'Alternative Ways of Being' : Reimagining Locative Media Materiality through Speculative Fiction and Design

Article ‘Alternative Ways of Being’: Reimagining Locative Media Materiality through Speculative Fiction and Design DALE LEORKE Tampere University, Finland CHRISTOPHER WOOD Queen Mary, University of London, UK Media Theory Vol. 3 | No. 2 | 63-102 © The Author(s) 2019 CC-BY-NC-ND http://mediatheoryjournal.org/ Abstract Following the ‘material turn’ in media studies and a growing intersection with posthuman philosophies, theorists and practitioners in the field of ‘locative media’ have recently sought to make more explicit and visible the underlying material infrastructure and processes of location-aware technologies. These approaches, we argue, concentrate on two, interrelated layers of locative media materiality: the ‘infrastructure’ itself and its socio-political consequences; and the material relations between human and non-human elements that act upon one another to create the ‘performance’ of locative media. These approaches offer a vital and necessary challenge to the predominantly humanand user-centric focus of existing locative media studies. To date, however, they have been focused on rendering visible the infrastructure and performance of locative media as it presently exists; and still remain centred around the human body as the site and metaphor for understanding this materiality. In this paper, we further complicate this human centricity around the infrastructural and performative layers of locative media to challenge and reimagine the role of the human in locative media art and practice. Drawing on the traditions of speculative fiction and design, we propose fiction, design, and worldbuilding as methods for developing imaginaries and alternative futures that expand the potential for locative media to be reframed from a non-human centric perspective. Such an approach emphasises creativity and imagination, in addition to purely empirical knowledge of locative technologies and processes; and allows for a more speculative, playful, and questioning approach to this materiality, taking into account not only ‘what is’ but also ‘what could be’. Through a discussion of two experimental projects undertaken by one of the authors of this paper, we advocate opening up locative media studies to encompass speculation about its alternative and future potentialities. Keywords Anthropocene, Digital Infrastructure, Locative media, Materiality, Mobile media, New Media Art, Speculative Design, Speculative Futures Media Theory Vol. 3 | No. 2 | 2019 http://mediatheoryjournal.org/ 64 ‘What is electricity? What is light? We experience these things every day of our lives but what good does it do if we find ourselves hurled back in time and we can’t even tell people the basic principles much less actually make something that would improve conditions? [...] What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.’ -- Don DeLillo, White Noise (1998/1985: 147-9) Following the ‘material turn’ in media studies (see Herzogenrath, 2015; Lievrouw, 2014; Parikka, 2012), the field of ‘locative media’ has recently undergone a similar shift as theorists and artists unravel the implications of GPS infrastructure and locationaware technologies. 1 Locative media first emerged in the early 2000s as a descriptor for the artistic practices and intellectual discourse around location-aware technologies’ potential to transform everyday life. As Jason Farman (2015: 51) notes, scholarship on locative media has largely consisted of social science approaches that focus on the interfaces of locative technologies and the interactions between their users, overlooking the more complex assemblage of material infrastructure that underpin them. Recently, numerous scholars and artists have sought to redress this by explicating the often hidden, obfuscated, or repressed presence of locative media technologies. They draw attention to the infrastructural ecology of locative technologies: cell phone towers, antennas, servers, satellites, monitoring stations, and electromagnetic signals. They also critique the protocols, regulations, technical affordances, glitches, and human labour that govern and underpin this infrastructure. Scholars such as Farman, Frederica Timeto (2014), and Ned Rossiter (2016), along with artists like Simon Faithfull, Mark Shepard, and Nikki Pugh, have sought to render visible these material objects and practices through theoretical and artistic interventions. These interventions in the scholarship and practice of locative media have made significant strides towards remedying this deeply-ingrained neglect and obfuscation of their materiality. As we discuss in this article, however, despite adopting materialist and speculative realist approaches to locative media, such approaches consistently return – and remain tethered to – the human body as the primary site and metaphor for understanding locative media’s materiality. As such, we seek to expand the existing scholarship on this topic by raising other possibilities for considering them outside the everyday ‘performance’ that unfolds around human bodies. We draw on the traditions of speculative fiction and speculative design to rethink the relationship between LEORKE & WOOD | ‘Alternative Ways of Being’ 65 humans, objects, animals, the environment, and locative media. We propose fiction, design, and world-building