Ideology, obsolescence and preservation in digital mapping and locative art

Abstract

The city has long been evoked as an environment for critiquing traditional paradigms of place, space and urban dwelling. This article engages with two related forms of urban mediation that arose during the late twentieth century in response to the proliferation of networked, mobile and location-aware technologies: locative media art and digital mapping. These practices emerged by taking advantage of the widespread availability and dissemination of the global positioning system (GPS), geographic information system (GIS) and location-aware devices, and today increasingly figure as a means of urban information seeking and navigation. This article argues, however, that the celebratory accounts of these projects often overlook how they are shaped by institutional, as well as counter-hegemonic, forces. It is therefore important to recognize the way these projects are often subsumed by the static accounts and data that are left after they are completed; or become assimilated back into the institutional and commercial structures that produced them. The article focuses on four case studies – San Francisco <-> Baghdad (2004), Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies (2009), Mapping the Commons (2010) and WalkSpace (2010). In order to evaluate the impact of these projects on their users’ and participants’ experience of agency within the situated urban environment, the article argues it is necessary to examine how their political and artistic objectives are shaped by the ways in which they are documented and recorded after their ‘lived’, situated performance.