Beyond Locative Media

Authors

Marc Tuters, media theorist, now at the University of Amsterdam, and Kazys Varnelis, architectural historian and then director of the Network Architecture Lab at Columbia University.

Citation

Tuters, Marc, and Kazys Varnelis. "Beyond Locative Media: Giving Shape to the Internet of Things." Leonardo 39, no. 4 (2006): 357–363.

Description

The article is both a summary of the locative media movement and an argument about where it had gone wrong. Written at the movement's high point — the same year as the ISEA2006 symposium in San Jose, which had locative media as a major theme — it functions now as the movement's most useful retrospective.

Tuters and Varnelis divide locative media practice into two strands:

• Annotative — attaching information to places. Tagging, geo-annotation, layered narrative, and the practices grouped under narrative archaeology.
• Phenomenological — tracing the movement of bodies through space. GPS drawing, walking projects, trace visualisation, and the psychogeographic inheritance.

Their critique is that both strands had become preoccupied with the subject — with the artist's route, the individual's trace, the personal annotation — and had therefore reproduced the very Romantic, expressive model of the wandering individual that the Situationist dérive was originally meant to disrupt. Locative art, they argue, risked becoming an aesthetics of self-tracking: "a neo-Romanticism of the mobile subject."

Against this they propose a turn toward objects and infrastructures — toward what was then being called the internet of things. If things can address, sense and report, then the interesting artistic and analytic questions concern the networks of objects themselves rather than the individual moving among them. Tuters later developed this as "the object-turn in locative media."

Key Ideas

• The annotative/phenomenological distinction. Still the most useful taxonomy of locative practice, and applicable to commercial location services as readily as to art.
• The critique of the mobile subject. The argument that centring the individual trace reproduces an ideology rather than examining one — a criticism that applies directly to later self-tracking; see quantified self.
• From locative to ambient. The prediction, largely borne out, that the significant developments would come from environments and objects that sense and report continuously rather than from devices carried deliberately. See Everyware.
• The politics of the platform. Their observation that locative art depended on infrastructure it did not control — GPS is a military system, mapping is proprietary — and that this dependency was rarely examined by practitioners.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

This is the best short account of a movement that ran from roughly 2002 to 2008 and whose vocabulary this wiki inherited. Reading it is the fastest way to understand what locative media was trying to do, why it stopped, and how its questions were absorbed into commercial location services with the critique removed.

Related Reading

• Narrative Archaeology
• Locative Feminism
• Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing
• Geocloaking
• Place: The Networking of Public Space
• Guy Debord