Mobility as Freedom in Critical Art and New Media
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Subject
The equation of mobility with freedom is one of the founding assumptions of locative and mobile media art, and this title names the critical examination of it.
The Assumption
Mobile technology has been sold, and largely theorised, as liberation: freedom from the desk, from the office, from the fixed line, from the constraints of place. The associated artistic tradition inherits the same premise from an older lineage — the flâneur, the Situationist dérive, the road, the nomad. Deleuze and Guattari's nomadology, with its smooth space traversed without partition, supplied the theoretical vocabulary and was taken up enthusiastically by media artists working with GPS and mobile devices.
The Critique
Several lines of argument converge against the equation.
Mobility is unevenly distributed. Doreen Massey's concept of power-geometry makes the central point: different groups are positioned very differently in relation to flows and movement. Some initiate movement and control it; some are moved; some are effectively imprisoned by other people's mobility. The business traveller and the refugee are both mobile, and the word is doing no useful work if it covers both without distinction. Bauman makes a parallel distinction between tourists and vagabonds.
Freedom to move is not freedom. The mobile worker is reachable everywhere, which is a reduction in autonomy presented as an increase in it — see Perpetual Contact on the collapse of unreachability. Mobility that abolishes the boundary between work and not-work has extended the working day, not shortened it.
Mobility is enabled by infrastructure and tracked by it. The device that permits movement also records it. Freedom of movement under continuous positional logging is a different thing from freedom of movement, and the difference is precisely what geocloaking responds to.
The nomad figure is a borrowed romance. Critics of the nomadology-inflected art of the period argued that it appropriated the language of actual displaced and pastoral peoples for an aesthetic of voluntary wandering by well-resourced artists — and that the resulting work was, as Tuters and Varnelis put it, a neo-Romanticism of the mobile subject.
Whose wandering. Feminist critics have pointed out how thoroughly the free urban wanderer is a gendered figure, and how much of the tradition's aesthetic depends on a body that can move anywhere at any hour without consequence. See locative feminism.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
This is the field's standing correction to a claim that is made constantly and examined rarely. When a technology is described as liberating, the useful questions are: freedom for whom, from what, at whose cost, and what new dependency arrives with it. Mobility is simply the case where the rhetoric is thickest.
