TAKING THINGS APART:LOCATIVE MEDIA, MIGRATORY ARCHIVES,

AND MICROPUBLICS

Part of the new heterogeneous transnational media ecology, locative

media expands upon legacies of Fluxus and participatory art that

foregrounded the assemblage of transitory publics.' Locative media

extends these practices to probe the intersections and interstitial

zones between invisible, ubiquitous technologies, imbedded networks

of control, the materiality of digital machines, and the necessity of

embodied interaction.2 Locative media counters the immateriality

of virtualization and the privatization of miniaturized hand-held

technologies. As locative media combines with migratory archives, they

open up zones for ongoing contestations and speculations about labor,

the environment, and political histories.

Locative media practices move beyond images that attempt to fix

meaning into much more fluid, mobile environments. They use mobile

digital technologies to map and interact with material spaces. They

are iterative, mutating, provisional, and adaptive, functioning within a

quite different mode than more traditional media.3 How they structure

interactions and convene micropublics is more salient than how they

create images. Locative media practices shift the terms of documentary

media production. They move from images to interfaces, from refined

arguments to contestations and speculations.4

The multi-reality performance-installation project "Invisible Threads"

(2008), the distributed mobile phone project "Fluid Nexus" (2008), and

the collaborative web-application mashup soweto uprising . corn. (2006)

are locative media that convene micropublics by taking things apart.

They do not take images apart as a form of excavation of obscured

meaning. They are not interventions into discourses as much as they

are public actions into and around constructions and artifice.2 These

projects contend no object or machine or conception is unified and

unassailable. They unscrew backs of Nokia cell phones, modify chips

and software, reroute Google Maps, and interface with Hewlett-

Packard digital printers.

These projects also migrate, moving relentlessly between analogue

and digital, between the lived and the imagined, between history and

fantasy. They migrate across and through different social spaces beyond

cinemas, multiplexes and television, operate instead within and around

micropublic zones such as kiosks, storefronts, community centers,

galleries, festivals, fairs, clubs, and schools. These projects suggest

revisions to documentary studies debates concerning oppositional

political practices.6 They function as utopian sites rather than discourses

of sobriety, operating in the hypothetical realms of "what if" rather

than the more empirical documentary realm of "it was."7

We examine these collaborative projects, which develop at the

intersections of imbedded technologies, publics, performance, histories,

geographies, and critical cartography, to forward a set of speculations.

These examples of locative media and migratory archives explore the

production of social spaces beyond the image as a fixed text. They

are not products or films, but are nodal points for engagements

and relationships, convivialities and conversation, movements and

mobilities, conjurings and potentialities. They are unresolved and

inconclusive, shape shifting and adaptive.

These projects share common structural and operational characteristics

of this newly emerging transnational media ecology."They all foreground

digitally networked technologies to remap temporal and spatial

relationships. They mobilize experimentation as a critical engagement.

They question location and mapping. They produce the archive and

the artifactual, rather than utilizing a previously established archive.

They are enacted through collaborative and participatory practices

to generate micropublics that reconfigure the relationships between

artists and audience.9 They trouble the divide between analogue and

digital, material and virtual. We do not suggest that these emerging

documentary modalities replace extant ones. Rather, we argue that

these modalities open up extent documentary and experimental modes

to reappraisal and revision.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

How do locative media and migratory archives extend and

challenge documentary studies and politics? Artists and collectives

working in locative media, ambient media, satellite and cellphone

technologies, and migratory archives activate political engagements,

microgeographies, and interventionist cartographies to probe ther

politics of terror and the location of global sustainability.1 0 Locative

Right

Installation view of "Invisible Threads" (2008) by Stephanie Rothenberg;

courtesy of the artist

15

media and migratory archives conceive of their publics differently

than audiovisual media. Rather than speaking about, to, with,or alongside their publics, they deploy networked technologies to

convene provisional and transitory micropublies. The design of these

projects imbeds collaborative processes. The projects do not exist

without enactment and engagement.

