i.e. formulate an oppositional politics (struggle). Our initial question concerning LM, then, will


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be to ask whether it offers an aesthetic of cognitive mapping; to what degree does the reinsertion

of geographic space into the virtual/digital realm offer a politically productive means to represent

the unrepresentable spaces of multinational capital?

An initial (and too hasty) response to this question might be a flat dismissal of LM given

its obviously contradictory nature as a site of resistance that articulates itself in and through the

sensing element of the surveillance state. It would seem at first that insofar as the original (and

continuing) intent of GPS is to see the world as a global militarized zone, the domestication of

this military gaze casts LM practitioners as deputized agents of control society. As Jordan

Crandall says in his essay Operational Media, location-aware technologies from the birth of

cybernetic science have always been about acquiring a position of mastery through an

omniscient distribution of the gaze: a controlling gaze that is everywhere yet nowhere, and which

acquires power solely because of this amorphousness.13

While this semiotics of locative

devices says nothing about whether they might be taken out of their default context and used in

other ways, Crandall does argue that the logics of these systems coalesce into regulatory

mechanisms,14which work to discipline the subject through specific practices, or, put another

way, they map the subject into spaces that function by operational logic. Thus, while LMs use

of these devices does not in itself necessarily contribute to an omniscient distribution of the

gaze, to ignore the logic encoded in the prescribed uses of these devices to work with them as

if they did not contain a potentially hegemonic dimension that would have them written into the

common sense of consumer society is to fall prey to the illusion of liberal instrumentalism,

behind which (as Crandall points out) lurks a deeply politically invested operational logic that

tends toward the full spectrum dominance of the subject.


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When it becomes evident that the structural ideology of regimes of control and discipline

are encoded into the devices themselves, it also becomes evident that any use of them at all must

speak in the voice of and look with the gaze of operational mediatization: one cannot simply

forget where the device comes from, a laRusty Schweickart. Hence many critics have voiced

concerns similar to those of Drew Hemment, who says:

To the extent that it simply celebrates the ability to locate all things at all times, a politics

of pleasure locked within the surveillant machine, Locative Media might be seen as little

more than a marketing wing for this branch of the control society, its autonomous space

but a rebellious younger sibling in a post-Big Brother world.

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Criticisms such as these are valid, and suggest that if any attempt is made to locate a productive

strain of LM, it must be found in a foregrounding of the politics of the devices LM implements.

The appropriation of GPS as its sensing element, the adoption of the gaze of the big Other of

the military-industrial complex, cannot be understood as an incidental enabler of some new,

exciting form of art. Rather, any attempt to suture the viewer into a space where the sensing

apparatus is rendered invisible, natural or neutral constitutes a move in the opposite direction of a

politicization of the devices itself, which is crucial to a politics that adoptsa set of

decontextualized devices. If LM is not understood in terms of an implicit or explicit critique of

global-technological systems if we ignore the politics of the technical apparatus that serves as

the mechanism through which LM is enunciated then we renounce the possibility of a politics

altogether and cast our lot with a vague sense of utopian or dystopian destiny with respect to

technology. The following sections will examine two recent LM projects that take up the issue

of their sensing element in different ways, each gesturing toward the unique political

possibility offered by speaking from within and through the gaze of the militarized big Other.


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The question will remain: How can locative technology be made to speak in such a way that it

gestures toward potential spaces of resistance in which the subject can map a place of

enunciation, a foothold from which to speak and act?

MILK

To begin, we can examine the LM project MILK,16

by artists Esther Polak and Ieva

Auzina of the Riga Center for New Media Culture (RIXC), which tracks the route of milk from

the udder of the cow to the plate of the consumer by means of all the people involved.17

MILK

participants carried GPS devices with them during the time they were occupied with the

movements of this dairy. The final destination of the dairy itself to become Rigamont,

MonteRigo, and Paisano cheese and sold to consumers at the Utrecht market served as a sort of

anthropomorphized reminder of the fate of the postmodern subject: The most fateful participant

of the project, always subjected to the passions of complicated human and international trade,

arriving in Europe with different names, different prices and different destinations.18

Strangely,

as the most fateful participant, it seems that the commodity is at even greater risk from the dis-

locative forces of capital than the individual, finding its identity split, dislocated, and multiplied

by the large technological system in which it finds itself. While this anthropomorphizing is

clearly meant to be allegorical of dis-locative forces of the large technological systems of

multinational capital, such a reading does not remain consistent throughout the piece. In fact,

several aspects of the project are clearly at odds with a reading of late-stage capital as an

effectively deterritorializing force, and we can see MILK at different moments constructing

radically different versions of the subject that assert themselves against the postmodern

subject.


