Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 15:56:18 -0800 (PST) From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com> Subject: [postanarchism] Tuters: "Theorizing the Radical Potential of Location-Aware Mobiles" Theorizing the Radical Potential of Location-Aware Mobiles http://www.gpster.net/potentialmobiles.html Marc Tuters The Geographiti Project mtuters-AT-gpster.net September 2002 Utopia is the frameless film, the wall-less architecture. Mikhail Iampolski [10] While the WTO protests in Seattle are now commonly sited as having marked the symbolic beginning of a new radicalism, they also signified the emergence a neo-tribal collectivism brought about by mobile connectivity. At the protests, the police moved on the demonstrators as a phalanx, their strategy synchronized through a central dispatcher. The protesters, however were able to scatter at one moment, and come together the next, by using their cell phones to communicate their movements to one another, demonstrating a collective behaviour that has been compared to that of birds flocking [17]. With mobile telephony having been adopted at an unprecedented rate, we are only just beginning to consider its potential impacts on patterns of social space. In what follows I considers some of the potential promises and implicit dangers of networked mobility by focussing on what has been hyped as the technology"s killer app.: location-awareness. This article attempts to turn theory into practice, by discussing the design of a potential forum for this "tech-nomadic" collectivism modeled on graffiti and based on the creative use of positioning information in the context of public Wi-Fi networks. The Geographiti project discussed below, is an open-access system for location-aware mobile networking that allows its users to post and receive geo-coded "virtual graffiti" to architectonic space. With the development of communications technologies we have witnessed the progressive de-localization of information.- Where people once required a definitive "here" to receive information, communication advances have allowed for greater amounts of distance between the sender and the receiver, to the point where, with the Internet for example, information, in terms of access, has no real location at all (or, all locations at once). In location-aware computing however, data is associated with distinct physical locations on the geo-sphere, and accessed by mobile users based on their relative position in relation to that information. With accurate methods for positioning of a wireless device, new mobile interfaces can effectively "co-register" spatial data with real space, thereby creating what Virilio refers to as "stereo-reality" [22]. A particularly resonant example of this can be found in the "pervasive gaming" phenomenon. With AR Quake, for example, a level of the popular online video game has been scaled, aligned and co-registered with GPS (the Global Positioning System) so as to be, navigable in geographic space with a translucent head-mounted display[1] [15]. In order to determine a user"s position technologies of surveillance are central to this form of information visualization, I therefore propose grounding my theoretical analysis of location-based technology in Paul Virilio"s radical critique of "hypermodernism" and subsequently focussing on the potential for the technology as a tool for individual creative expression and community building with reference to social constructivist theories of urban space. One cannot understand the development of information tech, without understanding the evolution of military strategy. Paul Virilio [23] Though lauded as a post-modern philosopher of science and technology, at his core, Paul Virilio is a peculiar sort of military historian whose theories paradoxically hinge on the city as the site of struggle between military control and anarchic liberation. In Virilio"s military origins of the city, urban space is controlled by military cartographers, whose lines of sight have determined the extent of mapable, and thus, controllable territory. The further the cartographer"s view of the territory/city extended, the more time it allowed to defend the city, and the further in turn the city grew outwards; making the city a temporal event related to control of the territory. Thus the Atlantic Wall of bunkers that the Germans built to defend fortress Europe in World War II, in Virilio"s theory, transformed Europe into a continent wide city [16]. Following this line, the entire planet has become a generalized urban security zone, surveillanced by military satellites such as GPS, with which one"s exact location can be determined from anywhere on the planet by triangulating the time of arrival of satellite transmissions.[2] "Sovereignty no longer resides in the territory, but in the control of the territory" [21], and, as William Bogard notes, in the generation of its simulation which distracts attention from the underlying disciplinary regimes of power in space [4].