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artcile by Dale Hudson and Patricia R. Zimmermann in Afterimage 36.4 (2009)
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TAKING THINGS APART:LOCATIVE MEDIA, MIGRATORY ARCHIVES,
AND MICROPUBLICS
Part of the new heterogeneous transnational media ecology, locative
media expands upon legacies of Fluxus and participatory art that
foregrounded the assemblage of transitory publics.' Locative media
extends these practices to probe the intersections and interstitial
zones between invisible, ubiquitous technologies, imbedded networks
of control, the materiality of digital machines, and the necessity of
embodied interaction.2 Locative media counters the immateriality
of virtualization and the privatization of miniaturized hand-held
technologies. As locative media combines with migratory archives, they
open up zones for ongoing contestations and speculations about labor,
the environment, and political histories.
Locative media practices move beyond images that attempt to fix
meaning into much more fluid, mobile environments. They use mobile
digital technologies to map and interact with material spaces. They
are iterative, mutating, provisional, and adaptive, functioning within a
quite different mode than more traditional media.3 How they structure
interactions and convene micropublics is more salient than how they
create images. Locative media practices shift the terms of documentary
media production. They move from images to interfaces, from refined
arguments to contestations and speculations.4
The multi-reality performance-installation project "Invisible Threads"
(2008), the distributed mobile phone project "Fluid Nexus" (2008), and
the collaborative web-application mashup soweto uprising . corn. (2006)
are locative media that convene micropublics by taking things apart.
They do not take images apart as a form of excavation of obscured
meaning. They are not interventions into discourses as much as they
are public actions into and around constructions and artifice.2 These
projects contend no object or machine or conception is unified and
unassailable. They unscrew backs of Nokia cell phones, modify chips
and software, reroute Google Maps, and interface with Hewlett-
Packard digital printers.
These projects also migrate, moving relentlessly between analogue
and digital, between the lived and the imagined, between history and
fantasy. They migrate across and through different social spaces beyond
cinemas, multiplexes and television, operate instead within and around
micropublic zones such as kiosks, storefronts, community centers,
galleries, festivals, fairs, clubs, and schools. These projects suggest
revisions to documentary studies debates concerning oppositional
political practices.6 They function as utopian sites rather than discourses
of sobriety, operating in the hypothetical realms of "what if" rather
than the more empirical documentary realm of "it was."7
We examine these collaborative projects, which develop at the
intersections of imbedded technologies, publics, performance, histories,
geographies, and critical cartography, to forward a set of speculations.
These examples of locative media and migratory archives explore the
production of social spaces beyond the image as a fixed text. They
are not products or films, but are nodal points for engagements
and relationships, convivialities and conversation, movements and
mobilities, conjurings and potentialities. They are unresolved and
inconclusive, shape shifting and adaptive.
These projects share common structural and operational characteristics
of this newly emerging transnational media ecology."They all foreground
digitally networked technologies to remap temporal and spatial
relationships. They mobilize experimentation as a critical engagement.
They question location and mapping. They produce the archive and
the artifactual, rather than utilizing a previously established archive.
They are enacted through collaborative and participatory practices
to generate micropublics that reconfigure the relationships between
artists and audience.9 They trouble the divide between analogue and
digital, material and virtual. We do not suggest that these emerging
documentary modalities replace extant ones. Rather, we argue that
these modalities open up extent documentary and experimental modes
to reappraisal and revision.
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
How do locative media and migratory archives extend and
challenge documentary studies and politics? Artists and collectives
working in locative media, ambient media, satellite and cellphone
technologies, and migratory archives activate political engagements,
microgeographies, and interventionist cartographies to probe ther
politics of terror and the location of global sustainability.1 0 Locative
Right
Installation view of "Invisible Threads" (2008) by Stephanie Rothenberg;
courtesy of the artist
15
media and migratory archives conceive of their publics differently
than audiovisual media. Rather than speaking about, to, with,or alongside their publics, they deploy networked technologies to
convene provisional and transitory micropublies. The design of these
projects imbeds collaborative processes. The projects do not exist
without enactment and engagement.