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Plotting a route on a two-dimensional map itself constitutes an implicit confirmation of a

stable relationship between subject and object, that space is indeed out there, territorial by

nature and ripe for abstraction into a Cartesian grid. If this relationship a one-to-one

correlation between map and land in which the subject serves as a neutral mediator between the

two holds, then perhaps we already have a stable foothold from which to develop a politics.

All we need to do, then, is place political content on a map, which serves as a canvas upon which

a politics is articulated. In this case we might already detect a political dimension to MILK: a

critique of the exploitation of the small farmer in the newly formed EU; a more broadly

conceived macrobiotic or local-organic politics formulated against an inherently exploitative (of

land, animals, people) international agro-business; or an even more broadly conceived

commentary on globalizations supposed erasure of cultural specificity. In other words, the

means with which the map was constructed fall into the background while the political concerns

placed onto the map come to represent the metadiscursive purpose which the map serves.

However none of the discourses fully materialize, and one can thus perhaps begin to

understand MILKs resistance to making a statement as an implicit critique of the essentially

paradoxical nature of cartographically supported global-political statements articulated through a

regulatory apparatus of the dominant global-technological (multinational capitalist) order. Nor

does the map itself ever materialize in any clearly meaningful way, i.e. in a way that gives the

viewer some sense of the complexity of international agri-business. We receive only partial

maps and vague indicators of distances and relationships. Given that the MILK artists use of

GPS data made available very clear and precise information about the movements of the product

and the people associated with its movement, one must conclude that the choice to represent

movement and territory in so indefinite a manner was a rhetorical choice. The MILK map,


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in the end, dislocates much more than it locates:

Europe as Europe. No borders, just land with people and things. People and things

that move. The MilkLine is one of the countless movements of the international food

trade, in this case milk, produced by Latvian farmers, made into cheese by a local factory

with the help of an Italian expert, transported to the Netherlands, stored in a charming

Dutch cheese warehouse to ripen, sold at the Utrecht market and finally eaten by Dutch

citizens.19

This attempt to map the relationships between local spaces and the global, and to locate actors in

each the juxtaposition of the local nodes in the movement of Latvian dairy with the global

system of the international food trade creates the tension that animates MILK. In de-

bordering Europe, the argument seems to be that GPS does notin fact construct a more complete

gaze that can better understand the complexity of the global, and even perhaps that GPS is not

augmentative, but rather limits the gaze to an exceedingly abstract perspective of global

positionality. Schweickarts liberal humanist subject, which through technology comes to


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function as the sensing element for humanity does not materialize in MILK, because the

technological apparatus that affords such a perspective is not sufficiently depoliticized; perhaps

the clearest evidence of this is that the GPS itself is included, right alongside the humans, as a

participant, or actor, in the network.20

For Schweickart to see whats important he must see

past the Cold War to the utopian human destiny that he supposes lies beyond, and as we have

already discussed, this necessarily implies a depoliticized technological object.21

In taking up

this transhistorical perspective, the effect then is to politically disengage from the conditional

material circumstances that construct the technological apparatus which allows him to assume

his perspective, to see whats important. The irony is that his extraterrestrial perspective,

because it does not take into account the sensing apparatus, is in the end too narrow, too partial,

too incomplete to allow us to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and

regain a capacity to act and struggle to use Jamesons words again. MILK, however, embraces

partiality and ambiguity and this is the productive move that keeps it from stagnating in an

oppositional pessimism directed at large technological systems of surveillance, control, and

domination.