[3] "there is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons. -Giles Deleuze [7] While, in an increasingly mediated society, military derived technologies of surveillance and simulation attempt to control people, there remains a destabilizing force at the heart of Virilio"s city. While cartographers organize space by attempting to control its flows, the city essentially emerged at the intersection of the flows when nomads settled down in walled cities giving-up some of their freedom in exchange for protection (thus urban space is a defensible space of "habitable stasis" [18]). The anarchic Virilio believes that the city"s streets retain a connection to the nomadic territorial order and continue to introduce nomadic vectors which cannot be controlled and out of which all the meaningful movements in history have emerged. Inspired by Virilio"s early work [7] Deleuze and Guattari developed the concept of nomadology as a way of constructing space that grows out of a territorial connection with place [6]. As an example, they present the itinerant labourers who built the great cathedrals of Medieval Europe. These "freemasons", whose guilds have always remained outside of "the State", constructed space from the rock itself, in contrast to the conceptual space of the architects according to whose plans the monuments were built. Similarly, for Henri Lefebvre, all social movements produce their own integral fluid spaces, while architects and urban planners, as handmaids of "the State", produce "representations of space" that encode hierarchical power dynamics into the built environment, where they become naturalized and erased from view [11]. These "representations of space" marginalize and fracture the social body so that the head can no longer see the feet (Lefebvre), severing meaningful connections with place (Deleuze and Guattarri), and ultimately, through an abstract spectacle of circulation, they exert perceptual control on the atomized individual generating a cultural nihilism which manifests itself as a will to speed (Virilio). Yet, while the State"s dominator culture attempts to channel the flows of the nomad, it tends to be sedentary and static while nomads are mobile and emergent (for which Deleuze and Guattarri use the metonym of the rhizome; a decentred, heterogeneous collective assemblage [6]). Exemplified in the aforementioned case of the Seattle protesters, we can thus conceive of a contemporary nomadic space extending from the space of the body through to a free society in which people become architects of their own space, time and being.[4] "The graffitists themselves come from the territorial order. They territotialize decoded urban spaces – a particular street, wall or district comes to life through them, becoming a collective territory again. Baudrillard [2] As a tool to facilitate the emergence of nomadic social spaces the Geographiti project has created an open access location-aware communications system based on the metaphor of graffiti. Etymologically derived from the Roman practice of scratching political messages onto public walls (graffito), graffiti has a long political history, though out many cultures, as a radical tactic for free expression. Yet, despite graffiti having flourished globally into arguably the art of "the streets" over the past 30 years, it invariably remains perceived by as an invasion of public space. From the Baudrillard quote above, graffiti is clearly a manifestation of the nomadic territorial order in contemporary urban society, however as a violation of the most basic principles of social order, an academic defence of a "graffitists" right to tag on these abstract grounds is a difficult argument to make. The Geographiti project emerged as an attempt to resolve this dilemma. Geographiti, can be conceived of as a kind of "virtual graffiti" that is accessible through special digital mobile devices only, allowing users to invest space with a symbolic component without visibly altering the landscape. With Geographiti, a user creates a waypoint[5] on a location-aware mobile device and uploads it, via a network link, to the GPSter database. As one fan explained Geographiti "it is based on a simple idea: every person has some favourite spots on this planet, so why not share those with others?"[2] Any subsequent, similarly equipped mobile user can then also request waypoints from the database and, via the network link, receive messages particular to that point in space as well. An important aspect of the graffiti metaphor for the sake of the Geographiti project has been the notion that the messages in this virtual space should be accessible by everyone on the system.- As opposed to other experiments in location-based services that have conceived of the technology as a marketing tool for broadcasting advertisements to consumers, the concept of Geographiti, like that of the original Internet, was therefore specifically designed as a distributed, non-hierarchical tool for communications.