Art Research Communication

Mobile Realism? by Chris Byrne

January 12, 2005 at 12:09 pm in News, Views No Comments

This text outlines some thoughts on portable networked imaging and its antecedents. It is soon to be published in Reclaiming cultural territory in new media (Ed. Mare Tralla), a publication following from RAM 3, Tallinn, part of the workshop series RAM – Re-approaching New Media. www.ram-net.net

Mobile Realism?
Thoughts on portable networked imaging and its antecedents

“…Reality itself founders in hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably through another, reproductive medium, such as photography. From medium to medium, the real is volatilized, becoming an allegory of death. But it is also, in a sense, reinforced through its own destruction. It becomes reality for its own sake, the fetishism of the lost object: no longer the object of representation, but the ecstasy of denial and of its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal.” – Jean Baudrillard (1)

“I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it.” – Dziga Vertov (2)

In this text I want to explore the links between the ways in which locative media, particularly mobile camera phone technologies and GPS mapping, are used today, and some historical antecedents involving artists in the surveying, mapping and collecting of data from urban and social spaces.

Media artists spent much of the 1990s immersed in virtual space: whether through computer imaging simulations or electronic networks. Projects like the Well, the Digital City, The Thing, Nettime, and a multiplicity of net and web art strategies, were concerned with the rapidly proliferating network of computer systems and the possibilities for creating new global social spaces somehow ’separate’ from localised, real-world networks. Whilst artists’ involvement in digital networks took many forms, in the late 1990s and early 2000s web sites have increasingly begun to crystallise around the technology of the weblog, an essentially diaristic and journalistic form, whilst visual experimentation has in many cases migrated to different outlets including software art and robotic art.

What I find interesting now is that networked media are more and more looking at the outside world. This striving for reality or realism is in contrast to the separate networked space, the Gibsonian ‘cyberspace’ of the 1990s. Camera phones are taking networked imaging out into public and private space in new ways. Web cams, the dominant paradigm of the previous decade, require a fixed, wired location in the main: though this may change as wi-fi cams become more commonplace.

Firstly, let’s examine some contemporary uses of camera phones. For example, moblogs. Moblogs are weblogs created by users of camera phones, the pictures uploaded to a web site from the phone itself or other Internet connected device. Moblog communities have started to appear, where users post their images. Textamerica and Flickr are amongst the better known of these community sites. (3) The predominant genres of photography on these sites are ‘home snaps’ or a form of diaristic photojournalism: essentially documenting everyday life, all the uses which amateur photography is put to. Also emerging on the sites are ‘collections’ of thematically related material, where enthusiasts participate in sharing pictures with their peers towards a common interest.

The phenomenon of moblogs helps to transform the mobile phone from a predominantly one-to-one communication tool to a one-to-many. This is one early example of what we might expect mobile phones to be used for in future. Video phones and 3G services will make the moblog and similar modes of expression more widespread. Current popular manifestations of camera phone usage reveal a rather self-referential pursuit, simply an extension of the contemporary mediatised lifestyle, where nothing is real unless it has been photographed.

This ability to instantly document and transmit images of your location has led to mobile phone images being used as a way of verifying where you are. Douglas Rushkoff wrote about this phenomenon recently. (4) ‘Salarymen’ in Japan can now avail themselves of a new service, which allows them to superimpose fake backgrounds on their cameraphone image to placate suspicious spouses or bosses. A variety of generic backgrounds are supplied by the service, your snap can be digitally matted onto these. Hence you can, for example, appear to be working late whilst in fact drinking in a bar.

A variation on this theme was explored by Finnish artist Heidi Tikka, who created ‘Imaginary Journey’. (5) Tikka took the framework of a moblog, and constructed a pictorial travelogue, mixing touristic, everyday ’snaps’ with snippets of text in an autobiographical or philosophical vein. It tells the story of the artist and her 4 year old son as they travel around Europe. The overall effect is of the classic weblog journal, in itself unexceptional, except for the fact that the travellers never left home. Instead the artist fabricated the trip, combining experiences at home with information from other sources: train timetables, advertising, tourist guides, web cams. She also invited people resident in the travel ‘destinations’ to send images and impressions of the places where they lived.