In live performances and real-time actions, locative media and migratory
archives practices disturb, dislodge, and redesign digital technologies that
we often ignore, like bar codes on passports and chocolate bars, radio-
frequency identification (RFID) tags used for anti-theR devices in stores
and for toll-collection on highways, global positioning system (GPS)
satellites and receivers, vector graphics in computer and video games, as
well as wireless local area network (\VLANJ) technologies, short message
service (SMS) communication and cellular telephone networks. These
various arts/polidcal practices reposition highly specialized technologies
within die democratic discourse of amateurism, which refutes technology
as inaccessible and too complicated. The emerging locative media and
migratory archives movement has accelerated in the United States since* legislation like the U.S.A. Patriot Act, which authorizes unprecedented
S data mining, invasions of privacy, wiretapping, and Internet surveillance.
Locative media focus on enactments rather than representations,
conjuring provisional micropublics in public spaces. They also inventnew kinds of performative systems to open up the liminal zones between
digital and analogue, virtual and material, embodied and disembodied,
16 game and reality, body and interface, history and mapping. Locative
media and migratory archives unsettle assumptions and provoke debate
itbout the functions and power of technologies." They take apart our
assumptions and expectations.
BIP M!!
BIP111 ON
INVISIBLE THREADS
"Invisible Threads" creates a participatory space to take apart ways
that work and play, labor and consumption, are refigured through
Wcb 2.0 technologies that transform social networking into telematic
manufacturing. The project is mobile and migratory, mixing reality
with networked media, performance with installation, with a virtual
sweatshop called Double Happiness Manufacturing in the social-
networking environment of Second Life (SL) and a kiosk storefront in
real life. The project, then, exists only with audience participation."s
Interfaces between virtual and material worlds blur the distinctions
between collaboration and consumerism. "Invisible Threads" exposes
ways real-world economies affect idealized virtual communities. As
Web 2.0 technologies move between social relationships and financial
exchanges, "Invisible Threads" produces a collaborative experience
that unsettles borders between virtuality and materiality. It is not a work
about producing new forms in SL akin to machinima, films directed
and performed in game engines; rather, it is a project that transmits and
produces collaborative experiences.
Developed at Eycbcam by digital media performance artist Stephanie
Rothenberg andJeff Crouse, "Invisible Threads" has been performed
at "New Frontier on Main" at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and
at "Synthetic Times: Media Art China 2008" in New York City.
Rothenberg and Crouse set up a kiosk with sales racks and other
publicity collateral. Real-world customers come to the kiosk, where
they order jeans from five different styles-No Pants Left Behind,
MyPants, LowRider, Road Kill and Classic-that are produced by
avatars in SL who work as pattern cutters. Custom-sized patterns are
exported into real life via a large-scale Hewlett Packard printer. Real-life workers then cut the patterns from cotton canvas and assemble
the jeans with a glue-gun and minimal stitching. The manufacturing
of the jeans is based on the model of just-in-time production, but the
jeans are disposable and unable to survive a wash-and-dry cycle--
exaggerating the impermanence of die digital. The project takes apart
the scamlessness of on-line shopping and the invisibility of sweatshop
labor. Indeed, Double Happiness Manufacturing operates according to
an "indentured servant mode" of labor, paying workers about ninety
cents per hour and selling the jeans for about fifty dollars." Profits
from sales are used to pay for rental of space in SL and salaries of
workers in SL and in real life.
"Invisible Threads" operates according to a "service aesthetics":
the artist and audience form one-to-one relationships through
commodity transactions within service economies of customization
and personalization, a radical departure from the "relationaesthetics" by which the artist aligns with audience in post-Fordist
economies of mass production.15 As an artist, Rothenberg is not
interested in the production of fixed images that witness events.Rather, site is invested in the creation of participatory, interactive
situations to create more engagements with the public to unpack
the mobilities of global capital. Rather tItan documenting a social
movement, "Invisible Threads" immerses in the exploitations and
injustices of digital outsoureing and free trade zones that are notsubject to labor laws by creating an accessible project that affiliates
with social and political movements.
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advantages of anonymity and avoidance of central servers that recordinformation that could later be subpoenaed by courts.
The decision to use Nokia units and Python programming language
reflect the project's commitment to serving the most users. Nokia isthe world's most popular brand; Python is a freeware program easily
modified for alternative applications. The system will function within abroadcast model, sending information directly from one programmed
phone to the next. The project was conceived in relation to areas where
communication systems arc tightly regulated and censored by tie state,as well as in areas affected by disasters that shut down communication
networks in conjunction with an anticipated migration of Bluetooth-
enabled mobile units from the global North to the global South viarecycling programs within the next few years.
