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Although locative media purports to provide tools for the creation and reception of counter-archives, providing a seemingly emancipatory shift toward self-representation, it is necessary to consider the affective qualities of the technology itself, says Ryan Griffis.

Simply put, everyday life might be the name for the desire of totality in postmodern times.

(Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory)


We should now talk of people making not their own history but their own geography.

(John Urry, “Social Relations, Space and Time”, in Spatial Relations and Spatial Structures)


The title of this essay is a remix of the title of an essay by artist Martha Rosler originally published in 1979, “For an Art Against the Mythology of Everyday Life”. Rosler’s text is an engagement with what was then the emerging context now often referred to as “post-industrial globalization.” More specifically, it is an engagement from the perspective of someone attempting to make things – art works – that can “address these banally profound issues of everyday life, thereby revealing the public and political in the personal”. She was particularly interested in both the oppressive and potentially liberating aspects of “mass media.” Here, I want to take up where Rosler left off, discussing the potential of art, and technology, to “step toward reasonably and humanely changing the world” using the example of what is commonly referred to as “locative media.”


The “Locative Media” label has been used to refer to both commercial and “critical” avant garde applications of geospatially aware technologies. Both often share a predilection for revealing the individual experience of “everyday life” and connecting it to larger, socially mediated and networked forms of experience. Locative media relies on the placement and movement of devices that can compute, and then transmit, their location to other, equally connected devices, like computers. In a larger cultural sphere, this is visible in the proliferation of the Geographic Positioning System (GPS) technology that is becoming increasingly common in devices like cell phones and automobiles. Locative media benefits from such deployment of communication technologies as “ubiquitous” – to be everywhere, at all times, and often unnoticed and inaccessible. Such notions of ubiquity can’t help but intersect with notions of “the everyday” – where else is “the everyday” if not in “the everywhere”?


Rosler begins “For an Art Against the Mythology of Everyday Life” with the question, “Where do ideas come from?” (p. 3). She immediately answers her question with, “All the myths of everyday life stitched together form a seamless envelope of ideology, the false account of the workings of the world.” Notions of “the everyday” as a site of resistance, dissent and creativity have been celebrated for their embodiment of what Michel deCerteau referred to as “tactics”. This somewhat utopian depiction of “making do” in the face of regimes of power, however, can equally serve to reinforce the “myths of everyday life” Rosler is trying to make knowable. The condition of always acting tactically requires a constant state of sublimation and reactionary posturing, that while potentially liberating in the face of short term oppression, can never respond adequately to inequities.


On the commercial side, the ideological link between life and consumption is even more seamless than before. The utopian side of this is represented by the image of an endless network of consumers, newly empowered to publicly share their experiences and encounters with products and places. But is this consumer networking changing the desires that have shaped centuries of violent inequity? For one answer, we can look at the popularity of mapping applications that facilitate commercial real estate transactions, such as HousingMaps.com that connects Craigslist real estate listings and Google Maps. The following statement from Thai Tran, a Google Maps product manager, commenting on the release of a new panoramic, photo-based interface by Google, is revealing:

One day we were looking at two of the original Google Maps mashups, HousingMaps.com and ChicagoCrime.org, and we realized it would be even more useful if they could be combined because most people wouldn’t want to live near high crime areas.


In Trans’ statement, we find that, for all the new technologically-facilitated “communities” we can now create, they don’t look all that different from those divided by racialized red-lines, created by earlier generations of GIS applications. I will return to some of the implications of this technological inscription of desire later, but would like to shift into a discussion of locative media as it is practiced and celebrated within the avant garde cultural sphere, and more specifically, in contemporary art.


One contemporary locative media art work that has received much attention (the 2005 Golden Nica Award at Ars Electronica and exhibited in “Making Things Public” at the ZKM) is a mapping project by Esther Polak, Ieva Auzina and the Riga Center for New Media Culture (RIXC) titled “MILK.” Completed from 2003 through 2005, “MILK” follows the production and distribution of cheese, from Latvian dairy farms to the markets of Utrecht. Following the movements of nine “participants” (selected people involved in the making, moving and consumption of cheese) through the use of GPS devices given to them, “MILK” proposes to give us a glimpse into the social, and spatial, construction of cheese. The self-generated press for the project positions it as a “locative art – mapping project, that explores visual and documenting possibilities of GPS technology.”