It would seem that if it werepossible to assume the gaze of the big Other, the pure gaze

(organ) detached from any mappable body, the perspective one needs to locate is precisely that

of GPS, which understands the earth as a grid upon which objects are ordered for use. Yet in

MILK this perspective turns out to be partial; GPS does not help us to articulate the unmappable

space of capital. Even though we have a map right in front of us that demonstrates relationships

between local actors and narrates the production cycle for Latvian dairy, the movements remain,

in MILKs words, countless. We watch the people (pixels) move across a map (an

undifferentiated color field), and are confronted with the fact that GPS data gives one absolutely


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no sense of place, but merely a numeric signifier. Thus, we begin to understand the gaze of

the big Other as partial itself; MILK re-mythologizes the managerial, masculine, libidinous,

surveillant gaze that exercises its mastery in translating all objects and subjects into equivalent

data (often numbers) so they may be measured and ordered for use. In other words, MILK

locates this detached gaze, this organ without a body, and demonstrates that it did indeed have a

body all along! In drawing its dis-locating map, MILK finds the location of the gaze itself, and

re-maps the technology into the (agonistic, masculine, protective, acquisitive) ideological fabric

from which it was torn loose. Is it any coincidence that MILK tracks this particular substance

from organ to organ, from udder to mouth? Surely the choice of content suggests a comic

rejoinder to the comically phallic GPS/locative family of technologies.

To suggest that there are different versions of the subject present in the spaces MILK

represents is not to suggest that this project (or LM in general) is an affirmation of difference as

such. It may appear that all the people involved who carry their adjectival ethnic tags (Latvian

farmers, Italian experts, and Dutch citizens) around with them on the map are merely intended to


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romanticize cultural specificity as having some inherent value, thus mythologizing the widely

perceived fear that something called globalization is systematically erasing local identity.

However, this reading contrasts sharply with MILKs suggestion that we can somehow

understand Europe without its borders, as just land with people and things. Why

deterritorialize Europe in one instance and then reterritorialize it the next? In other words,

how can the countless movements of multinational capital coexist in the same space as the

stable subject rigorously defined by nation and occupation (Latvian farmers, et al)? The

implication is deeply ambiguous: Even though we are beyond the nation-state, even though it is

not worth mentioning because it has been superseded by the space of multinational capital as

evidenced by the map which traces a commodity across an undifferentiated land mass, the only

way we can identify individuals within this global space is through recourse to local

metaphors. At certain points the local identities (class, gender, ethnicity) of the participants

disappear completely, as when they are represented as a blip moving within a color field.22

At

other points stable identities return with a (occasionally saccharine) vengeance, as in the

biographies of the participants: Ilga Grinberga and Aina Rudzite: The two magic sisters of

jocular farming. They even manage to make their twenty-four cows laugh!23

The difference between the multiple subjectivations deployed by MILK and the

decentered, hybrid, or schizophrenic non-subjectivities of discourses on/of multinational

capitalism is key. This differentiation will be taken up in more detail in the final section of this

essay; suffice it to say for now that, as Slavoj !i"ek writes, endorsement of the dissemination

of the unique Self into a multiplicity of competing agents.implies the abolishment of any sense

of a global coordinating center.24

MILKs very condition of possibility, however isa global

coordinating mechanism, and thus the verticality of hierarchical structures of surveillance and


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control must be re-mythologized alongside albeit in a disjointed, dis-locative way the

horizontality of multinational capitalist space: the center must be both present and absent. One

way in which this disjointedness is manifested is in MILKs apparent argument that regardless of

the seemingly totalizing gaze of the technologies of control society there remains an untouchable

core of the subject that resides in some version of local identity. In other words, it seems that the

project participants are at once both sucked up into the space of multinational capital insofar as

their movements are prescribed by its imperatives, and yet remain relatively rooted in a strong

sense of place, local history and family. Continuing with the biography of our magical sisters,

we may be reminded of Heideggers peasant woman: They follow in the footsteps of their

parents and have a truly ecological approach, leaving, for example, the horns on their cows. The

beautiful herd of brown, black and white, black, brown and white cows is called together twice a

day by their masters voice.25

The tension that arises between these global and local spaces

and their contingent versions of the subject engenders what we will identify as LMs productive

moment insofar as it pushes against the gaze that seeks to absorb everything into a closed system

of equivalent exchange. In the most basic sense we could say that MILKs image of the earth

an undifferentiated field populated with pixels that somehow coexist with the rich local lives

of its participants is incongruous in several ways: there are ruptures and reversals that work

against the assumptions of neutrality and transparency on which locative devices rely.