[6] Fig. 1 Fig 1: The GPSter search interface (www.GPSter.net/search.html). Fig. 2 Fig 2: The Geographiti client searching by location and keyword. - The Geographiti project consists of a universal open-access waypoint-sharing database (Figure 1.) and a mobile client application to send and receive waypoint data from the field (Figure 2.). Geographiti users search the database by range, keyword and coordinate with results displayed automatically upon entering a respective location. The Alpha prototype ran on a wireless local area network over the 802.11 (or Wi-Fi) standard, and used a GPS device for positioning. Open-access public Wi-Fi networks are being set-up for seamless wireless roaming in large cities; the idea being to share bandwidth (each operator offers their access point for public usage in exchange for access to other access points). The relatively local nature of public Wi-Fi networks as well as the communitarian spirit from which they are growing fits perfectly with the philosophy of the Geographiti project, making them ideal environments for deploying this type of system.[7] Geographiti on a public Wi-Fi network would create a kind of 3-D "virtual graffiti wall" only visible to those looking for it, however, unlike "tagging" this graffiti would not be invasive. Following socio-constructivist thought one could argue that graffiti is a manifestation of the nomadic territorial order positioned in opposition to the despotic State, which destroys graffiti in order to reinforce its own dominant representation of space. But, while the streets, as Virilio contends, may be the forum from which all the meaningful movements in history have emerged, a universal defence of graffiti on these grounds is surely an unenviable task. With the Geographiti system of virtual graffiti however, censorship would be replaced with intelligent social filtering on the level of individual. Invisible to those who do not wish to see, this digitally geo-coded realm would free both nomadic territoriality and the architect"s spatial imagination from the tyranny of consensual reality empowering us to create and inhabit the ultimate utopian dream of the wall-less architecture or the frameless film.- "Step through it! Roni Size [13] References Anonymous, Cooltown propotional videos; www.cooltown.com/cooltownhome/cooltown-video.asp [1] Anonymous, Roberts Klotins trans. "Planetary Games" in Komputerra; http://www.computerra.ru/offline/2001/423/14420/page2.html [2] Baudrillard, J. M. (1993 [1975]) Symbolic exchange and Death, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol 26, Sage Pub. [3] Bogard, William. (1996) The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies Cambridge University Press, Cambridge [4] Deleuze, Gilles. (1997) "Postscript on the Society of Control" in Neal Leach Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, Routledge, pp. 309-311 (originally published Deleuze, Gilles. "Postscript on the Society of Control", October, 59, 1992, pp. 3-8: p3) [5] Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. (1987) "A Treatise on Nomadology" A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Univ. of Minnesota Pr, Minneapolis, [6] Der Derian, James (1999)) "The Conceptual Cosmology of Paul Virilio" in Theory Culture and Society, Volume 16, Number 5 [7] Dimendberg, Edward. (1997) "Henri Lefebvre on Abstract Space" in Andrew Light, and Jonathan M. Smith (eds.) The Production of Public Space (Philosophy and Geography), Rowman & Littlefield, p 17-45 [8] Douglas, Ian R. "The Calm Before the Storm: Virilio"s Debt to Foucault, and Some Notes on Contemporary Global Capitalism"; http://proxy.arts.uci.edu/~nideffer/_SPEED_/1.4/articles/douglas.html [9] Iampolski, Mikhail. "Le cinema de l"architecture utopique" Cinema and Architecture, Isis, Paris [10] Lefebvre, Henri, (1991) Production of Space, Donald Nicholson-Smith, (trans.), Blackwell Pub., [11] Persons, Per, et Al. (2000) GeoNotes: Social and Navigational Aspects of Location-Based Information Systems, HULME lab, Swedish Institute of Computer Science; http://www.sics.se/~espinoza/GeoNotes_ubicomp_final.htm [12] Roni Size and Reprazent, (1998) New Forms, Mercury/Talkin' Loud [13] Spohrer, J.C. (1998) "Information in Places" IBM Systems Journal Vol 38, No. 4 online at http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/384/spohrer.html p1 [14] Thomas, Bruce, et Al. (2000) ARQuake: An Outdoor/Indoor Augmented Reality First Person Application, ISWC 00 available online at http://www.computer.org/proceedings/iswc/0795/07950139abs.htm [15] Townsend, Anthony M. (2000) "Life in the real-time city: mobile telephones and urban metabolism", Taub Urban Research Center New York University, August 30th 2000, online at http://www.informationcity.org/research/real-time-city/index.htm, [16] Virilio, Paul. (1994 [1975]) Bunker Archaeology, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, [17] Virilio, Paul, Mark Polizzotti (translator) (1986 [1977]) Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series; New York, [18] Virilio, Paul, and Sylvere Lotringer, (1983) Pure War, Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, New York,- [19] Virilio, Paul, Julie Rose trans. (1995) Art of the Motor Univ. of Minnesota Pr, excerpts online at http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Virilio/Virilio_ArtoftheMotor2.html [20] Virilio, Paul. Cyberwar, God and Television: Interview with Louise Wilson in CTHEORY online at http://www.ctheory.com/a-cyberwar_god.html [21] Virilio, Paul, "Global Algorithm 1.7: The Silence of the Lambs" interview with Carlos Oliveria, in CTHEORY