Digital Arts and Culture 2009

This article discusses ways of framing Locative Media through critical theories of new media, particularly Giles Deleuze’s “control society hypothesis” and Bruno Latour’s “parliament of things”. It considers artistic practices that combine data visualization and location-awareness in order to represent public space. If Locative Media largely reworked the Situationist practice of psychogeography, in which the city was the primary site of contestation, the article looks at practices which contest ideas about Nature, in order to create “structures of participation” to address a “crisis in political agency” (Jeremijenko). The conclusion shifts Latour’s discourse on networks of non-human agency to the cognitive level in order to consider the potential impact of ubiquitous technology in terms of being.