To use "Fluid Nexus," the user downloads tie software on her cell phoneand types a message in the interface. Tile message is stored on tie cell-
phone unit and broadcast via Bluetooth to other cell phones with tiedownloaded software. "Fluid Nexus" re-routes short-range wirelessconnectivity standards like Bluctooth from consumerism and complicity
toward activism. The P2P model of inrormation exchange avoidshicrarchy and control. "Fluid Nexus" is part of an emerging modality
of documentary practice that recognizes the dangers inherent todocumentation when things are not taken apart: fixed archival images risk
being repurposed from eyewitness accounts of human-rights violations
into audiovisual evidence used by oppressive regimes for control.
SOWETO UPRISING. COM
South African artist Ismail Farouk and Dutch-born Iranian programmerBabak Fakhamzadeh's collaborative work joweo uprisicom maps history
onto place. It seeks to avoid the power differentials and fWxty of physical
memorials by utilizing the Internet as a site for ongoing negotiations
and contestations over past events and their continued relevance." Theproject was initially conceived three years ago in conjunction with tie
Hector Pieterson Rescareh Project, Soweto's first historical museum,named after one of tie first victims of police violence against the studentprotesters. Intended to map the actual student routes taken during theJune 16, 1976, uprising in the Johannesburg township of Sowcto, the
project seeks to become a community-drivcn digital archive through
which members of the "lost generation" of young South Africans, wvho
sacrificed their education to stand against the Apartheid system, can
reclaim and transmit history.2
The project represents a political intervention into the archive and
memorialization. As the post-Apartheid state and civic governments beginto rollow the "global model" by memorializing not the actual routes buttheir symbolic approximates as heritage sites for international tourism,
sourto upuising. corn's digital archive becomes a vital means to counter therepurposing of history into consumable goods. Moreover, the political
bias or state and civic memorialization or history often marginalizes the
role of women and of organizations other than the African National
Congress. Soerveo uprising, corn includes routes organized or supported
by the Black Consciousness Movement and Positive Action Campaign
(PAC), including the PAC-organized route to the Orlando East police
station on March 23, 1960, in protest of the Pass Laws.
The web-application mashup allows users to view individual routes ofprotest and resistance as color-coded polylines mapped onto an image
of Soweto from Google Maps. Markers ("balloons") and custom iconsalong the routes open to additional information about sites, events,
Above"Invisible Threads' (2008) by Stephanie Rothenberg; courtesy of the artist
and martyrs: contemporary photographs of key sites along the student
routes, such as schools and police stations; user-contributed testimony or
remembrance; and blog queues into Google keyword searches to track
what people around the world are writing about sites in Soweto. As a
work of critical cartographic archive, soweto uprising, corn mobilizes the
open-source potential of the Internet to create a site for a collaborative
and migratory model of documentary praxes. The RSS feeds facilitate
unwitting collaboration. The meaning of the site's subject, Soweto's
history, opens to a broader audience of potential participants than the
web site's users. It is hardly surprising that political theorists recognize
the Internet as a model for guerrilla networks.1t The accumulation of the
comments-one modestly entitled, 'just one story"-have the effect of
opening the history of the uprisings to testimonies from participants that
often contradict official versions of this history controlled by groups in
power, facilitating micropublics for history.