Uncle Roy All Around You

Probably the most famous and certainly one of the most often criticized LM projects tp

date is Blast Theorys Uncle Roy All Around You(URAAY).26

URAAY is a game in which

players collaboratively track the game character Uncle Roy simultaneously in both a virtual city


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using a web application and on foot in an actual city (the game has thus far been played in

London and Manchester). The online player must guide the street player to complete certain

goals around the city before

locating Uncle Roys office and finally Uncle Roy himself, at which point the street player takes

a ride with Uncle Roy in a white limousine. The online players and the street players stay in

contact using GPS-enabled handheld computers, and each has access to certain pieces of

information that need to be cooperatively assembled to successfully complete the game. The

players are not rewarded with any piece of secret information, any key to the narrative; rather,

upon winning Uncle Roy makes a request of them: Somewhere in the game there is a stranger

who is also answering these questions. Are you willing to make a commitment to that person

that you will be available for them if they have a crisis? The commitment will last for twelve

months and, in return, they will commit to you for the same period.27

The premise of the game clearly owes much to conspiracy theory narratives insofar as it

mythologizes the existence of a secret network of powerful (white, male) agents that exist

behind the scenes and pull the strings. One might ask, then, if URAAY (and also MILK)

does not commit something like cyberpunk fictions epistemic logical fallacy. As has often been

argued, cyberpunk fictions subjects, while thoroughly immersed in the space of multinational

capital, nevertheless usually retain a high degree of autonomy and individualism, which are the


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very qualities supposedly at risk from the postmodern. As Joseph Tabbi, a harsh critic of

cyberpunk notes,

cyberpunk mostly sustains a generic narrative of romantic

individualism.when this fiction is not invoking traditional family structures against

systemic technological domination, it frequently follows the popular pattern of the

American detective hero in Gibsons case a cyberspace cowboy who must get his

own back from a hostile class structure and a diabolical political machine.28

The effect of retaining this highly autonomous individual subject is that the space of large

technological systems that emerges in the literature must ultimately be construed as fully

mappable. In other words, if the hero is to claim his heroic mastery over systemic technological

domination he must retain an ability to navigate the (virtual and actual) space of the postmodern

with relative ease. This is perhaps most clear in William Gibsons novels, where the cyberspace

cowboy locates the heart of the large technological system (most famously the AI Wintermute in

Neuromancer29

), which confirms that the space was always mappable in the first place, that the

seemingly disconnected, meaningless objects in the landscape did in fact mean something; the

symbolic order is given consistency by the discovery of a relational center that had been there

pulling the strings all along. The effect is to reduce large technological systems to a single

paranoid figure.30

The picture that emerges, then, is one in which the spaces supposed by large

technological systems are merely fictions that do not, in fact, confound (and this is the real

problem) an especially talented user of technology. An uncomplicated version of mastery, and

thus the stable subject emerges and reterritorializes on a slightly modified liberal

instrumentalism that admits things can get out of control, but situates responsibility for

maintaining control with familiar versions of rational masculine ordering. Again, the political


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dimension of the technological object disappears in a one-dimensional, broadly humanist

assertion that ignores the material substratum upon which such assertions rest.31

Does URAAY not construct mutually exclusive autonomous subjects and unmappable

spaces? Does it not pose the expert user as the answer to the puzzle of Uncle Roys meaning?

Is Uncle Roy himself not proof that LM has not transcended the paranoiac reductionism that

often finds the genesis of postmodern confusion in that most powerful and diabolical figure of

multinational capital: the omnipotent CEO? More importantly, and more crucial for thinking

about a potential LM politics, we must ask whether the game space of URAAY simply

reconfigures the deterritorialized (virtualized) space of the city as a kind of militarized war zone

that operates by an instrumental logic. If this is the case, then the possibility for any sort of

critique or resistance would seem nonexistent. However, the situation is more complicated than

this. The usual suspects of conspiracy theory are present, but (as in MILK) they are rendered

partial by the diegesis: the narrative is compulsively collaborative, structuring each character

on a lack. The player at the terminal and the player on the street each experience a certain

version of the city space, neither of which is complete: not in the sense that the map is unclear,

obfuscated by some malign force, but rather in the sense that each space is experienced as

requiring supplemental articulation by another player. When players finally find Uncle Roy,

who turns out to precisely nothold the missing piece of the narrative, the space is revealed as

fundamentally collaborative: there is no big Other who guarantees consistency in the symbolic

order of the game. Roys question, in fact, removes the virtual overlay in which the players had

been operating; he wants them to make a commitment in real life, and so, like Borges map the

size of the territory, this one also disintegrates. The game space dissolves into an actual space in

which there are real people with crises and phone numbers. The clearest example of a