that is rooted in these traditions as methods for developing imaginaries and alternative futures that further explicate the implications of locative media from a non-human centric perspective – while also acknowledging the perhaps inescapable end-point of this human-centricity. Incorporating speculative fiction into locative media studies offers two overarching benefits. First, it renders visible the materiality of locative media in a way that builds on the work already undertaken by theorists and artists, but through creative rather than purely theoretical or empirical means. Narrative, imagination, and metaphor play a greater role, allowing humans to think more widely and openly about the materiality of locative technologies. Second, it allows for a richer and more open-ended understanding of this materiality, opening critiques of locative media infrastructure beyond ‘what is’ to ‘what could be’, by encouraging speculation about future and alternative applications of this infrastructure – rather than just existing ones (see Galloway, 2013). The paper begins with a necessarily brief overview of the scholarship on locative media and how it has more recently been challenged by both theorists and artists from Actor Network Theory (ANT), non-representational theory, object-oriented ontology, and related approaches. We then outline speculative fiction and speculative design, as articulated by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby (2013), as methods for building on these critiques. Through this approach we aim to shift the focus away from a groundlevel, human-centric perspective on locative media’s materiality to a more conceptual, imaginative, and speculative one. The final section discusses two projects, designed by one of the authors of this paper, which explore how this approach can be applied in practice. Towards a Materiality of Locative Media The term ‘locative media’ was coined, as Andrea Zeffiro (2012: 251) notes, in 2003 by Karlis Kalnins at the Art+Communication Festival in Riga. It sought to describe and capture an emerging avant-garde movement or artistic practice premised on experimentation with mobile and location-aware technologies. Locative media served Media Theory Vol. 3 | No. 2 | 2019 http://mediatheoryjournal.org/ 66 as an umbrella term encompassing the body of work being produced by artists, theorists, and developers utilising these devices – mobile phones, PDAs, laptops, GPS trackers – to reconceptualise and critique the relationship between people, networked communication technologies, and the everyday environment. The various genres and applications of locative media have been documented in an extensive body of scholarly literature since the mid-2000s (see for instance de Souza e Silva and Frith, 2012; Farman, 2012; Hemment, 2006; Tuters & Varnelis, 2006; Zeffiro, 2006, 2012). As this article is primarily concerned with intervening in debates around locative media rather than rehashing them, we refer readers unfamiliar with locative media practice and theory to this literature. However, it is important for the context of this article to briefly ruminate on the term ‘locative media’ itself and critique how it has been conceptualised and examined within academic and artistic discourse. Since its inception, the term locative media has been imbued with symbolic meaning and importance. The term is derived from the locative noun case in the Latvian language, which roughly corresponds to the English words ‘in’, ‘on’, ‘at’ or ‘by’ and refers to the final location or time of an action. As Kalnins (2004: n. p.) explains, it is a decidedly apt term for location-aware devices that use GPS technology, given ‘GPS devices are useful for not just geographical coordinates but also for obtaining very accurate time from orbiting atomic clocks’, emphasising the fact that these devices (and the projects that use them) are ‘not just about location’. The use of the Latvian locative case is also a gesture to the place where the term itself was coined – Riga – neatly bringing everything back full circle, drawing attention to both the intellectual environment in which the term originated and its temporal and spatial meanings. The symbolic importance of this term becomes clearer through a glance at the various definitions ascribed to it. Locative media has been described as a ‘field of cultural production’ (Zeffiro, 2012); a ‘site’, ‘framework’ and ‘context’ (Russell, 2004); a ‘genre of projects’ (Flanagan, 2007: 1) and a ‘philosophy’ (Cubitt, 2007: 1152). Moreover, as Zeffiro (2012) recounts, it has been articulated, contested, and redefined through numerous online forums, message boards, and artists’ workshops, where debates about its potential ranged from techno-utopian euphoria to dystopian anxiety, and everything in between. Locative media is clearly much more than simply a descriptor for the set of technologies and infrastructure that enable location-aware media practices. It is LEORKE & WOOD | ‘Alternative Ways of Being’ 67 thickly layered with symbolic meaning, conceptual baggage, and an array of sometimes conflicting notions about how it is to be defined and understood. Since it was coined, the scholarship on locative media has undergone two overarching and overlapping phases. The first, early phase concerns the attempts to define and debate its social and political impact. These largely took place during, and in the