A substantial obstacle for soweto uprising, cons, of course, is the realities of
the global digital divides. According to an UNESCO report on knowledge
societies, the digital divide is "not one but rather many digital divides" that
fracture access to knowledge according to economic resources, geographical
asymmetries, generation, gender inequality, language, employment,
disabilities, and educational, social, and cultural background.t" Only 11 %
of the world's population has access to the Internet, and 82% of the world's
population represents only 10% of this 11% with the other 90% living in
the US., Canada, western Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Australia.us
Many of the participants in the Soweto uprising do not have Internet
access or Internet literacry Nonetheless, soweto uprising, corn does propose
new ways of interacting with documentary, ways to navigate history as web
environments similar to readings of webcams as a "mediated geographical
actuality and our cultural conceptions of the wider world."2t
The project is curTently entering a third phase, which includes mapping
additional routes, as well as conceptualizing user interface in response to
inadequate Internet access within the township, which has contributed to
limited participation. Since a purely on-line platform is not sufficient, Farouk
and Fakhamzadeh are exploring ways to integrate mobile units along
the routes (such as in Internet cafes being developed for the 2010 World
Cup), as well as interfacing the project with other services, such as digital
scanners and free email accounts. The project will further explore the use
of existing social networks to encourage participation. Farouk believes that
mapping facilitates conceptions of historical documentation that active
spatial dimensions toward visualizations affecting change. The project seeks
to give voice to those who participated in the country's future-to take apart
the illusions of global consumerism and reclaim history as process, rather
than product. Participants have found the project extremely emotional and
gratifying, releasing thoughts that they have described to Farouk as "lurking
in memory." Soweto uprising, corn deploys an open-archive, community-driven
model toward the documentation of history
SPECULATIONS
How can we assess the political implications imbedded in this idea of
"taking things apart"? Locative media and migratory archives, exemplified
in "Invisible Threads," "Fluid Nexus," and soweto uprisings, corn, alter some
of these integers of documentary and experimental film, foregrounding
not the work of art and media as an object but instead augmenting a
process of continual openings, questionings, reconfigurations, blurrings,
speculations. All three works take things apart to convene micropublics.
The collaborative works examined in this essay open up speculations rather
than fixed conclusions. Collaborative models of locative media-which
collapse production, distribution, exhibition, and participationr-offer
new possibilities and potentialities for political documentary and thinking
in new ways about interactions between social movements and arts/
media practice. The performative functions of locative media exorcise
technologies to make them visible and comprehensible as embodied power
relations. How can we take things apart?
DALE HUDSON is a visiting assistant professor of cinema and new media studies at
Amherst College, Massachusetts. His work appears, or is forthcoming in Cinema
Journal, Journal of Film and Video, Screen, Studies in Documentary Film,
and elsewhere.
PATRICIA R. ZIMMERMANN is a professor of cinema, photography, and media arts at
Ithaca College, New York She is the author of Reel Families: A Social History
of Amateur Film (1995) and States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars,
Democracies (2000) and is co-editor ofMining the Home Movie: Excavations
in Histories and Memories (2008).
_A10TES 1. See 77wnos Ketei, Fluxus (London, Thaimes and Hudson, 1995)for examples ofsthe Flwuas movenrent
liahlngolfthe foady ,epe#&nnative, andtheaudience.FDramnplesolhiw audeLeeparle6a,ondrehlaiorOalaesitheiesavloed in subsequent derades international, see Participation, Claire Bithip, ed. (Caabridge, AM: Tht MITPnes;,
2006) 2. A variey ofdigitu teorists, haze questioned how to consider the issues of digial networks and political actions.
For "aamlp;, see Geert Lxaink, Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture (Xu'w rork, Roulledge,
2008);AlarkPoter, Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Mtachines (Durham, AC.:
Duke Unknsyi Press, 2006); Don Tapscoit andAitLhony D. Williams, Wiknomics: How Mass Collaboration
Changes Everything (Nme York Penguin Group, 2006). 3. Tor a discussion of locatite media, see Jason Abolan, Sthn
AlMm; and Banyff Wildno, "Soune,illanice, Waorable and Digtal Tools in Suarilled Environments," Byron Hoau,
DavidAL. Rnler, and Olie Ov"do, eds. SmallTech: The Culture ofDigital Tools (Afinneopolii, MN" Universty
afMinnuotna Pass, 2008), 179-96. 4. See Patrica R, Zimmeronamnn, "Frhn te Irmage to the Ineerface. PiremptOu Afedia
Collective`l omilable at imotmsedicharnnemlorg. 5. For the larger rontet of intervntioniat art, mee Naot Thompson and
Gry Sholete, wtit Joseph Thomepon, .AscholasMirzoi7 , and Ondine C. Chaotya, The Interventionists: Users'
Manual forthe Creative Disruption ofEveryday Life (WonrhAdaium MA:MAfSSAMoCA Publiolions, 2004).