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moment when the barrier between virtual and actual spaces dissolves comes in Blast Theorys

documentary film of the project. When a participant riding in Uncle Roys limo is asked for her

personal information (address, phone number, name), her discomfort is palpable. The intrusion

of real life into the game space engenders an overt uneasiness.32

Where conspiracy theorys paranoiac fantasies reconstitute a relational center in the

instance it appears some system is beyond comprehension and representation (symbolization),

repositioning a new meta-subject who plays the part of the Other of the Other, a secret,

invisible, all-powerful agent who effectively pulls the strings behind the visible, public Power

that operates the partof the meta-guarantee of the consistency of the big Other,

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URAAY

demonstrates the essential fiction of this figure, showing (to paraphrase Lacans remark about the

jealous husband) that even if he (Uncle Roy) does exist in actuality, postulating his existence is

still pathological, a paranoid knee-jerk reaction to increasingly dislocative social confusion. All

players in the game must traverse this social confusion in some sense, and discover something

like Jamesons (de-pathologized) postmodern subject: I think one cannot too often emphasize

the logical possibility, alongside both the old closed, centered subject of inner-directed

individualism and the new non-subject of the fragmented schizophrenic self, of a third term

which would be very precisely the non-centered subject that is a part of an organic group or

collective.34

While the Gramscian organic subject of a new class consciousness undergirding

Jamesons statement is not explicitly present in URAAY, it does seem that its modified

conspiracy narrative suggests that a cognitive map, if at all possible, is achievable through

cooperative collaboration, and that the form proper to cognitive mapping is the collective.

It is no coincidence then that LM finds itself conspiracy theory-adjacent. The projects

do, after all, all use GPS technology and handheld devices that find their origins mainly in


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military applications. However, a project such as URAAY at least appears to attempt to think its

way out of reconstituting the gaze of the big Other in its game space. The question Uncle Roy

asks at the end of the game: Are you willing to make a commitment?... dislocates Uncle Roy

from the position of command, control, and surveillance, and situates the player, the agent on the

ground, in a position of some power: Uncle Roy needs a favor. The big Other, indeed, does not

exist; it is constituted as lacking, inconsistent, and partial. Thus, at least in this small way, we

can begin to argue that URAAY does not territorialize on a libidinally charged paranoiac fantasy,

but that it begins to move in some other direction. Once the traditional goal of conspiracy theory

to locate the obfuscated center of a network of power relations is found to be beside the

point, and it is understood that the symbolic order of the game requires the cooperation of both

Uncle Roy and the players, then new, more politically productive questions arise, such as: How

effective is this dislocation of the subjective roles of game players and game characters for

representing the ways in which masculinist, hierarchic power relations and unitary, autonomous

subjects are legitimated through goal-oriented devices and games?

It is clear that Blast Theorys game in some sense militarizes the city space, asking

participants to play out a conspiratorial fantasy that mythologizes hierarchic power structures,

best represented by Roy himself, whose white limousine is the endpoint of the game trajectory.

In its basic narrative structure, it does appear that URAAY falls into the same old paranoiac

fantasies that are reactionary answers to the perceived loss of autonomy resulting from

modernization. The irony here and this is what makes the game ultimately productive for

examining the legitimating apparatuses of stable (read: patriarchal and imperial in the sense of

maintaining a liberal instrumental relationship to technology) subjectivities is that the game

itself can only take place in what is the already-militarized game space of the GPS gaze. When


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one uses a GPS device to navigate a city, does one not already in some way represent urban

space in the language of military simulation? In this sense, URAAY is a metagame, a game

space built on top of an existing game space. The criticisms that URAAY (and Blast Theorys

other games) reduce the city space to a simple rule-based abstraction35

is to miss the point,

which is that this abstraction is implicit in the gaze with which LM necessarily looks. To operate

within the gaze of location-aware surveillance and navigational technologies whose primary

objectives are the formal modeling of closed systems and the development of highly

sophisticated scenario planning techniques, which are privileged at the expense of situated,

experiential knowledge

36

is to make a concession at the outset. To suggest that these devices

themselvescan create the opportunity for one to become your own avatar in a historical fantasy

based on the present and as vast and complex as the world itself, as Karlis Kalnins does,37

is to

invest the device with a liberatory power in the same way that 19th

century Americans invested

the locomotive with the rhetoric of manifest destiny and universal civilization.38

To imagine

rescuing the satellites from the military-informational complex and the handheld devices from

consumer society is to truly regress to an earlier form of liberal instrumentalism which the

atomic bomb taught us without question is an untenable position. There is not, in other

words, an innocent way to look with locative devices.