years after, the period when the term was coined. This literature encompasses discussions on forums, listservs, and workshops such as CRUMB, [LOCATIVE] and N5M (Next Five Minutes), as documented by Zeffiro (2012); formative texts like Ben Russell’s headmap manifesto (1999; see also Leorke, 2017) and the Transcultural Mapping Reader (2004); and articles in various books and special issues of journals like Convergence and Leonardo Electronic Almanac (see de Souza e Silva & Frith, 2012; de Souza e Silva & Sheller, 2014; Gordon & de Souza e Silva, 2011; Farman, 2012; Hemment, 2006; Tuters and Varnelis, 2006; Wilken and Goggin, 2014). These texts were primarily concerned with defining the meaning of the term; cataloguing the different types of locative media projects; debating the implications of the technology (often from either a celebratory or pessimistic viewpoint); and speculating on its future possibilities. The second phase of locative media scholarship concerns the body of literature that first began to emerge in the mid-2000s (see in particular de Souza e Silva, 2006) examining the impact of location-based technologies on sociability and social interaction in everyday public space. Taking their cue from 20th Century scholars of social interaction – from Weber and Simmel to Goffman and Sennett – these scholars concentrate on theorising and reconceptualising how users of location-aware technologies interact with one another and the physical environment around them. This research also often contains an empirical component, such as interviews, surveys, or ethnographic observation of locative media users (see e.g. Humphreys, 2007; Licoppe and Inada, 2006, 2008; Özkul, 2014; Raanan & Shovel 2014; Saker and Evans, 2016; Schwartz & Haleguoa, 2015). These social science approaches to locative media have proven highly valuable and necessary for unpacking their social impact. But, as scholars like Farman argue, they have contributed to a largely human-centric approach to locative media that often effaces or ignores the role played by the technological infrastructure itself. Farman points out that most locative media scholarship tends to focus on ‘human-to-human Media Theory Vol. 3 | No. 2 | 2019 http://mediatheoryjournal.org/ 68 connectivity’, viewing the location-aware devices and infrastructure as ‘an extension of social media sites like Facebook’ into the streets and everyday environment (2015: 51). Referring to ubiquitous computing, Anne Galloway points to the tendency for scholars to ‘privilege the technology or the people who use it,’ overlooking ‘the assemblages or associations amongst all the humans and nonhumans involved in the production and consumption of new technologies and media’ (2013: 55). And Ned Rossiter (2014: 210) echoes this point in relation to the infrastructure in which locative technologies are embedded, arguing that: at the conceptual and empirical levels, research on locative media has next to nothing to say about logistical media and supply chain operations whose spatial-temporal operations are frequently enough overseen by locative media – GPS, RFID, voice picking technology, ERP systems, social media software, etc. Exceptions to such oversights do exist, with some formative locative media scholars touching on the history and technical infrastructure of GPS (see for instance Gordon & de Souza e Silva, 2011: 41; Zeffiro, 2006: 305). But by and large they establish only a rudimentary understanding of the basic components of locative media, while assuming that their infrastructure is fixed and stable, operating in a generic and predictable fashion. It is impossible to ascertain, of course, how dominant this bias is within the literature on locative media, let alone more broadly outside scholarship, without an exhaustive discourse analysis – something outside the scope of this article. But a simple examination of the term ‘locative media’ itself indicates how deeply rooted these assumptions about its materiality are. As we noted above, the term has served as something of a vehicle for debates about, and imaginaries around, the potential – both utopian and dystopian – of location-aware technologies. It is also a convenient umbrella for discussing and debating these technologies’ emergent possibilities. But in the process, it assimilates the much more diverse array of devices, cables, telecommunications infrastructure, and GPS satellites that underpin locative media into a single, homogenous technological apparatus: ‘locative media’. In the process, it downplays the myriad technologies and infrastructure that make locative media possible – as well as the unevenness, disjuncture, and disconnection that frequently characterise them. Even though locative media is plural, it is mostly deployed LEORKE & WOOD | ‘Alternative Ways of Being’ 69 as a singular term to encompass these multifarious infrastructures. Even within the very terminology used to describe them, the material devices and infrastructures of locative technologies are – unconsciously or otherwise – stripped of agency, autonomy, and specificity. As noted, other scholars and practitioners of locative media have already pointed out and begun to address this oversight in their work. True to the origins of locative media as both a theoretical paradigm and an avant-garde artistic movement, both academics and artists have driven this shift. Their approaches broadly fall