The resulting story is remarkably convincing, the artist skilfully matching lighting conditions and grading images to create a seamless experience. All the tricks of digital image montage are employed to help the illusion. However Tikka cannot resist placing occasional textual clues as to the inauthentic nature of the journey, self-consciously signifying the home-spun origins of certain shots.

UK based artist Simon Faithfull’s current project ‘Antarctica Dispatches’ (6) utilises GPS information as a means of annotating journal entries, similar to the way in which contemporary weblog software allows geographic tracking features for blog entries to show the blogger’s whereabouts at the time of posting. The artist’s objective is to convey to the viewer his exact position on each day of his journey with the British Antarctic Survey. It differs slightly from other journey-mapping projects in that Faithfull’s journal entries are updated daily in blog style, and also distributed to the audience via e-mail.

Rather than photographs, the artist produces black and white drawings and simple animations using a Palm PDA and stylus. This graphic style gives the project a nostalgic feel, the simplicity of the pixel drawings echoing the images of early 20th century expeditions. The tendency towards invention and reduction inherent in the creation of hand drawn images is counter balanced by the GPS data associated with each image, rather like a signature, as though the artist is attempting to guarantee the authenticity of the scene depicted. The contrast with the approach taken by Heidi Tikka’s work could not be more stark, despite both artists using a similar genre of storytelling.

Artist and film-maker Pete Gomes goes one step further in the quest to verify the place and position where an image has been made. With collaborators Pall Thayer, Sara Kolster and Andrew Paterson, London based Gomes has been developing the concept of ‘Geo-Cinema’. (7) Fusing a GPS system with a moving video camera, the technique overlays location-specific positioning data onto the moving image in real time, as it is recorded. This literally inscribes information about the real location for a video shoot, what Gomes dubs ‘place-code’.

Geo-cinema not only gives a new meaning to the phrase “on location”, it also points at possibilities for documentary film-making and news gathering, allowing verification of the geographical ‘truth’ of a given view of reality. The technologies point towards a potential use of such data as a tool for creative expression, as an alternative to GPS’s development history as a system for military and commercial control and navigation systems. Formally, the combination of GPS co-ordinates with video imagery is reminiscent of camera images from remote weapons guidance systems.

“Consider a recent news broadcast. A pilot is flying an aircraft during a combat situation in Iraq. It is flown jointly, by an operator in the cockpit as well as by operators on the ground. We are watching the scene as if through the cockpit window. Computer calculations are arrayed on the image-field. We see through the pilot’s eye, but we also see through the viewpoint of the larger command network in which the pilot is embedded. The pilot is one actor within a distributed agency that combines humans and machines. Our viewpoint is momentarily converged with that of the piloting agency. The clip ends, and a zoom out frames the image within a newsroom stage. A news anchor appears. She meets our gaze and addresses us in terms of a collective “we.” We are placed in position, momentarily aligned with this combinatory operator, sharing its perspective, hailed as subjects within its operational world.” – Jordan Crandall (8)

Following the initial Geo-cinema experiment in Helsinki, Gomes completed filming of a collaborative work of geo-cinema in Karosta, Latvia, in 2003. The film narrative was based on a fusion of real locations and real coordinates with a fictional scenario around navigation, memory, the unconscious and dreaming. Prior to making the film, Gomes and Paterson made a series of experiments in and around Karosta, playing short range picture messaging games using the principles of haiku poetry rule sets. The methodologies formed the basis for the latest manifestation the ‘Aware’ project, the ‘Rengo’ workshop, presented at ISEA 2004, in Helsinki. (9)

In 2003 the collaborative mapping project ‘Aware’ explored context-awareness, and developed models for participation in “collective augmentation and reconfiguration of memory, narrative potential, as mediated by mobile devices” Its first manifestation, ‘Interactive Audio-Visual Narrative’ (IAN), aimed to create a “memory city”, mapping the cityscape of Helsinki according to individual subjective viewpoints, then archiving the collected data to a web site. (10)

