The Locative, the Ambient, and the Hallucinatory in the Internet of Things

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper outlines three modes in mobile digital media in the contemporary cityscape: the locative, the ambient, and the hallucinatory. All of these tendencies appear in contemporary artistic and commercial strategies for “intertwingling” our cities and our data, yet each bears its own distinct freight. Rhetoric around locative media projects, which frequently draws on Situationist texts, tends to make broad claims about the potential for positive cultural change. Ambient media's rhetoric is entwined with neo-liberal desires for a closed, frictionless circuit of consumption, where mobile technologies directly connect consumers to brands via virally circulating digital advertising codes. The hallucinatory is a moment of the unexpected irruption of the Real, and, as such, offers the possibility of conceiving of a relationship between data and objects that escapes the fantasy of frictionless global digital capital. Drawing on international urban art projects such as “[murmur]” and recent urban ad campaigns from marketing firms such as Dentsu Canada and Sony Pictures. This article argues for the growing need to map the stakes of these emergent modes in the Internet of Things.