Conclusion

The optimism of many, if not most, LM projects has been noted by several critics,

including Drew Hemment, who says, In place of an oppositional stance towards surveillance, or

a conventional politics of dissent, Locative Media suggests a politics that is collectively

constructive rather than oppositional (headmap.org), offering the opportunity to build another


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world, to create a space that can stand up as an alternative, a localized utopia.39

While

Hemments proclamation may smack of the uncritical technological determinism which

characterized the most dangerous forms of the techno-utopian modernism that celebrated speed,

strength and power as positive qualities in themselves, his assertion that LM does not (cannot)

adopt a conventional politics of dissent is correct. I only add here that this resistance to

conventional dissent is structurally encoded in LMs sensing element. The claim that LMs

initial conditions of possibility disallow an oppositional foothold has remained absent from LM

criticism, and hence utopian platitude rears its head again and again, arguing that LMs

alternative spaces are able to transcend the horizon of the totalizing gaze of the operational

media through which it articulates itself. When Marc Tuters, an outspoken advocate and

practitioner of LM asks the question Is [it] really fair that the artist with an interest in exploring

digital media in space always have [sic] take on the entirety of the so-called Control Societies

debate?, what he fails to note is that LM is nothing butthe control societies debate.40

Whether conscious or not, the construction of alternative spaces is complicated by the

technological devices involved, because these specific devices arethe materially manifest

objectives of control society. However, this essential complication in LM, which as we have

seen leads to the always-partial articulation of spaces and subjects, is productive insofar as it

simultaneously constructs the gaze itself as multiple and partial.

The common thread that runs through much of LM is the refusal to articulate a space or a

subject in any way that would locate it, or allow it to be mapped with any certainty. The

variously local, national and global markers that MILK assigns to individual actors in the

network it constructs (including its object-participants: milk and GPS) materialize and

dematerialize so rapidly that it becomes impossible to maintain a stable perspective with


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respect to a space or a subject. Europe is borderless, yet MILK traces the route of commodities

across it anyway (From where? To where?). There are no countries, yet individuals are

identified primarily by national citizenry. The movements of the international food trade are

countless, but nevertheless we count. URAAYs conspiracy theory narrative constructs the

space of paranoiac reductionism, the postmodern coping mechanismpar excellence, locating the

point of origin of that space in such a way that it is figured as partial and underdetermined. The

spaces in between spaces are figured similarly: the symbolic distance between the big Other

(represented by Roy) and the individual agent (game players) as well as the distance between the

virtual game space and the actual space of lived experience is uncertain. The partiality of all

these things (Uncle Roy, the players, the city, the virtual realm) holds open a zone of discomfort,

or ambiguity, that, unlike, for example, the average cyberpunk narrative, refuse to territorialize

on any single version of the subject or in any single space.

Because LM is essentially grounded in a perspective which still accepts the existence of a

global-coordinating center, it must continue to deal with vertically-oriented power structures that

operate through surveillance and repression. Also, because LM is equally grounded in the

exploration of consumer devices that work toward the subjective internalization of the

operational logic of this total gaze, it must continue to deal with horizontally-oriented power

structures that operate through hegemonic integration into everyday life. LM thus always

engages with both the macro- and micro- (read: hierarchic and distributed) conceptions of spaces

contingent to different understandings of power relations, each of which is constitutive of a set of

practices which map the subject into the space of the social. The version of the subject

systemic to LM projects hence bounces back-and-forth between the paranoiac and the

schizophrenic, the horrifying absence of meaning and the terrifying proliferation of meaning, the


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central and the dispersed. The effect is that one never gets comfortable, neither stagnating in a

utopian liberal humanism that forgets technology, nor in a pessimism that accepts the total

immanence of large technological systems.