into two categories, which we briefly outline in the remainder of this section: ‘infrastructural’ and ‘performative’ critiques. ‘Infrastructural’ critiques concern the numerous technologies that enable locative media to exist, from GPS satellites orbiting more than 20,000 kilometres above the Earth’s surface to the cell phone towers, fibre optic cables, and control centres that mediate and convey the electromagnetic signals of these satellites. ‘Performative’ critiques seek to emphasise the way locative media itself can be considered a performance – what Timeto describes as ‘an unfolding environment traversed by mobile interfaces that actively mediate the networks of sociospatial relations’ (Timeto, 2014: 100). We briefly outline these critiques here. It is important to note at the outset of our discussion of these critiques that they are not distinct but overlapping and interconnected – although scholars and artists have tended to subtly emphasise one aspect or the other. Satellites and Towers: The Infrastructure of Locative Media A full and comprehensive description of locative media and location-aware networks and their material presence on Earth (and beyond) would be an exercise in futility. Locative technologies, and the infrastructure that make them possible, are now so vital to human social, political, and economic activity that, as Greg Milner (2016: 101) postulates, their sudden collapse would cause irreversible economic and social disruption, setting human progress back at least several decades. Yet beyond a recognition of GPS’s military origins and basic functionality, until recently locative media scholarship has paid scant attention to this infrastructure behind the user-level interface of devices connected to it. Media Theory Vol. 3 | No. 2 | 2019 http://mediatheoryjournal.org/ 70 Jason Farman’s recent work (2015, 2016, 2017) has been instrumental in challenging this oversight by arguing for a stronger engagement with the materiality of locative media. He notes how, on a fundamental level, the infrastructure that make locationaware technologies possible are designed – deliberately or otherwise – to recede into the background by those responsible for their design and implementation: planners, engineers, the military, and technology vendors. Fibre-optic cables are buried underground. Cell towers are often disguised as trees or blended into nearby architecture to remain out of sight. And the command and control centres that operate the GPS satellite constellation are located in remote, military-patrolled facilities offlimits to most civilians. This gives rise, Farman (2015: 57) notes, to a contradiction between the functionality of locative media infrastructure – which relies on line-ofsight visibility between towers and devices – and the aesthetic design of the devices that connect to it, which aim to appear seamless, intuitive, and ever-present. Locative media is rendered ubiquitous, in the sense conveyed by Mark Weiser’s (1991) theory of ubiquitous computing: always on-hand, but designed to fade into the background. This dual, contradictory approach to the design and rollout of locative media technologies represents an ideological desire to overcome their ‘otherness’, in the process repressing the ‘political consequences’ such objects play in the way people ‘practice space, identity and community creation’ (Farman, 2015: 57). In other words, the infrastructure behind locative media are rendered invisible from the very points at which they are implemented not only for aesthetic purposes, but because those responsible for them – governments and large companies – do not wish to draw attention to the processes that go into their design and operation. These range from the military sensitivity of GPS satellites to the often exploitative conditions in which most smartphones are produced. Going against this tendency, then, is to undertake a political economic critique as much as it is an exercise in technical description. By challenging these attempts to render technology as invisible and ‘other’, Farman contends that scholars (and ultimately users) can examine more openly the political implications of locative media infrastructure: the labour behind such technologies, the technical and regulatory infrastructure that keep them operating, and users’ own consumption patterns and decisions. LEORKE & WOOD | ‘Alternative Ways of Being’ 71 Farman’s sentiment is echoed by other work from outside locative media studies. Lisa Parks’ work on satellites, for instance, highlights their omnipresent, almost unconscious presence in people’s lives. She points out that they deliver live news feeds, directions to nearby landmarks, and, today, streamed content to our phones despite virtually no understanding by users about how they work or who controls them. Satellites exist ‘beyond the horizon of everyday visibility’ at both the extra-terrestrial level, she writes, where they orbit the Earth mostly invisible to the naked eye; and the ground level, where they are operated from highly restricted military bases in remote, inaccessible locations. As a result, Parks argues, ‘publics around the world have both been excluded from and/or remained silent within important discussions about their ongoing development and use’ (Parks, 2007: 207). Building on Parks’ work, Stephen Graham (2016) argues for the need to ‘penetrate’ this elusive and secretive nature of