[cartography] Geograffiti as The Digital Production of Nomadic Space

[Marc Tuters]

Here's an article I just finished on my take on Geo-annotation

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Geograffiti as The Digital Production of Nomadic Space
Marc Tuters

Abstract
The postmodern trope in which the map has replaced the territory is posited by some as a
problem resulting in a decentred subject who is thus unable to map her position in a
world in such flux. Borrowing metaphors from postmodern theory, this article develops
the notion of a user-generated cartography wherein we can inscribe a one-to-one scale
map of space with a multitude of ‘other’ places.

Keywords
user-generated cartography, postmodern geography, geo-annotation, location-based
services (locative media)

The democratization of mapping technologies has given amateurs the means to produce
their own cartographic data, which, with the arrival of wireless networking technologies
will make it possible for subjective mental maps to be made objective. Sharing these
‘headmaps’ will enable the development of a non-proprietary data pool of human
geography. Unlike State maps, annotated with ‘official’ point of interest, (City Hall,
McDonalds, etc), these portable immersive maps will permit users to inscribe space with
their own proprietary and/or shared desire.

It is often rumored that 80 percent of human knowledge has a spatial component, yet,
communications technologies have progressively de-localized information to the point
where, in terms of access, data has no real location at all (or, an infinite multitude
of locations). With the arrival of portable, location-aware networked computing devices,
open standards and protocols will enable us to map our physical environments with
geo-annotated information, or geograffiti. While the World Wide Web has been
characterized by its globalized scale, the focus of user-generated cartography will be
spatially localized, and centered on the individual as a ‘producer of space’.

What are typically referred to in the industry as ‘location-based services’,
(heretofore, locative media) essentially re-purpose Geographic Information Systems
(GIS), traditionally designed to run locally on powerful computers, for the speed and
scalability requirements of mobile computers. At the forefront of corporate research
into future of locative media is computer giant Hewlett Packard’s so-called ‘Cooltown’
project, which proselytizes a future where “everything and everybody are connected to
the World Wide Web. People, places and things have websites. Beacons beam out web
addresses everywhere you go. Now the cyber and the real world work together…”

The location-awareness upon which Cooltown’s vision is based is rapidly becoming
standardized into mobile phones with the passage of ‘emergency location’ legislation
such as the Unites States’ Federal Communications Commission’s E911 law that mandates
network operators be able to locate mobile phone users in case of emergency. As the
ability to effectively track movement increases, location information also becomes
valuable to advertising firms who can use it to push content at consumers based on their
proximity, such as in the case of Starbucks, who experimented with sending text messages
to regular customers whenever they passed within close proximity of one of their
locations. While applications for locative media raise privacy concerns, following the
French philosopher Giles Deleuse, this essay argues “there is no need to fear or hope,
but only to look for new weapons” (Deleuse ‘97)

By augmenting geography with a layer of networked digital information, locative media
redefines social relations in space. Note, for example, interpersonal awareness services
such as Tokyo’ ImaHima which signals users when a potential mate that fits their profile
comes into range. Researchers in Oregon have extended this concept into design of a
locative communication system, that enables wearable computer users to form spontaneous
communities based on the principle that mobile, networked agents ‘give off’ valuable
information with respect to their social status that can, in turn, be used to help build
ad-hoc social networks in space (Rheingold 2002 169-74). Observing this phenomena, noted
technology journalist Howard Rhiengold states: “(m)obile media that can augment the
informal, mostly unconscious information exchanges… or affect the size or location of
the audience for these exchanges, have the potential to change the threshold for
collective action.” (Rheingold 2002 175).

The potential of mobile, locative media to affect the threshold for collective action is
also giving rise to a kind of intelligent crowd phenomenon in which people are
organizing spontaneous events via text messaging from street performances to political
protests, popularly known as ‘flashmobs’. Flashmobbing was arguably first, and most
famously used as a civilian technology when, in 1999, a loose association of protest
groups used their cell phones to evade a police force who were synchronized by a single
dispatcher, thereby disrupting the meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle
--a milestone in the counter-globalization movement (De Armond, 2002).

While flashmobbing remains extremely interesting for future studies into emerging mobile
geographies, this article is interested in the emergence of locative media that permit
amateurs to annotate and personalize public space from their mobile devices. The
technology for creating such mobile, user-generated cartography has yet to become widely
available, yet several projects have experimented with using a combination of wireless
networking and positioning technologies to give users the ability to “leave traces in
the system (and in geography) for others to see”, (Espinoza 2001, p4) “enabling a
community’s collective memory to grow organically, allowing ordinary citizens to embed
social knowledge in the new wireless landscape of the city.” (Lane 2003). Were it
designed and distributed properly, such technologies could potentially offer their users
the ability to become the producers of their own digital social spaces.