In live performances and real-time actions, locative media and migratory

archives practices disturb, dislodge, and redesign digital technologies that

we often ignore, like bar codes on passports and chocolate bars, radio-

frequency identification (RFID) tags used for anti-theR devices in stores

and for toll-collection on highways, global positioning system (GPS)

satellites and receivers, vector graphics in computer and video games, as

well as wireless local area network (\VLANJ) technologies, short message

service (SMS) communication and cellular telephone networks. These

various arts/polidcal practices reposition highly specialized technologies

within die democratic discourse of amateurism, which refutes technology

as inaccessible and too complicated. The emerging locative media and

migratory archives movement has accelerated in the United States since* legislation like the U.S.A. Patriot Act, which authorizes unprecedented

S data mining, invasions of privacy, wiretapping, and Internet surveillance.

Locative media focus on enactments rather than representations,

conjuring provisional micropublics in public spaces. They also inventnew kinds of performative systems to open up the liminal zones between

digital and analogue, virtual and material, embodied and disembodied,

16 game and reality, body and interface, history and mapping. Locative

media and migratory archives unsettle assumptions and provoke debate

itbout the functions and power of technologies." They take apart our

assumptions and expectations.

BIP M!!

BIP111 ON

INVISIBLE THREADS

"Invisible Threads" creates a participatory space to take apart ways

that work and play, labor and consumption, are refigured through

Wcb 2.0 technologies that transform social networking into telematic

manufacturing. The project is mobile and migratory, mixing reality

with networked media, performance with installation, with a virtual

sweatshop called Double Happiness Manufacturing in the social-

networking environment of Second Life (SL) and a kiosk storefront in

real life. The project, then, exists only with audience participation."s

Interfaces between virtual and material worlds blur the distinctions

between collaboration and consumerism. "Invisible Threads" exposes

ways real-world economies affect idealized virtual communities. As

Web 2.0 technologies move between social relationships and financial

exchanges, "Invisible Threads" produces a collaborative experience

that unsettles borders between virtuality and materiality. It is not a work

about producing new forms in SL akin to machinima, films directed

and performed in game engines; rather, it is a project that transmits and

produces collaborative experiences.

Developed at Eycbcam by digital media performance artist Stephanie

Rothenberg andJeff Crouse, "Invisible Threads" has been performed

at "New Frontier on Main" at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and

at "Synthetic Times: Media Art China 2008" in New York City.

Rothenberg and Crouse set up a kiosk with sales racks and other

publicity collateral. Real-world customers come to the kiosk, where

they order jeans from five different styles-No Pants Left Behind,

MyPants, LowRider, Road Kill and Classic-that are produced by

avatars in SL who work as pattern cutters. Custom-sized patterns are

exported into real life via a large-scale Hewlett Packard printer. Real-life workers then cut the patterns from cotton canvas and assemble

the jeans with a glue-gun and minimal stitching. The manufacturing

of the jeans is based on the model of just-in-time production, but the

jeans are disposable and unable to survive a wash-and-dry cycle--

exaggerating the impermanence of die digital. The project takes apart

the scamlessness of on-line shopping and the invisibility of sweatshop

labor. Indeed, Double Happiness Manufacturing operates according to

an "indentured servant mode" of labor, paying workers about ninety

cents per hour and selling the jeans for about fifty dollars." Profits

from sales are used to pay for rental of space in SL and salaries of

workers in SL and in real life.

"Invisible Threads" operates according to a "service aesthetics":

the artist and audience form one-to-one relationships through

commodity transactions within service economies of customization

and personalization, a radical departure from the "relationaesthetics" by which the artist aligns with audience in post-Fordist

economies of mass production.15 As an artist, Rothenberg is not

interested in the production of fixed images that witness events.Rather, site is invested in the creation of participatory, interactive

situations to create more engagements with the public to unpack

the mobilities of global capital. Rather tItan documenting a social

movement, "Invisible Threads" immerses in the exploitations and

injustices of digital outsoureing and free trade zones that are notsubject to labor laws by creating an accessible project that affiliates

with social and political movements.

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advantages of anonymity and avoidance of central servers that recordinformation that could later be subpoenaed by courts.

The decision to use Nokia units and Python programming language

reflect the project's commitment to serving the most users. Nokia isthe world's most popular brand; Python is a freeware program easily

modified for alternative applications. The system will function within abroadcast model, sending information directly from one programmed

phone to the next. The project was conceived in relation to areas where

communication systems arc tightly regulated and censored by tie state,as well as in areas affected by disasters that shut down communication

networks in conjunction with an anticipated migration of Bluetooth-

enabled mobile units from the global North to the global South viarecycling programs within the next few years.

