Alicia Cornwell, Tufts University, Massachusetts, USA

“You Are Here”: Locative Media and the Body as Networked Site

In the 1960s, the United States Department of Defense began developing satellite based radio-positioning technology in order to track more accurately the movements of submarine based ballistic missiles and to provide navigation and positioning support to its Navy and Air Force ¹ . This technology, developed nearly fifty years ago for the military, is now commonly known as Global Positioning System, or GPS. Now widely used beyond the parameters of military defence, a number of industries and services we rely upon daily operate more accurately and efficiently using the technology to assist in positioning and navigation. ²

Individuals also employ GPS technology with a number of handheld and personal electronic devices that many of us interact with on a daily basis. Mobile phones, car navigation systems, PDAs, laptops, and watches are all being equipped with the satellite navigation system, which provides an unprecedented amount of personal access to a United States government funded, internationally employed service.

GPS, along with similar projects, makes up a new body of technology that is based in location- and context-awareness, collectively known as locative media. The ubiquity and increasing reliance on these types of communications systems have been of interest to artists working with computing technology and digital media in recent years. Groups such as the artist-led, inter-disciplinary European collective known as Loca (an acronym for Location Oriented Critical Arts) have explored the ways in which we use locative media in our daily lives, and how our activities are increasingly closely monitored as a result of the wide availability of such technologies.

Loca is a member of burgeoning but highly inter-connected groups of artists who employ locative media in their work and are associated with an artistic practice known as locative arts. Described by artists and critics such as Michael Gibbs as the most recent form of “artistic intervention in public space,” locative media artists work with devices and technologies that allow the “overlay[ing of] digital information onto real space.” The result is “cellspace,” an unseen but permeable layer of information that is transmitted through the air around us, which, with the proper tools and knowledge, can be manipulated and monitored. ³

Although they work with new media, Loca can be situated within the context of earlier avant-garde practice, such as conceptual and site-specific art. Using the familiar strategies of institutional critique, Loca intervenes in this cellspace in an attempt to reveal the structure of digital networks and their effect on those who occupy them.

Loca specifically targets wireless networks, or WiFi, which are increasingly common in most urban and densely populated suburban environments. These networks, when left unencrypted, can easily be “hopped onto” by unauthorized users. WiFi networks create “pervasive” or “ubiquitous” computing environments known as “ubicomps,” in which users’ needs are addressed proactively through integrated and therefore largely invisible networks. ⁴ Integrated technologies, according to ubicomp pioneer Mark Weiser, are “[woven] …into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” ⁵ These networks, working in concert with satellite and computing technologies such as GPS and mobile phones, have created a new kind of terrain in which artists and groups like Loca can explore issues of spatiality, place, and surveillance, often in subversive ways. ⁶

As a collective, Loca are particularly interested in exploring the ways in which mobile phones have pervasively entered our everyday space in capacities of which we are not always fully aware. Made up of two interaction designers, a creative technology researcher, and a computer scientist, Loca is devoted to examining mobile phones and their users’ vulnerability to being monitored publicly via Bluetooth technology, a locative media commonly used in mobile phones and other devices to receive text messages and additional signals from other users and fixed locations.

Loca’s “grass-roots pervasive surveillance” project involves setting up basic, homemade Bluetooth nodes encased in concrete at various sites in city environments. These nodes track the Bluetooth enabled devices such as mobile phones, Blackberries, and Sidekicks that people are carrying nearby. When a person carrying one of these devices enters Loca’s homemade wireless network, Loca sends unsolicited text messages to the user, an action known as “Bluejacking.” The user may check their device and discover a message that reads, “We are currently experiencing difficulties monitoring your position: please wave your network device in the air,”⁷ or, “Our server suggests that you may be late. You haven't been charged for this advice.”⁸

At a test run during a 2005 Royal College of Art exhibition in London, Loca monitored an estimated 10,000 visitors’ mobile phones and sent messages indicating that the user’s phone was being tracked, for example, “You have been here for an hour.” As a part of the exhibition, Loca displayed maps of the space they were monitoring, which contained representations of the wireless nodes in the space and the movements and flow of the mobile phone users they were tracking. By sending these unsolicited messages and showing representations of individuals’ movements, Loca intends to make the user more aware of the increasing amount of privacy they are giving up in order to access such services. The messages and maps are intended to emphasize that the user’s device, and by extension the user him or herself, is vulnerable to being tracked and monitored both by the large corporations who provide the services they use and by other individuals.⁹

In addition to the messages and maps, Loca also provides “strap-ons” for mobile phone users that help them to identify when they are being monitored by anonymous Bluetooth scanners. The device, which features an LED light, attaches to the user’s mobile phone and blinks when it detects that the phone is being scanned. By providing this simple device, Loca intends to remind the user that they do in fact have agency and are able to avoid being monitored by their mobile phones. Loca instructs and encourages users to switch on the “invisible” setting on their Bluetooth device.¹⁰