The project’s basic components consist of some text, video and photographic imagery that records the movements of farmers, dealers and buyers of cheese. Through these mediations, the artists represent the spatial histories and knowledges that are, for all practical purposes, otherwise inaccessible and invisible in the material of cheese. “MILK” re-presents “cheese” as a body of knowledge that can be engaged on a human scale, through the actions and thoughts of those involved in its production, and on a more macro scale, through visualizations that reveal the geographic distances and time involved in its materialization.


Not surprising, one of the primary influences in the creation of the project, stated by Esther Polak, was the artist’s recollection of an earlier documentary project of rural life, poet James Agee and photographer Walker Evans’ 1941 account of poor farmers in the US South, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” Evans’ and Agee’s project, begun as an assignment for Fortune Magazine in 1936, is in many ways a classic example of New Deal era documentary work, combining the aesthetic sensibilities of the two artists with the Progressive political values of the emerging welfare state. As Polak and other commentators on “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” have noted, the book is both celebrated and criticized for its “experimental” or “difficult” method of combining text and pictures. Polak goes so far as to call it a “technological experiment,” echoing other common impressions of the work as “challenging” and rejecting “any vision of the world as clearly understandable and ordered.” This reading of Agee and Evans’ collaboration provides Polak, and her perceived audience, with a precedent for MILK – the creation of an experimental, yet universalizing, narrative of the everyday existence of rural farmers. Both share the familiar documentary aim of making visible for their audience the stories of marginalized people and places.


This identification with documentary should not be surprising, but should also not give undue import to the artists’ intentions. It does, however, provide a lens through which to view the materialization of meanings that locative media represents, meanings that, I argue, can be productively read as a further development in documentary image making. It is important to note that while some instances of locative media are more easily relatable to documentary traditions, such as “MILK,” other locative practices don’t begin or end with those traditions.


Where locative media practitioners and proponents can point to the difference between their work and conventional documentary practice is in their desire and ability to annotate space – to link their narratives to specific, geographic contexts. Many locative media projects use geo-spatial technology to attach stories, sound and relationships to locations such that an intersection between virtual/networked space and geographic space can be used to visualize invisible or imaginary realities. The Toronto-based [murmur] project, for example, produces audio stories about specific locations, using stickers marked with phone numbers to provide access to those stories for people inhabiting those very spaces, attempting to “change the way people think about that place” by bringing “that important archive out onto the streets.”


In many respects, I can find in contemporary locative media practices a response to critiques of archival and documentary models, by Rosler and others, like artist and theorist Alan Sekula. [murmur]’s creation of an alternative archive of Toronto, for example, could be read as an answer to Sekula’s dictum that “the archive has to be read from below, from a position of solidarity with those displaced, deformed, silenced, or made invisible by the machineries of profit and progress.” (“Reading an archive”, in Blasted Allegories, p. 184)


If locative media purports to provide tools for the creation and reception of counter-archives, providing access to the very means of knowledge (and therefore historical) production, this indeed seems an emancipatory shift toward self-representation. But the means through which locative media operates should also be considered. In recent debates about the cultural capital that locative media has been attracting, critiques leveled against its most visible instances have accused it of complicity with capitalist spectacle and, worse, as cultural research and development for surveillance and data mining industries. Many have attacked this complicity and the historical connections between contemporary technologies of geographic visualization and the US military.


On the one hand, the significance of location-based media art can be critically analyzed through the established framework of representation; using the tools of cultural and visual studies, we can arrive at a reading of how the content of locative media fits into, or ruptures, the current paradigms of meaning, signification and knowledge production. As Anne Galloway and Matthew Ward have shown, we can see locative media as an extension of “representational technologies,” as “ultimately understood as collections of cultural artifacts.”