In “The Production of Space”, French geo-historian Henri Lefebvre ([1975] 1991) proposed
a frame by which to develop this concept in the context of urban geography. For
Lefebvre, mainstream urban geography was essentially spaceless, because social relations
were conceived of as operating within a featureless container (Gottdiener 1985),
Lefebvre instead saw the history of social life as the history of space itself, a notion
he referred to as the socio-spatial dialectic. For Lefebvre power encoded urban space
with dominant ideology, which, as part of city’s built environment, became reified as a
kind of ‘second nature’. To resolve this situation, Lefebvre proposed city dwellers had
to become the conscious ‘producers’ of liberated spaces, in what geographer Neil Smith
characterizes as a “‘jumping scale’ model of liberation from body to interpersonal
space; from the liberation of a park to the scale of the neighbourhood; from the
neighbourhood to the city; the city to the nation and so forth” (Smith, 1997 p. 66). The
theory, however, is based on the assumption that a person can, in fact, determine their
position in relation to an externally mapable reality, a claim that postmodern theorist
Frederick Jameson questions (Dear notes that Jameson owes a significant debt to Lefebvre
- Dear 2000). Jameson claims that the urban ‘hyperspaces’ of multinational capitalism
have undergone a “mutation in the object, unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent
mutation in the subject” (Jameson in Leach 243), “ending the capacity of the individual
human body to locate itself… and cognitively to map its position…(in) the great global
multinational and de-centered communication network in which we find ourselves caught as
individual subjects" (Jameson in Leach 1998, p. 244).

“One cannot understand the development of information tech, without understanding the
evolution of military strategy.
Paul Virilio (1998)

Postmodern military theorist, Paul Virilio, proposes that developments in mapping are
coeval with developments in urban space. Continuing his military analysis, Virilio
believes that the City-state requires vantage points from which to control space. The
further the cartographer’s gaze extends, the more time it allows for defense; making the
cities into temporal events related to control of the territory. Thus, for Virilio the
Atlantic Wall of bunkers that the Germans built to defend ‘Fortress Europe’ in World War
II, transformed Europe into a continent wide city (Virilio, 1975). Virilio paradoxically
sees the post-War détente as a period of ‘total war’. For Virilio, the nuclear threat
was strategically designed to deurbanize cities because they corresponded to a civil
status, which was not consistent with consumer's mind frame (Virilio, 1983). Having
established total control over the territory, the industrial military complex of
post-War society turned mass media on the civilian population, leading Virilio to claim
“ we have entered the age of turning state war into war against one's own people... it
is no longer exo-colonization (the age of extending world conquest) but the age of
intensiveness and endo-colonization. Now one colonizes ones own population." (Virilio,
1983, 95).

As the circuits of power in this postmodern era have become increasingly virtualized,
Virilio claims that urban space has transformed into a “Monument Valley… of some… past
society whose technologies were intimately aligned with the visible transformation of
matter, a project from which the sciences have increasingly turned away” (Virilio, 1991,
20). According to Virilio’s theory, surveillance technologies from CCTV to satellite
arrays like GPS (Global Positioning System) and high-resolution GIS maps transformed the
entire planet into a general urbanized zone (1999). Accompanying this development is the
emergence of one-to-one scale mapping in which, as an oft-cited IBM system journal
states, “information objects –first geo-coded signs and later animated special effects—
will begin to populate real physical space” and “a level of accuracy will be achieved
for both indoor and outdoor locations that will allow the colour to be set for a cubic
centimeter of space, forming volumetric pixels ([or] Voxels)” (Spohrer, 1998, p1).

“Here is an anecdote that illustrates the inventory of a world that will from now on be
lived in real time… (GPS) probably constitutes the event of the decade as far as
globalization of location goes.
Paul Virilio (1995)

Perhaps such mapping technologies will constitute Jameson’s mutation in the postmodern
subject with which s/he can cognitively map hyperspace. With head-mounted display
technologies that ‘paint’ a full colour image directly onto the retina of the user’s
eye, hi-tech, locative media may soon enter the realm of the senses – perhaps resembling
the hallucinatory visions in Samuel Delaney’ Dhalgren (Delaney, 1975) where wandering
urban punks sport holographic ‘light shields’ that emanate from their bodies like giant
holographic cephalopods.

“The city is a body without organs, and the graffitists themselves come from the
territorial order. They territorialize decoded urban spaces –a particular street, wall
or district comes to life through them, becoming a collective territory again”
Baudrillard 1993: 79

According to Virilio, as a temporal phenomenon, the city essentially emerges at the
intersection of nomadic flows, which State cartographers attempt to control.
Historically, nomads settled down in walled cities, exchanging a measure of freedom for
protection, making urban space a defensible space of “habitable circulation” (Virilio,
1986). Inspired by this thesis, as Der Derian notes (1999), Deleuze and Guattarri
(1987), developed a post-structural form of nomadic subjectivity. According to Deleuze
and Guattari the raw materials of existence - the social, the mental and the physical -
are constantly in flux, for which they propose the concept of the ‘assemblage’ to
understand how order emerges from the chaos. Assemblages connect multiplicities into
three strata that bind human existence (the organism, language, and subjectification)
against undifferentiated reality that they call the body without organs, which bring
disarticulation and movement to the strata. Nomadic space is smooth, based on freedom of
movement, and uses the metaphor of the weed (spread) as opposed to the root (fixed).
Thus nomadology, is a process that constantly resists the imposition of hierarchical
organization and fixed meaning – drawing instead, upon an environment constantly in
flux.