Making invisible wireless networks discernible is one of Loca’s primary concerns. By providing users with stickers on which they can record the physical locations of “digital identities” they discover in public spaces, they hope to make others outside the project aware of largely invisible wireless structures and those individuals who occupy them. Loca also sponsors a series of workshops in locations around Europe, attempting to bring together people from a variety of disciplines to develop alternative, de-centralized networks that resist pervasive surveillance.¹¹

As Loca’s project demonstrates, locative media technology allows this pervasive surveillance of people who carry these devices anywhere, anytime. Anyone who has the knowledge and skills to develop their own monitoring network can track users’ bodies within proximity. As more location-based information services are offered to wireless consumers, more users than ever will be employing locative technology. Few of these users have a clear understanding of how this technology functions, or an understanding of its implications. One of the most significant of these implications is that the users’ technologically augmented bodies become located sites of surveillance.

Artists have long explored the issue of surveillance and the body’s position within surveyed space. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Bruce Nauman developed closed-circuit installations such as Live/Taped Video Corridor (1969-70), in which the viewer can see themselves, but only from behind, moving in and out of a narrow space on a monitor. The viewer experiences themselves in real space through their physical presence, but also through a manipulated image of real space on the monitor.¹² Similarly, in Dan Graham’s Time Delay Room I (1974), the viewer can monitor themselves and other viewers in an adjoining room by closed-circuit television either physically or through a confusing combination of live and delayed feed.¹³ The blurring of bodies in real space and in manipulated representations of space in these installations is comparable to Loca’s use of locative media to alert the mobile phone user of their body’s presence in monitored digital space.

Surveillance is closely connected to locative media. As previously noted, the initial development of GPS technology for use by the military was intended to survey land and seascapes in order to monitor missiles and other kinds of military equipment. GPS’s original purpose has implications for the ways in which it is currently employed in civilian life and for the way the technology constructs our sense of place and self.

Today, wireless and communication technologies are still chiefly concerned with determining the location of objects, now typically wired devices, in order to deliver contextual information. ¹⁴ Jordan Crandall, an artist whose work deals with surveillance, militarization and security culture, has suggested that technologies of surveillance developed by the military and used on the home front objectify individuals, creating bodies as sites to be monitored in a terrain. Crandall argues that locative technology is a kind of “strategic seeing” and that “all forms of technically augmented vision are gradually incorporated by the body.”¹⁵

Unlike Loca, Crandall points out that this tracking ability is not entirely negative and argues that in fact we seek out strategies that will allow us to be monitored in order to construct our sense of self. He emphasizes that these methods of surveillance, while originally employed by the state as a form of control, also give us the ability to become more self-aware and to be accounted for.¹⁶ This assertion is echoed by Vicente L. Rafael, who writes about the use of mobile phones in the construction of the self, and the sense of “being someone” who can reach and be reached by others. The closeness of the user to such technology, he argues, causes the user to become like it, allowing the body to become a device that can send and receive messages.¹⁷

However, Crandall points out that the same technologies that can help construct our sense of self-awareness can also be used track our location, activities, and even our purchases in ways that “[know] us first and faster.”¹⁸ The bodies of individual users, situated within wireless networks of surveillance, are reduced to abstract ideas and data sets such as geographic coordinates and consumers of certain products. Simson Garfinkel, writing about identification techniques, has emphasized this duality of bodies that constitute our existence in both the physical and the digital realm.¹⁹ The bodies that we inhabit intersect directly with data when retrieved through locative media devices we use and carry.

The situated body, in both a physical and digital location, is caught between the layers of this physical and digital space, made “mappable” by the information they often unwittingly provide. As sites in the terrain of wireless networks, we are traceable and identifiable to organizations and institutions larger than ourselves. Often these companies know more about their wireless customers than the customers themselves may be aware of.

The utilization of records and activities of individual users of locative media is rarely acknowledged and primarily used without those individuals’ express permission. Virgin Mobile, for example, admitted in 2001 that they had maintained and archived records of each individual phone call made by all of its one million subscribers since the service was first offered in 1999.²⁰ Earlier this year, it was reported that the United States’ National Security Agency had been collecting records of millions of domestic phone calls without warrants, and that many telecommunication companies had provided access to the email messages and phone calls of their customers.²¹ Loca is critical of this lack of privacy and also of the ways in which wireless corporations control the production and distribution of locative technology, making it difficult for others to develop new uses and content.²²

Loca’s project, because it addresses concerns about the domination of wireless networks by corporations and other institutions, can be aligned with certain conceptual art practices of the mid to late 1960s. Mel Bochner is an example of an artist who has engaged in an institutional critique of the art establishment by exploring ideas related to location, space, and place. His 1969 series Measurement involved recording the specific dimensions of galleries onto the walls themselves in order to highlight the controlled physical context in which art is displayed. Bochner’s efforts to “decode and/or recode the institutional conventions so as to expose their hidden operations” can be compared with Loca’s efforts to make visible the structures and uses of wireless networks.²³ Rather than the physical space of the gallery, Loca is exploring the overlayed digital space in which users interact with one another, and, less consciously, interact with those who control and construct digital space.