To use "Fluid Nexus," the user downloads tie software on her cell phoneand types a message in the interface. Tile message is stored on tie cell-

phone unit and broadcast via Bluetooth to other cell phones with tiedownloaded software. "Fluid Nexus" re-routes short-range wirelessconnectivity standards like Bluctooth from consumerism and complicity

toward activism. The P2P model of inrormation exchange avoidshicrarchy and control. "Fluid Nexus" is part of an emerging modality

of documentary practice that recognizes the dangers inherent todocumentation when things are not taken apart: fixed archival images risk

being repurposed from eyewitness accounts of human-rights violations

into audiovisual evidence used by oppressive regimes for control.

SOWETO UPRISING. COM

South African artist Ismail Farouk and Dutch-born Iranian programmerBabak Fakhamzadeh's collaborative work joweo uprisicom maps history

onto place. It seeks to avoid the power differentials and fWxty of physical

memorials by utilizing the Internet as a site for ongoing negotiations

and contestations over past events and their continued relevance." Theproject was initially conceived three years ago in conjunction with tie

Hector Pieterson Rescareh Project, Soweto's first historical museum,named after one of tie first victims of police violence against the studentprotesters. Intended to map the actual student routes taken during theJune 16, 1976, uprising in the Johannesburg township of Sowcto, the

project seeks to become a community-drivcn digital archive through

which members of the "lost generation" of young South Africans, wvho

sacrificed their education to stand against the Apartheid system, can

reclaim and transmit history.2

The project represents a political intervention into the archive and

memorialization. As the post-Apartheid state and civic governments beginto rollow the "global model" by memorializing not the actual routes buttheir symbolic approximates as heritage sites for international tourism,

sourto upuising. corn's digital archive becomes a vital means to counter therepurposing of history into consumable goods. Moreover, the political

bias or state and civic memorialization or history often marginalizes the

role of women and of organizations other than the African National

Congress. Soerveo uprising, corn includes routes organized or supported

by the Black Consciousness Movement and Positive Action Campaign

(PAC), including the PAC-organized route to the Orlando East police

station on March 23, 1960, in protest of the Pass Laws.

The web-application mashup allows users to view individual routes ofprotest and resistance as color-coded polylines mapped onto an image

of Soweto from Google Maps. Markers ("balloons") and custom iconsalong the routes open to additional information about sites, events,

Above"Invisible Threads' (2008) by Stephanie Rothenberg; courtesy of the artist

and martyrs: contemporary photographs of key sites along the student

routes, such as schools and police stations; user-contributed testimony or

remembrance; and blog queues into Google keyword searches to track

what people around the world are writing about sites in Soweto. As a

work of critical cartographic archive, soweto uprising, corn mobilizes the

open-source potential of the Internet to create a site for a collaborative

and migratory model of documentary praxes. The RSS feeds facilitate

unwitting collaboration. The meaning of the site's subject, Soweto's

history, opens to a broader audience of potential participants than the

web site's users. It is hardly surprising that political theorists recognize

the Internet as a model for guerrilla networks.1t The accumulation of the

comments-one modestly entitled, 'just one story"-have the effect of

opening the history of the uprisings to testimonies from participants that

often contradict official versions of this history controlled by groups in

power, facilitating micropublics for history.

A substantial obstacle for soweto uprising, cons, of course, is the realities of

the global digital divides. According to an UNESCO report on knowledge

societies, the digital divide is "not one but rather many digital divides" that

fracture access to knowledge according to economic resources, geographical

asymmetries, generation, gender inequality, language, employment,

disabilities, and educational, social, and cultural background.t" Only 11 %

of the world's population has access to the Internet, and 82% of the world's

population represents only 10% of this 11% with the other 90% living in

the US., Canada, western Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Australia.us

