mobility

The contemporary world, Doreen Massey notes in “A Global Sense of Place,” is composed of connections and flows that have compelled a fundamental reconceptualization of the local and the global. In such a world, mobility is linked to power, which is achieved through access to economic and cultural capital and freedom to travel. Massey writes, “It is not simply a question of unequal distribution, that some people move more than others, and some have more control than others. It is that the mobility and control of some groups can actively weaken other people.” Speaking also of connections, flows, and control in The Exploit, Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker emphasize the need for a critique of networks, the primary modern structures that modulate the movement of people and goods; they wonder if, “as networks continue to propagate, there will remain any sense of an ‘outside,’ a non-connected locale from which we may view this phenomenon and ponder it critically.” Such apprehensions about the potential for individual autonomy and critical distance in our networked societies suggest that discussions of planetary consciousness, multi-cultural contact, or social justice need to consider the routes and paths by which people and goods travel. Focusing on such flows of people and goods, Esther Polak’s project, “Nomadic Milk,” uses GPS technologies to trace the path of milk production and sale in Nigeria. Her project followed the different routes of nomadic herdsmen and PEAK milk (a major dairy brand in Nigeria) transporters as they delivered dairy to points of sale. This tracing of routes was supplemented by records of the walkers’ and the drivers’ narratives and accounts of their routes, as well as by Polak’s blog recording her own paths as artist. Polak’s project exemplifies how people and goods are subject to both the constraints and the opportunities of a network system. My paper considers how “Nomadic Milk” reveals mobility along established networks and attempts to make invisible routes visible. I argue that “Nomadic Milk” presents travel as a primary mechanism of planetary and local consciousness, and it provokes deliberation of the often consuming power of networks, as well as potential for intervening on their anonymizing, modulating authority. In looking closely at how Polak’s work traces paths and spaces of going, I am interested in exploring a poetics of mobility and the ways in which a reconsideration of ideas of place and path is fundamental to considering the potential for agency in global networks

Source:https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/nt2/en/elo2018/schedule/1104/Trac…

From Guy Debord in the early 1950s, to Richard Long, Janet Cardiff and Esther Polak more recently, contemporary artists have returned again and again to the walking motif. Debord and his friends tracked the urban ambiences of Paris to map the experience of walking at street level. Long trampled a path in the grass and snapped a picture of the result (A Line Made by Walking). Cardiff created sound walks in London, New York and San Francisco that sent the audience out walking. Mapping is a way for us to locate ourselves in the world, physically, culturally, or psychologically. Debord produced maps like collages that traced the “psychogeography” of Paris, while Polak and her team equipped nomadic Fulani herders in Nigeria and Cameroun (West Africa) with GPS devices and developed a robot to map their itineraries in the sand. Today, the convergence of global networks, online databases, and new tools for mobile mapping coincides with a resurgence of interest in walking as an art form. In Walking and Mapping, Karen O’Rourke explores a series of walking/mapping projects by contemporary artists. Some chart “emotional GPS”; some use GPS for creating landscapes made of data --“datascapes”-- while others use their legs to do “speculative mapping.” Many work with scientists, designers, and engineers. O’Rourke offers close readings of these projects--many of which she was able to experience firsthand--and situates them in relation to landmark works from the past half-century. She shows that the infinitesimal details of each work she considers take on more significance in conjunction with others. Together, they form a new entity, a dynamic whole greater than the sum of its parts. By alternating close study of selected projects with a broader view of their place in a bigger picture, Walking and Mapping itself maps a complex phenomenon.

This essay discusses the emergence of lifestyles under the paradigm of urban life, based on the results of research on interface design for mobile connections in ubiquitous computing with pervasive and sentient interfaces, which generate cybrid (cyber+hybrid) scenarios for co-located beings that act in physical and digital space. Artistic creation using software art writes programs and uses hardware that convey a sense of presence and action, with digital collage adding information about the physical scene. The digital material is pasted in layers onto the physical space, redesigning places, reconfiguring actions, and mixing realities in a cybrid manner. In other words, locative and mobile interfaces reconfigure the sense of presence by blending in the digital material that adds information to locations. Computers mix into the periphery through transparent interfaces, enabling enactions and affordances in quotidian actions in calm connections with transparent interfaces. Instants are experienced through computers, which become invisible in portable and mobile technologies: cell phones, PADs, displays, computational vision, tags, RFID, Bluetooth, wearable computers, geolocators, trackers, GPS, SMS, MMS, make us co-exist here and there. Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR), social platforms, perceptual and affective computing, wearable computing, among other examples from various artists and scientists, are discussed here.

The underlying idea of this paper can be expressed as follows: mobile information technologies have enabled new means of communication and sociability based on what I call “information territories.” What is questioned here is a new relationship between information technologies and the dimensions of place, territory, community and mobility. I will argue that, under the label of “locative media,” the new mobile technologies are creating new forms of territorialization (control, surveillance, and tracking) and new meanings of space, place, and territory, contradicting the theory of “non-place” or “no sense of place.” Moreover, this impels us to discuss the ideas of anomie and isolation with the emergence of new forms of sociability and community bonds created by location-based services.