Projects like Aware’s IAN are well organised, calling upon teams of people in specialist roles: contributor, gatherer, depositor, connector, listener, and ultimately audience. The process of mapping the urban space is co-ordinated through a co-operative structure. The data/content accumulated occurs according to the specific trajectories and interests of certain categories of participants in the project, and also in self-reflexive response to content left by others in particular cells of the mobile network. The Aware application detects the networked device’s location and delivers location-specific content.

The technologies and processes from this first project have been refined through a number of subsequent projects, including a boat trip, mobile animation workshops and collective moblogs, to the point where Aware is now being taken forward as a design tool and a production platform for collective publication and syndication of mobile media.

Another collaborative mapping project, ‘One Block Radius’ by Glowlab, (11) which claims to be a ‘psychogeographic documentary’, utilises similar techniques of data gathering to create an online archive documenting the area of New York where the New Museum of Contemporary Art is building a new facility.

Concentrating on one area of a city creates a dense layering of images, sounds and data. The archive becomes a networked monument to an area which is disappearing and the people in it. However it also literally maps institutional presence and power, presenting the displacement of an urban environment by an art institute.

Eric Paulos and Elizabeth Goodman’s ‘Familiar Stranger’ project revisits psychologist Stanley Milgram’s 1972 essay, on individuals we regularly observe in social space but do not interact with. (12) By using wireless proximity detection techniques, the project allows people with appropriately equipped mobile phones to be made aware when they are in the presence of familiar strangers.

The project aims to “promote discussion around tools that work to improve community solidarity and sense of belonging in urban spaces” through encouraging mobile phone users to interact with each other on a personal level. The use of swarming behaviour in this way, familiar from the ‘flash mob’ phenomena, is posited as an antidote to the tendency of mobile phones to atomise and isolate individuals from the crowd. However I wonder if the desired effect will occur: this and other proximity based applications such as Bluetooth networked gaming may promote localised interaction, but this is mediated through the phone screen, rather than face to face.

Both One Block Radius and the Aware projects owe much to the theories and praxis of Guy Debord and the Situationists, particularly the Dérive and their ideas around collective creativity in urban space.

“The lessons drawn from dérives enable us to draw up the first surveys of the psychogeographical articulations of a modern city. Beyond the discovery of unities of ambiance, of their main components and their spatial localization, one comes to perceive their principal axes of passage, their exits and their defenses. One arrives at the central hypothesis of the existence of psychogeographical pivotal points. One measures the distances that actually separate two regions of a city, distances that may have little relation with the physical distance between them. With the aid of old maps, aerial photographs and experimental dérives, one can draw up hitherto lacking maps of influences, maps whose inevitable imprecision at this early stage is no worse than that of the first navigational charts. The only difference is that it is no longer a matter of precisely delineating stable continents, but of changing architecture and urbanism. ” – Guy Debord (13)

I seek however to draw links between locative media and another, earlier antecedent of such practices: the Mass Observation movement. The techniques of location-aware mapping certainly share characteristics with the Situationist Dérive in the actions of individual data gatherers, but the overarching superstructure of the mapping projects, and their means of organisation with a centralised administration, owe more to the systematic approach of the Mass Observation movement. Active in the UK from 1937, throughout the Second World War until the late 1950s, Mass Observation, like Situationism, had roots in Dada and Surrealism. (14) Broadly speaking, there can be seen to be shared obsessions between the two movements: the classic Modernist pre-occupations such as the City, the Masses, and a Left-leaning belief in progressive social change, the theoretical and technical frameworks were of course very different.

