Art History, Curation and Practice After Media
CHArt Twenty-Second Annual Conference
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FAST FORWARD: Art History, Curation and Practice After Media |
'You Are Here': Locative Media and the Body As Networked Site
Alicia Cornwell, Tufts University, Massachusetts, USA
The increased use of locative media-enabled devices such as mobile phones has recently been of interest to artists working in the emerging field of locative arts. Artists and collectives such as Loca (Location Oriented Critical Arts) are highlighting the ways in which locative media technology allows bodies to be tracked and monitored through largely invisible wireless networks. By sending unsolicited text messages which indicate that the mobile phone user is being observed and also by providing methods that aid users in physically identifying such networks in their surrounding environment, Loca’s project draws the user’s attention to the tendency of technologically-augmented bodies to become sites of surveillance in the digital terrain.
Mobile phones and other devices do not only allow users to be tracked, they also contain and reveal surprising amounts of information about users’ lives. The wealth of information afforded by these devices makes up an individual’s digital past, both distant and immediate, that is specifically connected to the user’s situated body within the wireless networks they inhabit. Loca, whose project can be linked to both site specific art practices from the 1970s to the 1990s and to the activities of the mid-twentieth century Situationist International movement, makes use of homemade wireless networks and nodes to demonstrate the ease with which outside parties (often large corporations) can monitor and glean personal information from mobile phone users.
Loca are emphasising through their project that the result of the digital and physical overlapping of space is an increasingly complex and often compromising system of information generation and retrieval, reliant upon the physical location and context of bodies in space. As sites that are monitored within a wireless, networked terrain that is increasingly vast, Loca stresses that our bodies have been caught between the layers of the physical and digital divide.