6. 4li hank Alihaet Chann for his isidtl/l quehes about political econoy andpollical exenies in relations to our
theorizations oflocafire media, espLalao his ouionay arguments about oo investing in the utopianism of d4gitalal in the
context of how diotal netwbrks inscribe power diff erentv and nore insidioaoly Furo clearapositionofhowdiplalonetuorkE
organizeotenselveso narudcode, othifadlitutes rontrol andpor,n see AlexoanderGa0oay, Protocol: Hone ControlExistsafterDecentrnlization(Camboritge,MA&TheMlTl4ss, 2004). ZBillAlchols hasrguedthatdomoentarios
exhibit a disonarse of sobriep engaging the epistemoh*loa! in his Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in
Documentary (Bloomington, LAr Indiana Uniersiy Pless, 1991). For an exposition ofpasienciel historiogrrp4y that
is lks intemested in wthat constitutes the past than in how the past can be testhrnded through different inagined regisue
andmirots, seeDipesh Chabkratay, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Diflerence
(Tincelon,i,Y:Princeton Uniswisy`ress, 2000). 8. In thelastrh yearse may ywritersand organizations haoy okned
ahat hoo been dubbed the 'uem# energingrsnnmalional media erology"as a di?1 awuyfiomt conceptions of mainstmean/
aSlernative rmedia and proft/nompofit. See Rochard Kahn and Douglas Kelbn, "Thropolitas, Blog; and Emergent
AMedia Ecologies: A Critical /ReconstictireApproach," Small Tech 22-37; Nongovernmental Politics, Alichel
Fde, ed with CGell Knkorwn and rut-a McKIe (Anrw Nork Zone Books, 2007); ationolAllianceforiAedi Arts andCulture, Deep Focus: A Report on the Future of Independent Media (San Francisco, CA:NAMAC, 2004).9. Fora cogent diossnio ofrollaboraetiemediapractices, see Helen deMAichit 'A Mosaic ofPnucticec PublicMedia and
Partiipatoy Cullure," Afterimage, VoL 35, no. 6 (MAy/June 2008), 7-14. 10. The daeloping literae on critical
arftogrphy ha explored the reationship between ontgetion, networks, dotali, rwdeing inviiblepauemttnssible through
toiuasrations andgruphics, and alkenalt e designm For an excellent overmet of thisofeld, jeeJanet Abrams and Petir
Hall, eds., Else/Where- Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories (Minneapilis- Universiy
of(Milnesota Pros, 2006). 11. Weno Huilj%mng Clumg, Control and Freedom: Power and Parmotia in the
Age of Fiber Optics (C=mbridge, MA: The MITPress, 2008). 12. Authorn' teephone intervdew wilt Stephanie
RoteonberA May 23, 2008.13. For additional infmnation on Double HappmausJeans risit uc w.doublehappinesemns.
com. 14. TIorhersinSL are paid200Linden pIer onr Due tothe roots innumhgthe projert,prices tore ratioedfroa $35
to about 50. 15. Stereo Heny Madoff, "SeiceAestetics,"Artforum (September 2008). 1. "10 Simple Steps to Four
Own Vrulum Sweatshop" can bee steamed on blO.to at hit]//blpitbpv./file/779038. 17. For additional infosnation of
"FluidNcaus" t.iyt uuswsincotu-net.ea/fluidinuv/#about. 18. For addinonal i/fonnation an TXTmob oisnil uw.
oppliedautoomon .rom/trtmob.hthnL For the Institute ofAppliediAutonorfys September3, 2004, pren release on T-Mobile
sm wurm appliedautonony. omn/txtmol/tltmobPR2.hhnL 19. Arthors'telephone interiew with ictk laouf, Jane 18,
2008. 20. To acress soweto uprisings. cornm ldt htcO://somotonpringo.aon. 21. Authors'telephone intetriewowith Ismail
FamAk, Jabr 15, 2008. 22. Alichael Hardt andAntonio Aegn, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of
Empire (Nmw York. Penguin, 2004), 82-83.23. UNESCO World Report: Towards Knowledge Societies
(Parns UndedNaations Educational, Scientfic, and Cultural Orgauicaton, 2005), 30. 24. Ibid, 29. 25. Andrew
btte,son, 'Destination DigitaL. D&nenta Representation and the Virtual Tirnelogue," Quarterly Review of Film
and Video Vol 20, no. 3 (2003, 199.
19
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
TITLE: Taking Things Apart: Locative Media, MigratoryArchives, and Micropublics
SOURCE: Afterimage 36 no4 Ja/F 2009
The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and itis reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article inviolation of the copyright is prohibited. To contact the publisher:http://www.vsw.org/