So perhaps in all its bouncing around we can begin to see that the collective subject

does not, for either MILK or URAAY, alone constitute the answer of where LM can politically

locate itself. Otherwise we wouldnt need Uncle Roy and his conspiratorial narrative which is at

odds with the autonomous character who navigates the city; we would also not need MILKs

tension between unmappable space and the inextricably mapped remainder of local identity

that resides with its participants. We would instead only need some triumphant advocate of the

collective in itself while these other subjects fall away into the past. The lingering presence of

all these subjects in the same (non) space articulated by LM not only stands in sharp contrast to

the reduction of the subject to informational equivalency (positionality) sought by GPS and

locative devices, but it holds open ambiguity41

it refuses to territorialize for more than a

moment on any version of space or the subject, and thus things remain uncomfortable. And what

is discomfort except not feeling at home? To return briefly to Heidegger, it seems clear that

LMs most interesting moments are when it makes un-homelike the spaces (the local, the

global, the city, the screen, the map, the postmodern) we need to domesticate in order to locate

ourselves with any sort of consistency.

The most concise definition of the Freudian uncanny is that it is a space which contains

some inexplicable excess: it is when the room develops a sensing element, when it feels as

though the object is looking back at you yet you are unable to see from where it looks. So

perhaps Freuds uncanny and its associations with the gaze, with being looked at from behind

is equally as valuable for articulating the space contingent to the operational logic of GPS as is


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Heideggers more literal translation. While Heideggers de-worlded world, or un-homelike

home describes an effect, Freuds uncanny might point toward a strategy that preserves the

discomfort, the eerie feeling of being looked at by an object. It is only when it appears that

something is not right that we are forced to move elsewhere: to find or create alternative

spaces in which enough stability may be mustered so that one might, finally, begin to build a

cognitive map. Just as Freuds uncanny was intimately linked to the eye, so must LM understand

itself as inextricably tied up in its sensing element. Just as the Sand-Man returned again and

again, partially articulated in the figures of Coppelius and Coppola, threatening to pluck out

Nathaniels eyes, so must LM return again and again, also refusing to fully materialize its subject

and its objects, refusing to map them in any consistent, locative way. Only thus will it enable

itself to establish some critical foothold from which to address the locative gaze; only in

adopting the locative gaze to purposes fully alien to the sensing elements operational logic by

failing to locate, to speak, and yet to act in and through the gaze and voice of the surveillance

apparatus might LM point to a space in which one can regain the capacity to act and struggle.


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1Russell Schweickart, No Frames, No Boundaries, inEarths Answer: Explorations of Planetary Culture at the

Lindisfarne Conferences, ed. Michael Katz, William P. Marsh, and Gail Gordon Thompson (New York: Lindisfarne

Books: [distributed by] Harper & Row, 1977), 16.2Martin Heidegger, Only a God Can Save Us:Der SpiegelsInterview with Martin Heidegger, trans. Maria P.

Alter and John D. Caputo, in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge: MIT

Press, 1993), 105-106.3One only need remember Neil Armstrongs famous words to be reminded that technology was often absent fromthe rhetoric of astronauts.4David Nye,American Technological Sublime(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 256.5Andrew Feenberg, Questioning Technology(New York: Routledge, 1999), 14.6United States Coast Guard Navigation Center, GPS General Information, United States Coast Guard Navigation

Center, http://www.navcen.uscg.gov/gps/default.htm(accessed November 10, 2005). The artificial degradation was

known as Selective Availability.7Mark Tuters, The Locative Utopia, TCM Locative Reader, http://locative.net/tcmreader/index.php?endo;tuters

(accessed November 10, 2005).

8Drew Hemment, Locative Arts, Drew Hemment, http://www.drewhemment.com/2004/locative_arts.html(accessed November 10, 2005). Drew Hemment is a major critic (and proponent) of Locative Media, and is the

founder and Director of the Futuresonic International Festival of Electronic Music and Media Arts. Also see:

Hemment, Locative Dystopia 2.9Fredric Jameson,Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism(Durham: Duke University Press,

1991).10Jameson,Postmodernism, 39.11Jameson,Postmodernism, 54.12Jameson,Postmodernism, 54.13Jordan Crandall, Operational Media, Ctheory.net, http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=441, (accessed