online at http://www.ctheory.com/ga1.7-silence.html [22] Virilio, Paul, "Cyberresistance Fighter, interview with David Dufresne online at http://www.apres-coup.org/archives/articles/virilio.html [23] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [1] According to one noted expert: "soon a level of accuracy will be achieved for both indoor and outdoor locations that will allow the colour to be set for a cubic centimetre of space, forming volumetric pixels ([or] Voxels)" [14]. [2] In "95 Virilio claimed that the commercialization of GPS receivers, which have now become available for US$100 +/- , "constitutes the event of the decade as far as the globalization of location goes" [20] This radical claim was given substance when, in May of 2000, the military removed the error on civilian GPS increasing it accuracy tenfold. [3] According to Virilio the growth of the media industries in the post-war era can be considered together with the birth of the military industrial complex as constituting a general miltarization of society. "It is no longer exo-colonization (the age of extending world conquest) but the age of intensiveness and endo-colonization.- Now one colonizes ones own population" [19]. Virilio"s thesis is given credence by a 1997 the National Research Council white paper written for the US department of defence that outlines the mandate for the military to work together with game developers to share innovation and recruit gamers [8]. [4] Inspired by Deleuze and Guattarri as well as Michel DeCerteau"s "Practice of Everyday Life" the nomad has been a popular trope in contemporary post-structural theory. For Cultural Studies the nomad is both an object of study and a way of doing theory from the field as opposed to the omniscient sociological point of view of the Frankfurt-school tradition of Critical Theory (while both study contemporary culture, the former seek-out sites of strategic resistance --sometimes, for example, referred to as "queer spaces"). While cultural theorists have attempted to use the nomad to rescue a certain degree of agency from the cynical death-grip of Critical Theory by revealing a panopoly of alternative positions, Cultural Studies and Critical Theory should not, as is often the case, be set-up as opposites.- - While nomadism may prove to be an excellent model for theorizing emergent mobile technology paradigms we should also keep in mind Virilio"s dromology which analyses social control via the governance of "flows". In a consumerist dromocaracy, Virilio sees the centralized discipline of Foucault"s enclosures becomes superseded, by "ultra-rapid free-floating forms of control"[18].- Power itself becomes nomadic and is articulated through the control of "flows" and interruptions on the phenomenological level of perception. The radical quality of any critique based on the nomad thus seriously comes into question, especially when one considers that a consumers" patterns of movement (determined through cell-ID) are amongst the most valuable commodities to marketers. [5] A waypoint is a reference point to ones geographic location that normally has a few words attached to it (such as, for example, "John Coltrane"s Grave N 4045.0780 W 07324.1920"). Typically waypoints are created by mariners, geographers or outdoors enthusiasts to aid in mapping and plotting courses of navigation and are not generally shared, nor, before GPSter, had there been any system for sharing waypoints across large numbers of users. [6] Examples of the corporate, advertising driven future envisioned for location-based services include Starbucks experiments with pushing customers SMS messages to alert them to the presence of a branch outlet in the user's cell zone and Hewlett Packard"s Cooltown project (whose ridiculous corporate videos envision a global infrastructure for a proprietary HP location awareness whereby only HP licensed hardware will access HP licensed content [1]). In our opinion, these corporate visions of location-awareness are invasive, exclusive and depersonalizing. We have thus conceived the Geographiti project, in response, as a means for people to access the potential of location-based communications technologies as a tool for community building.- [7] While the addition of a GPS receiver gave the application a degree of positioning that allowed users to exchange messages every 10M+/- or so, we are currently working on a Wi-Fi-based system that would not require any special hardware. A Wi-Fi access point"s hardware address can be associated with a discrete geographical location to create publicly available positioning information accurate to 100M+/-. This coarse positioning can, in turn, be semantically divided into sub-zones to which users can leave messages (e.g., "by the soda machine"). A model for a location-based information system of this type has been developed at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science [12]. ===="Being at one is god-like and good, but human, too human, the mania Which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth and one way." - Friedrich Hölderlin, 1799 __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
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