Document Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
This contribution seeks to examine the centrality of location and the activity of walking as everyday practices essential to extractive digital capitalism. The argument is that location – physical presence - is the glue that binds together data into individualised profiles adding contextual value to the myriad data points captured in the accelerating data colonisation of everyday life. Location in this sense is an everyday attribute (or technology), the capture and datafication of which, has become a byproduct of basic participation in contemporary life. Location and urban movement are well theorised in urban and artistic practice, from Baudelaire's flaneur, the Situationist International, to urban geographers who saw urban movements such as walking as representative of processes of appropriation and resistance that characterised the city in modernity. However, the interconnections between pervasive location aware devices and the normalisation of industrial scale data-extractivism has yet to be fully understood. In this contribution I will examine how these processes of resistance became so thoroughly recuperated by digital capitalism and propose that the work of Locative Media artists was, without their consent or agreement, co-opted in the shift to location-first data extractivism, even as they critically engaged with emerging location-aware technologies in the early 2000s.Locative Media (LM) was a digital art movement that emerged just as locative aware technologies and devices were transitioning from military and specialist technology to consumer applications. In the aftermath of the first gulf war (1990) the US government's decision to hasten the end of selective availability – the intentional degrading of the GPS signal for non-military applications – opening a consumer GPS market. Artists saw this emerging locative awareness as an emancipatory tech that would allow individuals and communities to overlay real space with virtual annotations, revealing hidden histories to make all space relational and resistant to meta narratives of power. LM's relationship with the technological systems that underpinned it was tactical and circumventive. Lacking any substantive control, they operated parasitically within the confines of the military-industrial complex, with the understanding that they could be excluded at any moment. In many ways it could be argued that LM shaped the technology and its application, initially for the better. The cartesianism of GPS with its reading of location as coordinates on a grid gave way to location as fundamentally relational, privileging these relationships with place as the key processes that shape communities.Today understandings of location as relational, signifying complex relationships with places, making and remaking cities and their communities and individuals, are both widely accepted and thoroughly recuperated. Location is captured by digital devices in granular detail, it is used to contextualise other data, to build and detailed predictive portraits and train machine learning models. It is bought and sold as a commodity and used to track and target. This intervention examines the history of this process with a focus on how spatial ideas - on the emancipatory power of walking and being in space derived from artistic avantgardes, from the Situationists to Locative Media - were weaponised and turned into tools of surveillance and commodification of everyday life of unprecedented scale and breadth.This intervention seeks to understand how we got here, what lessons can be learned, and what is to be done.
Recommended Citation
McGarrigle, C. (2024). Where We Are: the datafication of location.
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