Many of the participants in the Soweto uprising do not have Internet

access or Internet literacry Nonetheless, soweto uprising, corn does propose

new ways of interacting with documentary, ways to navigate history as web

environments similar to readings of webcams as a "mediated geographical

actuality and our cultural conceptions of the wider world."2t

The project is curTently entering a third phase, which includes mapping

additional routes, as well as conceptualizing user interface in response to

inadequate Internet access within the township, which has contributed to

limited participation. Since a purely on-line platform is not sufficient, Farouk

and Fakhamzadeh are exploring ways to integrate mobile units along

the routes (such as in Internet cafes being developed for the 2010 World

Cup), as well as interfacing the project with other services, such as digital

scanners and free email accounts. The project will further explore the use

of existing social networks to encourage participation. Farouk believes that

mapping facilitates conceptions of historical documentation that active

spatial dimensions toward visualizations affecting change. The project seeks

to give voice to those who participated in the country's future-to take apart

the illusions of global consumerism and reclaim history as process, rather

than product. Participants have found the project extremely emotional and

gratifying, releasing thoughts that they have described to Farouk as "lurking

in memory." Soweto uprising, corn deploys an open-archive, community-driven

model toward the documentation of history

SPECULATIONS

How can we assess the political implications imbedded in this idea of

"taking things apart"? Locative media and migratory archives, exemplified

in "Invisible Threads," "Fluid Nexus," and soweto uprisings, corn, alter some

of these integers of documentary and experimental film, foregrounding

not the work of art and media as an object but instead augmenting a

process of continual openings, questionings, reconfigurations, blurrings,

speculations. All three works take things apart to convene micropublics.

The collaborative works examined in this essay open up speculations rather

than fixed conclusions. Collaborative models of locative media-which

collapse production, distribution, exhibition, and participationr-offer

new possibilities and potentialities for political documentary and thinking

in new ways about interactions between social movements and arts/

media practice. The performative functions of locative media exorcise

technologies to make them visible and comprehensible as embodied power

relations. How can we take things apart?

DALE HUDSON is a visiting assistant professor of cinema and new media studies at

Amherst College, Massachusetts. His work appears, or is forthcoming in Cinema

Journal, Journal of Film and Video, Screen, Studies in Documentary Film,

and elsewhere.

PATRICIA R. ZIMMERMANN is a professor of cinema, photography, and media arts at

Ithaca College, New York She is the author of Reel Families: A Social History

of Amateur Film (1995) and States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars,

Democracies (2000) and is co-editor ofMining the Home Movie: Excavations

in Histories and Memories (2008).

_A10TES 1. See 77wnos Ketei, Fluxus (London, Thaimes and Hudson, 1995)for examples ofsthe Flwuas movenrent

liahlngolfthe foady ,epe#&nnative, andtheaudience.FDramnplesolhiw audeLeeparle6a,ondrehlaiorOalaesitheiesavloed in subsequent derades international, see Participation, Claire Bithip, ed. (Caabridge, AM: Tht MITPnes;,

2006) 2. A variey ofdigitu teorists, haze questioned how to consider the issues of digial networks and political actions.

For "aamlp;, see Geert Lxaink, Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture (Xu'w rork, Roulledge,

2008);AlarkPoter, Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Mtachines (Durham, AC.:

Duke Unknsyi Press, 2006); Don Tapscoit andAitLhony D. Williams, Wiknomics: How Mass Collaboration

Changes Everything (Nme York Penguin Group, 2006). 3. Tor a discussion of locatite media, see Jason Abolan, Sthn

AlMm; and Banyff Wildno, "Soune,illanice, Waorable and Digtal Tools in Suarilled Environments," Byron Hoau,

DavidAL. Rnler, and Olie Ov"do, eds. SmallTech: The Culture ofDigital Tools (Afinneopolii, MN" Universty

afMinnuotna Pass, 2008), 179-96. 4. See Patrica R, Zimmeronamnn, "Frhn te Irmage to the Ineerface. PiremptOu Afedia

Collective`l omilable at imotmsedicharnnemlorg. 5. For the larger rontet of intervntioniat art, mee Naot Thompson and

Gry Sholete, wtit Joseph Thomepon, .AscholasMirzoi7 , and Ondine C. Chaotya, The Interventionists: Users'

Manual forthe Creative Disruption ofEveryday Life (WonrhAdaium MA:MAfSSAMoCA Publiolions, 2004).