But this would be only looking at locative media as a mechanism of representation, without consideration of the affective qualities of the technology itself. Without ignoring the importance of representation, and avoiding a reductive technological determinist analysis, we can look at the manner in which locative media could be read through Gilles Deleuze’s notion of a “control society” in which access and mobility are designed into systems, rather than enforced through disciplinary means. This reading might, for example, begin with the material history of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), the mapping of quantifiable, spatial information about populations and environments, with its origins in the combination of Cold War era MGIS (Military Geographic Information Systems) and earlier forms of mapping the urban housing crisis during the Great Depression, and even earlier examples such as John Snow’s mid 19th Century map of a London cholera outbreak (pp. 261-82). GIS became a valuable tool in the ongoing domestic wars against the urban poor under the guise of “urban renewal,” dissecting cities with highways and other forms of what Mike Davis has referred to as “third borders.” In this light, contemporary geo-tracking tools can be seen as part of what geographer Stephen Graham calls “software-sorted geographies,” where the sorting of social privileges is achieved not through enforcement of compliance, but rather through a preemptive selection of allowable conditions achieved through the employment of regulatory software in spaces of potential conflict. Just as walls and massive highways can serve to regulate movements between regions of a city, software, when connected to mechanical access points, can be used to regulate access to transportation, buildings and services.


The melding of knowledge and space requires the simultaneous fusing of that knowledge with privileges of mobility and technological access. Mediated space becomes an archive, not of political contestation, but of narratives accessible only to those who benefit from voluntary processes of surveillance. This is not the panoptic surveillance of Foucault’s disciplinary society, it is the surveillance of supermarket value cards, toll-road EZ passes, automobile GPS tracking systems and biometric airline regulation.


The Italian collective Multiplicity provide a significantly different instance of location awareness through which geographies of inequity are visualized and experienced. In a project titled “Road Map,” the collective made two journeys of similar distance, through Israeli and Palestinian-controlled territories, one time using an Israeli passport, the other time a Palestinian one. These two journeys were mapped and recorded with video, documenting the disparity in duration between the trips – roughly one hour with the Israeli passport, and over five hours with the Palestinian papers. Opposed to the view of space presented by MILK’s GPS derived drawings on pixelated, abstracted renderings of Europe, what Michael Curry has called a “view from nowhere,” “Road Map” presents an understanding of space as inextricable from the systems that shape it (p. 52). There is no neutral ground upon which to project narrative movements, only a ground delineated with checkpoints and regulated zones for some and by-pass roads for others. There is not one map, but (at least) two.


Acknowledging the shifting boundaries between the space we consider inhabitable and these computerized spaces, the notion that we are moving through the space created by satellites and control centers, miles away from our perceived location, becomes thinkable. And if we can move through these spaces, our movements can likewise be regulated by them. And just as they become part of established conceptions of “the everyday,” they likewise alter the boundaries of knowledge, either opening or sealing the envelope of ideology further. New Media theorist Drew Hemment has suggested that locative media might be better termed “embedded media” in recognition of its “inherent complicity in the operation of power,” referring, of course, to the recent practice of journalists being “embedded” with the US military. This notion of an “embedded” locative media turns citizens into prosumers (the popular neologism referring to productive consumers) of locatable content, content that is designed as much to analyze their movements and habits as it is to entertain or educate them. One might say the King’s minions have taken it upon themselves to write a contemporary Domesday Book themselves. Only the King isn’t such a simple entity anymore, but is rather some messy chimera of state and corporate interests.


It seems important to ask if it is sufficient merely to acknowledge complicity, to accept the dialectical utopian/dystopian visions. In another text on documentary and photography, Rosler questions representations of power that defy causal analysis:



“If there are no victims – or if, what amounts to the same thing, we are all equally victims – then there are no oppressors. Social inequality appears to be produced by a system without active human agents or collective remedies. …in the present map of the world, the self-same photo might simply be readable as an image of the random Brownian motion of individuals present in the same unit of space-time, and adding up only to numbers, not to ’society.” (p. 177)


Technology may further mediate power and control, and in many senses physically embody them, but does technology replace ideology? Does perspective collapse under the weight of 24 satellites? Michael Curry suggests that the “view from nowhere” always and already occupies a position of interest, but the interest becomes located further and further from the place of power – in this case, literally in space (p. 52). If the tendency of the control society is to embed ideology into mechanisms of domination, essentially black-boxing oppression, how can the black box be opened and its contents documented?

Special issue: art and democracy, recent articles
Tags: activism, cartography, everyday life, locative media, ryan griffis

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