The Challenge of Ubiquity in Digital Culture
CHArt 27th ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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The Challenge of Ubiquity in Digital Culture
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Gavin MacDonald
Moving bodies in ‘the inhabitable map’: the GPS trace and its referent in new media art.
The development of ubiquitous/pervasive digital technologies has, according to the geographer Nigel Thrift, been one aspect of a fundamental cultural shift. We now live, Thrift argues, in a fully gridded world populated by trackable objects, and as our surroundings have become imbued with data and calculation, the world has become a fabric that is constantly being respun: ‘the inhabitable map.’ Thrift’s argument is that life in the inhabitable map is experienced as continuous, flowing and mobile, and to illustrate this he draws on the anthropologist Tim Ingold’s use of a wandering, gestural line as a motif for an authentic life lost – fragmented – in the transformations of modernity. However, this is not a return, rather Thrift argues that the inhabitable map is a world in which phenomenological encounter is now mass produced, with this mass production dependent on the very gridding of the world that for Ingold, is bound up with the fragmentation of both lines and lives.
The GPS trace has been employed in new media art practices since the 1990s, and is particularly evident in the locative media genre that emerged in the early 2000s. In works where maps are overlaid or even produced by aggregations of mobilities, there is often an apparent commitment to understanding the GPS trace as continuous with that which it refers to, as an indexical sign of a life, of a movement in the world. Other works problematise such understandings, emphasizing the mediation of these lines.
In this paper Ingold’s and Thrift’s different takes on lines and lives, mapping and mobility, are used as the starting point for a discussion of the GPS trace in new media art. This paper will draw on recent interviews, conducted during doctoral research, with artists who have made a significant engagement with GPS, mapping and mobility over the past decade: Daniel Belasco Rogers, Christian Nold, Esther Polak and Jen Southern. With reference to particular works, it will consider the way the GPS trace and its relationship with its referent has been understood and imagined.