6. 4li hank Alihaet Chann for his isidtl/l quehes about political econoy andpollical exenies in relations to our

theorizations oflocafire media, espLalao his ouionay arguments about oo investing in the utopianism of d4gitalal in the

context of how diotal netwbrks inscribe power diff erentv and nore insidioaoly Furo clearapositionofhowdiplalonetuorkE

organizeotenselveso narudcode, othifadlitutes rontrol andpor,n see AlexoanderGa0oay, Protocol: Hone ControlExistsafterDecentrnlization(Camboritge,MA&TheMlTl4ss, 2004). ZBillAlchols hasrguedthatdomoentarios

exhibit a disonarse of sobriep engaging the epistemoh*loa! in his Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in

Documentary (Bloomington, LAr Indiana Uniersiy Pless, 1991). For an exposition ofpasienciel historiogrrp4y that

is lks intemested in wthat constitutes the past than in how the past can be testhrnded through different inagined regisue

andmirots, seeDipesh Chabkratay, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Diflerence

(Tincelon,i,Y:Princeton Uniswisy`ress, 2000). 8. In thelastrh yearse may ywritersand organizations haoy okned

ahat hoo been dubbed the 'uem# energingrsnnmalional media erology"as a di?1 awuyfiomt conceptions of mainstmean/

aSlernative rmedia and proft/nompofit. See Rochard Kahn and Douglas Kelbn, "Thropolitas, Blog; and Emergent

AMedia Ecologies: A Critical /ReconstictireApproach," Small Tech 22-37; Nongovernmental Politics, Alichel

Fde, ed with CGell Knkorwn and rut-a McKIe (Anrw Nork Zone Books, 2007); ationolAllianceforiAedi Arts andCulture, Deep Focus: A Report on the Future of Independent Media (San Francisco, CA:NAMAC, 2004).9. Fora cogent diossnio ofrollaboraetiemediapractices, see Helen deMAichit 'A Mosaic ofPnucticec PublicMedia and

Partiipatoy Cullure," Afterimage, VoL 35, no. 6 (MAy/June 2008), 7-14. 10. The daeloping literae on critical

arftogrphy ha explored the reationship between ontgetion, networks, dotali, rwdeing inviiblepauemttnssible through

toiuasrations andgruphics, and alkenalt e designm For an excellent overmet of thisofeld, jeeJanet Abrams and Petir

Hall, eds., Else/Where- Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories (Minneapilis- Universiy

of(Milnesota Pros, 2006). 11. Weno Huilj%mng Clumg, Control and Freedom: Power and Parmotia in the

Age of Fiber Optics (C=mbridge, MA: The MITPress, 2008). 12. Authorn' teephone intervdew wilt Stephanie

RoteonberA May 23, 2008.13. For additional infmnation on Double HappmausJeans risit uc w.doublehappinesemns.

com. 14. TIorhersinSL are paid200Linden pIer onr Due tothe roots innumhgthe projert,prices tore ratioedfroa $35

to about 50. 15. Stereo Heny Madoff, "SeiceAestetics,"Artforum (September 2008). 1. "10 Simple Steps to Four

Own Vrulum Sweatshop" can bee steamed on blO.to at hit]//blpitbpv./file/779038. 17. For additional infosnation of

"FluidNcaus" t.iyt uuswsincotu-net.ea/fluidinuv/#about. 18. For addinonal i/fonnation an TXTmob oisnil uw.

oppliedautoomon .rom/trtmob.hthnL For the Institute ofAppliediAutonorfys September3, 2004, pren release on T-Mobile

sm wurm appliedautonony. omn/txtmol/tltmobPR2.hhnL 19. Arthors'telephone interiew with ictk laouf, Jane 18,

2008. 20. To acress soweto uprisings. cornm ldt htcO://somotonpringo.aon. 21. Authors'telephone intetriewowith Ismail

FamAk, Jabr 15, 2008. 22. Alichael Hardt andAntonio Aegn, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of

Empire (Nmw York. Penguin, 2004), 82-83.23. UNESCO World Report: Towards Knowledge Societies

(Parns UndedNaations Educational, Scientfic, and Cultural Orgauicaton, 2005), 30. 24. Ibid, 29. 25. Andrew

btte,son, 'Destination DigitaL. D&nenta Representation and the Virtual Tirnelogue," Quarterly Review of Film

and Video Vol 20, no. 3 (2003, 199.

19

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TITLE: Taking Things Apart: Locative Media, MigratoryArchives, and Micropublics

SOURCE: Afterimage 36 no4 Ja/F 2009

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