“computer games move outside and get subversive... sex and even love are easier to
find... real borders, boundaries and space become plastic and malleable, statehood
becomes fragmented and global... what was once the sole preserve of builders, architects
and engineers falls into the hands of everyone: the ability to shape and organize the
real world and the real space… geography gets interesting…
Headmap Manifesto

Like the graffitists before them, geograffitists of the future might re-appropriate the
city’s junk, except in the latter case it will be through the medium of radio and the
Internet rather than cement and spray paint. Contemporary urban space has become awash
with spectrum garbage. Since radio waves tend to broadcast on a fixed frequency from a
fixed location it is conceivable that with a little mapping one could triangulate ones
position at the intersection of this radio pollution –this technique makes GPS
technology accurate to several meters anywhere in the world and similar techniques have
been demonstrated to be accurate to several meters using the 802.11b protocol of the
wireless Internet nodes that are currently mushrooming throughout the urban environment
(Hightower & Borriello, 2001). In combination with Internet-ready telephony this
do-it-yourself location-awareness could allow for people to post and receive geograffiti
messages to open database servers (such as www.GPSter.net) turning their surveillanced,
sanitized city centers back into collective territories again.

As a violation of the consensual social order, it is hard to defend a ‘graffitist’s’
right to ‘tag’ a public wall based on some anarchic philosophy. Geograffiti, however
could create a stereo-reality in which messages co-registered to a specific location
would only be visible to those who looked for them. As with the Internet, a raw search
of a location would render a meaningless clutter of information. In order to make any
sense of it, a user would have to filter a space for what s/he wanted to see. Ideally,
this new cartography would be something like an open space in which user-generated
content could flourish without need for censorship. Where a single consensual reality
had previously been carefully maintained, a thousand versions of reality could bloom in
a single public space.

For millennia, and with particular ferocity in this past century, Utopia has been “the
basic formation on the horizon throughout history” (Deleuze and Guattarri 1985 [1972] p.
26), yet all such efforts have been predicated on exclusion. Following the anarchic
thought of the theorists discussed above, I would propose that the Utopia of urban
nomadic subjectivity is not a place, so much as a dynamic state, which perhaps most
closely resembles nature’s mycelium. Mycelia are threadlike structures that form
interconnected networks beneath the forest floor, that can cover hundreds of meters, and
from which mushrooms grow as fruit. While remarkably resilient, a single mycelium can be
over a thousand years-old, the organism only bears fruit in the right conditions, at
which point a multitude literally burst forth. While architects construct utopias as
eternal monument to ideologies, mycelia brings forth utopias in the form of temporary
autonomous zones (Bey, 1991) that flourish and perish with the cycles of the earth, from
which they arise.

In order to tap the potential of transient and volatile spatial knowledge, grassroots
projects are emerging worldwide that focus on developing tactical tools for tomorrow’s
locative mobile devices.  Projects such as Headmap, Urban Tapestries and, Locative, to
name but a few, seek to develop open-source, location-aware services for connecting
participants to each other and to the land, and to leverage the potential for situated,
transient knowledge to affect the threshold for communal action. In essence, these
projects seek to build a site-specific, yet global, knowledge-commons where individual
voices can compete with the mass media in our hyper mediated urban environments.

Rather than creating a ‘walled garden' of proprietary data, the most interesting of
these approaches are fundamentally peer-to-peer, employing emerging semantic web
standards such as RDF that allows people to syndicate their own data in machine readable
languages that software aggregators can then synthesize into a holistic view. This
captures a more transient and volatile 'memetic space' than does traditional web page
hosting, and allows for spatial knowledge to become truly distributed; making it much
more difficult to erase memory from space. While a community and its physical artifacts
can always be destroyed by a targeted attack, its geo-encoded memories could potentially
go on to haunt that space, echoing throughout the distributed circuits of the Internet
forever.

In conclusion, a word of warning; when proselytizing the tech-nomadic future one should
be careful not to forget how our enlightened modern science eclipses certain forms of
knowledge in its cold light of reason. To a significant extent the idea of geograffiti
presents a recuperation of potentials from tribal custom and natural phenomena. As such,
I believe, the challenge is first to build these tools in order to acquire these skills
so as to be able to position ourselves in meaningful and sustainable relationships with
each other and with the environment, and then to learn how to do it ‘on the natch’.
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