But Loca also points out that digital content remains in some ways tied to physical space. This contrasts with the general tendency to think of digital content as “placeless, only encountered in the amorphous and other space of the Internet.” As previously noted, digital content is often in fact part of a limited, geographically situated wireless network, but importantly, it is also linked to place in the sense that people who receive the content function as sites within that network themselves.²⁴

Loca’s connections to conceptual and site-specific work indicate a return to avant-garde practices of revealing the hidden structures of institutions and ideologies. Their use of new technologies with this practice, however, also allows us to view Loca and its mobile phone project as part of the developing movement of locative arts. Concerned with the implications of emerging location- and context- based technologies which situate the body in both physical and digital networked space, locative artists and collectives are emphasizing in their work the overlapping of these two spaces in the lives of wired individuals. Artists like Loca are pointing out that the result of this overlapping is an increasingly complex and often compromising system of information generation and retrieval, reliant upon the physical location and context of bodies in space.

Making visible the typically veiled manner in which information is gathered and used is an important element of locative artists’ intent to “place” digital content. Loca makes clear that when augmented with locative media devices, bodies themselves are in fact the grounded locations of such data. As sites that are monitored within a wireless, networked terrain that is increasingly vast, our bodies have been caught between the layers of the physical and digital divide.

Notes

1. Spencer, J., Frizelle, B.G., Page, P.H. and Vogler, J.B. (eds.) (2003), Global Positioning System: A Field Guide for the Social Sciences, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., p. 26.

2. Spencer, J. et al, p. 29.

3. Gibbs, M. (2004), ‘Locative Media’, Art Monthly, 28 (October), p. 40.

4. Loca (2005), Location- and Context-Awareness: First International Workshop, Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany, 12-13 May 2005, Germany: LoCA.

5. Quoted by Rheingold, H. (2002), Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, p. 88.

6. Gibbs, M. (2004), p. 40.

7. Loca, About Loca, http://www.loca-lab.org/ (March 23, 2006).

8. We Make Money Not Art, Loca: Location Oriented Critical Arts, Telephony Archives, http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/cat_telephony.php?page=16 (April 24, 2006).

9. Loca, About Loca, http://www.loca-lab.org/ (March 23, 2006).

10. Loca, Artifacts – Strap-On, http://www.loca-lab.org/documents/Artifacts/Strap-on (April 23, 2006).

11. Loca, Artifacts – Stickers, http://www.loca-lab.org/documents/Artifacts/Stickers (April 23, 2006).

12. Zbikowski, D. (2002), ‘Bruce Nauman’, CTRL Space: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, Levin, T., Frohne, U., and Weibel, P. (eds.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 64-67.

13. Stemmrich, G. (2002), ‘Dan Graham’, CTRL Space: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, Levin, T., Frohne, U., and Weibel, P. (eds.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 68-71.

14. Hemment, D. (2004) Mobile Connections, http://www.futuresonic.com/futuresonic/pdf/Mobile_Connections.pdf (April 26, 2006).

15. Crandall, J. (2005), ‘Envisioning the Homefront: Militarization, Tracking and Security Culture’, Journal of Visual Culture, 4:1, pp. 18-21.

16. Crandall, J. (2005), pp. 18-21.

17. Rafael, V.L. (2006), ‘The Cell Phone and the Crowd’, New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, Hui Kyong Chun, W. and Keenan, T. (eds.), New York: Routledge, p. 300.

18. Crandall, J. (2005), p. 20.

19. Garfinkel, S. (2000), Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century, Beijing; Cambridge: O’Reilly, p. 65.

20.Rheingold, H. (2002), p. 185.

21. Lichtblau, E. and Shane, S. (2006) ‘Bush is Pressed Over New Report on Surveillance’, New York Times, 12 May.

22. Marc Tuters, M. (2004) ‘The Locative Commons: Situating Location-Based Media in Urban Public Space’, http://www.futuresonic.com/futuresonic/pdf/Locative_Commons.pdf , (April 26, 2006).

23. Kwon, M. (2002), One Place After Another, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 14.

24. Hemment, D. (2004), ‘Locative Arts’, http://www.drewhemment.com/2004/locative_arts.html, (April 13, 2006).

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