November 10, 2005).14Crandall, Operational.15Drew Hemment, Locative Dystopia 2, TCM Locative Reader,

http://locative.net/tcmreader/index.php?locarts;hemment-dystopia, (accessed November 10, 2005). Hemmentdescribes here one uncritical version of LM. Elsewhere in the same essay he is much more optimistic about itspotential for critical engagement.16Both MILK and Uncle Roy All Around You are very well known, having won in consecutive years the Ars

Electronica Golden Nica for Interactive Art (2005 and 2004 respectively).17http://www.milkproject.net, (accessed November 10, 2005).18http://milkproject.net/participants, (accessed November 10, 2005).19http://milkproject.net/participants, (accessed November 10, 2005).20http://milkproject.net/participants, (accessed November 10, 2005).21It should go without saying that a liberal instrumental attitude toward technology coupled with progressive

politics is the recipe for an especially reductive brand of technological determinism. For insightful analyses of the

roots of this distinctly American attitude, see Nye (1994), Leo Marx (1964), and even Heideggers comments on

Americanism near the end of The Question Concerning Technology.22I use local identity in the broadest possible sense, in order to differentiate between the global subject which isreduced to an opaque node in a large technological system and the local subject which carries some quality that

seems to transcend a merely functional understanding of the subject.23http://milkproject.net/participants, (accessed November 10, 2005).24Slavoj !i"ek, On Belief, (New York: Routledge, 2001), 25.25http://milkproject.net/main, (accessed November 10, 2005).26http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_uncleroy.html, (accessed November 10, 2005).27http://www.blasttheory.co.uk, (accessed November 10, 2005).28

Joseph Tabbi,Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk, (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1995), 216.
http://www.navcen.uscg.gov/gps/default.htmhttp://locative.net/tcmreader/index.php?endo;tutershttp://www.drewhemment.com/2004/locative_arts.htmlhttp://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=441http://locative.net/tcmreader/index.php?locarts;hemment-dystopiahttp://www.milkproject.net/http://milkproject.net/participantshttp://milkproject.net/participantshttp://milkproject.net/participantshttp://milkproject.net/participantshttp://milkproject.net/mainhttp://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_uncleroy.htmlhttp://www.blasttheory.co.uk/http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_uncleroy.htmlhttp://milkproject.net/mainhttp://milkproject.net/participantshttp://milkproject.net/participantshttp://milkproject.net/participantshttp://milkproject.net/participantshttp://www.milkproject.net/http://locative.net/tcmreader/index.php?locarts;hemment-dystopiahttp://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=441http://www.drewhemment.com/2004/locative_arts.htmlhttp://locative.net/tcmreader/index.php?endo;tutershttp://www.navcen.uscg.gov/gps/default.htm


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29William Gibson,Neuromancer(London: HarperCollins, 1994).30Tabbi,Postmodern, 217.31Often in these texts virtual spaces come to appear as the more free space, while actual spaces of everyday life

are, as a foregone conclusion, already completely dominated by large technological systems (the plucky hero is

usually able to develop hacks that allow him to fly under the radar, so to speak).32

http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_cysmn.html, (accessed November 10, 2005). This sort of reversal is notalways intended, which is seen as desirable by the designers. Included on Blast Theorys web page for another

mixed-reality game called Can You See Me Now, is a quotation from one game player: I had a definite heartstopping moment when my concerns suddenly switched from desperately trying to escape, to desperately hoping

that the runner chasing me had not been run over by a truck (thats what it sounded like had happened).33Slavoj !i"ek, The Big Other Doesnt Exist, Journal of European Psychoanalysis, no. 5 (Spring-Fall 1997),

http://www.psychomedia.it/jep/number5/zizek.htm, (accessed November 10, 2005).34Jameson,Postmodernism, 34535Karlis Kalnins, "Locative Gaming: Dawn of the Cyborg Zombies." Qtd. in Tuters, Marc. Locative Utopia.36Crandall. Operational.37Kalnins Locative Gaming, (qtd. In Tuters).38Nye,American Technological Sublime, 76.39Tuters, Locative Utopia.40Tuters, Locative Utopia.41Hemment, Locative Dystopia.
http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_cysmn.htmlhttp://www.psychomedia.it/jep/number5/zizek.htmhttp://www.psychomedia.it/jep/number5/zizek.htmhttp://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_cysmn.html


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Documents

Seeing What's Important- Mapping Strategies in Locative Media