The role of subconscious desire was crucial to the Dérive (Debord’s “letting-go”), coupled with ideas borrowed from the science of ecology, applied to the urban environment. Mass Observation took instead from Surrealism the act of seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, attempting to decipher through teams of Observers the meanings in the behaviour of crowds and social groups, reports of the images in dreams, the sampling and analysis of overheard snatches of conversation. It applied techniques from ethnography and anthropology to help in this aim. Thus the data sets resulting from Situationist and Mass Observation mapping techniques were very different. Where the two otherwise disparate movements collide is in the application of pattern recognition to make sense of collated data. For the Situationists the data patterns formed the basis of complex image collage-maps and critical and theoretical texts. For Mass Observation, the analysis attempted to be more scientific, producing reports and statistics. (15)

It is arguable which of these historical movements the current locative media projects most resemble. On the one hand, the general modes of operation, artistic philosophies and visual presentation techniques of projects such as One Block Radius and Aware are analogous to those used by the Situationists, updated with portable networked technologies. On the other, the project contributors/participants take on specialised and differentiated roles that resemble those used in Mass Observation. The data sets resulting from the mapping activity rely upon global, standardised systems, and are themselves both standardised and computable. Data sets become object-oriented databases, allowing for complex filtering processes and visual representations, but also meaning the data can potentially be used in a variety of other ways, including for analysis techniques more closely associated with Mass Observation.

So whilst there is much to be gained from the digital appropriation of Situationist techniques, in enabling personal and collective creativity, there are also lessons from both this movement and from Mass Observation which should give pause for thought.

The Mass Observation movement was marked by differing objectives and approaches, from the poetic and artistic imperatives of Humphrey Jennings, Humphrey Spender and Charles Madge, to the scientific, anthropological bent championed by Tom Harrisson. Mass Observation’s ideas left two main legacies: they were influential on the emerging documentary movement in photography and film; and they provided a model for gathering social data. Mass Observation data and reports on social trends and living conditions were used by government, aiding the Beveridge report which led to the establishment of the Welfare State in the UK. Later in the post-war period, Mass Observation became a business, aiding corporate interests in profiling consumers through commissioned research.

As Jordan Crandall points out in his recent essay (16), portable networked technologies reinforce and enhance the systems of surveillance, control and feedback necessary for accurate targeting of consumers, and for statistical or security analysis by the State. However, in the hands of creative people, these technologies can also provide tools for the creation of new and different forms of meaning.

Locative media practices, in adapting the techniques of Situationism without an accompanying critical framework, risk simply accelerating and deepening the endless reproduction of Spectacle, rather than interrogating it. In attempting to engage with and represent specific locations within the real, they also open the doors to augmented reality and the hegemony of the hyperreal. Artists employing these techniques will need to balance the use of location-aware technology with critical awareness to find a way forward.

1 Jean Baudrillard, “Symbolic Exchange and Death,” Paris, 1976.
2 Dziga Vertov, “Kinok manifesto”, Moscow, 1923.
3 www.textamerica.com, http://flickr.com
4 Douglas Rushkoff, ‘Sex, Lies and Videophones’, in The Feature, 12 May 2004 www.thefeature.com
5 ‘Imaginary Journey’ was commissioned for Ideologica II, the 2003 Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art. http://imaginaryjourney.uiah.fi
6 http://simonfaithfull.org/antarctica
7 www.mutantfilm.com/geocinema
8 Jordan Crandall, “Operational Media”, CTHEORY, Vol 28, Nos 1-2, 2004, www.ctheory.net
9 www.isea2004.net
10 Initiated at the Media Lab, University of Art and Design Helsinki. http://aware.uiah.fi, http://aware.uiah.fi/ian
11 www.oneblockradius.org
12 The Familiar Stranger project is based at Intel Research, Berkeley. http://berkeley.intel-research.net/paulos/research/familiarstranger
13 Guy Debord, “Theory of the dérive”, Internationale Situationiste, no. 2, 1958 (1956)
14 New Formations no 44, ‘Mass-Observation as Poetics and Science’, Editors: Nick Hubble, Margaretta Jolly and Laura Marcus
15 More material at the Mass Observation Archive, www.massobs.org.uk
16 Ibid.

Image credit: Markus Ort, the Aware project.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.