satellites. He points to the work of artists and activists like Trevor Paglen and Steve Rowell who track and photograph military satellites in the sky, and the military bases that control them, rendering visible these highly sensitive infrastructure (see Graham, 2016: 32-7). These strategies of ‘watching the watchers’ that Graham describes are more political incarnations of the tradition of ‘infrastructural mapping’ and ‘infrastructural tourism’ – as Shannon Mattern (2016) describes it – aimed at unearthing and uncovering urban and industrial infrastructure. Titles such as Kate Ascher’s The Works: Anatomy of a City (2005), Brian Hayes’ Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape (2014) and Harry Granick’s classic Underneath New York (1991) all seek to expose the workings (and aesthetics) of hidden, overlooked, or enigmatic infrastructure in the city, resonating with media archaeological approaches to digital technologies and infrastructure (Mattern, 2017a, 2017b, 2018a, 2018b; Parikka, 2012, 2015). Of course, all of this is not to claim proof of a deep conspiracy about governments’ and corporations’ intentions around locative media. In many cases, the design and implementation of locative media technologies are driven as much by accessibility and usability as political agendas. But they do point to a deeply ingrained tradition of repressing the materiality of locative media that in turn influences users’ capacity to conceptualise and understand its social and political dimensions – something these infrastructural lines of critique seek to reverse. Media Theory Vol. 3 | No. 2 | 2019 http://mediatheoryjournal.org/ 78 occurs by considering the wider ecology of locative media on a grander – planetary and posthuman – scale. We position these debates about locative media infrastructure and performativity at the centre of speculative, narrative-driven approaches to understanding their presence in everyday life. This involves not merely revealing the infrastructure and making humans aware of its presence on a conceptual or bodily level. It also re-orients the relationship between human and non-human elements, pointing to new and alternative materialities in future work within the field. Speculative Approaches to Locative Media Materiality In this section we argue that speculative approaches to engaging with locative media infrastructures can provide a powerful new perspective for existing technologies and practices. Such work is creative, but also contributes to research by working to ‘enrich and not only reduce the object of study’ (Asdal and Moser, 2012). In other words, it can potentially deepen contextual understandings of a research area, generating new perspectives and questions, rather than seeking answers for more narrowly defined problems. Within such an approach, research methods themselves become active, engaged, and embedded with their object of study, rather than operating at a distance from it. Methods such as these must first seek the ability to address a subject area and then to engage with it, affecting the problem space (Lury and Wakeford, 2012). They reject the idea of method as ‘a set of short circuits that link us in the best possible way with reality’ (Law, 2005: 10). Instead, method is ‘a delicate act of creation, something that requires time and effort to make realities and hold them steady for a moment against a background of flux and indeterminacy’ (ibid). These views on method are strongly aligned with ANT approaches and typically understand the social as, in fact, being sociotechnical: something profoundly emergent with and through the materialities of technical and social relations. This generative understanding of materiality makes it a useful framework to advance questions of locative media materiality, offering to understand it from emergent, speculative positions. In what follows, we demonstrate this approach through two case studies: the ‘DIY Cultures in the Anthropocene’ workshop (2016) and GPS Tarot (2016-present). Following Law, our intention is to form a reality that takes in the often obscure actions of blackboxed infrastructures, LEORKE & WOOD | ‘Alternative Ways of Being’ 79 holding those actions steady for a moment to be examined, critiqued, and re-imagined. Both bringing in materiality and leaving space for speculation about extra-human agency is difficult to do in a single, off-the-shelf method. The tactic used here, therefore, makes case-specific first steps towards alternative understandings of locative infrastructures, using metaphor, story, and speculation as a bridge. In taking this position, we draw again on Bowker and Star’s work (1999). In their writing on infrastructural inversion, a process by which a concealed or blackboxed infrastructure are revealed, they suggest that an infrastructure, although hidden, can be felt through the ‘texture’ of its actions. Infrastructures often support other technical systems or practices and therefore these actions may well be indirect, making it a slippery thing to grasp. Keller Easterling describes the ‘disposition’ (a concept similar to Bowker and Star’s texture) of an infrastructure’s actions as ‘not the pattern printed on the fabric, but the way the fabric floats [...] Not the object form, but the active form’ (Easterling, 2014: 21). Bowker and Star (1999) suggest that, because of this indirectness, metaphor is an especially powerful means of describing infrastructural action. We would add that, in the fictive and metaphorical realm, there is also space to offer radical new perspectives to rethink human relationships to infrastructure. Case Study #1: ‘DIY Cultures in the Anthropocene’ ‘There has been a rift. A break between one civilisation and the next. A great forgetting. There has been no transfer between them. No passing on of knowledge or language. Only that which was stable enough to last without maintenance and repair remains.’ This is the scenario envisioned by one participant in a project organised as part of the workshop ‘DIY Cultures in the Anthropocene’, hosted by the Nordic Summer University. This event was driven by a desire to bring together technologists and people involved in DIY communities and permaculture to try and find common ground for projects which might emerge in a time of increased environmental and societal stress. The workshop, organised by one of the authors of this paper, Wood, had 10 participants walk around the workshop site (an abandoned paper mill in the Swedish forest) using an app called GPS Test which visualises the position of the GPS satellites overhead. Wood posed two questions to the participants: ‘How might the satellites see the earth?’ and ‘How might the satellites operate after the society which Media Theory Vol. 3 | No. 2 | 2019 http://mediatheoryjournal.org/ 80 built them had died out?’ Both these questions were designed to un-think many of the assumptions built around an everyday technology such as GPS. These questions point to ideas around infrastructural inversion (Bowker and Star, 1999; Wood et al, 2017a), but use that inversion as a launchpad for speculation around alternative uses in a future scenario. After walking around the site for around 20 minutes, the participants were given paper and pencil and asked to respond to the questions through text and drawings. The response by the participant quoted above (see Figure 4) demonstrated a powerful insight into the role these technologies play in our everyday lives, imagining what uses they might give rise to in a future where they are stripped of their current utility. In the post-apocalyptic scenario he describes, in which the GPS satellite constellation persists without any prior memory or knowledge of its purpose, satellites have come to assume an almost mythical, religious presence. The participant’s drawing shows a variety of different interactions with GPS signals (represented by numbers) in the absence of our familiar practices. Figures shelter from the signals in earthworks, priests collect them in a pyramid, animals speak to them, and people try to capture them with nets. Such ideas point to the esoteric uses which were imagined in the early days of radio. Late 19th century pioneers such as Sir William Crookes understood radio as an etheric realm of communication between hidden voices without bodies. In this realm even speaking to the dead might be possible (Peters, 1999: 104–105). This (a)etheric understanding of the magical potential of radio is shared by the passage from Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, quoted in our epigraph to this paper, in which the protagonist, an academic, is asked by his genius son to explain how radio works to a hypothetical group of pre-historic humans with no knowledge of modern technology. 4 Like this passage from White Noise, the question posed to participants of the ‘DIY Cultures in the Anthropocene’ project about possible future uses of GPS prompts us to reflect simultaneously on the omnipresent role technologies have in our lives, and how little we understand about their material constitution and operation. LEORKE & WOOD | ‘Alternative Ways of Being’ 81 Figure 4. Participant drawing from the ‘DIY Cultures in the Anthropocene’ workshop. February 2016. 5 Media Theory Vol. 3 | No. 2 | 2019 http://mediatheoryjournal.org/ 82 Perhaps because of the open nature of the prompt, the participants returned a mix of responses. Some were pre-occupied with the present-day implications of government surveillance using location services. In response to the question, ‘How might satellites see the Earth?’, others were keen to emphasise that the satellites were just sending out signals rather than receiving any information from our devices. Because of this technical point, the idea that GPS satellites might ‘see the earth’ (as the workshop prompt suggested) was a misnomer, and that it was, in fact, a gross anthropomorphisation to imply that they are seeing or sensing the earth at all. Another participant was sceptical about the ability to forge new meanings from moments of infrastructural breakdown, stating that: ‘the device is confused and the satellites didn’t care.’ Here, the perception that the satellites are remote beings who are not concerned with what is happening on earth (Parks, 2007) acts as its own form of speculation, opening up the possibility of what kind of existence they might be leading removed from earthly concerns. In the face of these mixed responses, Wood decided to treat this workshop as a first step and to develop a second workshop concentrating on the kinds of existence a network of satellites might develop whilst in orbit. This rephrasing would mean the speculative satellites would not be under pressure to ‘see’ or otherwise be beholden to earthly or human concerns. A second round of workshops took place at Queen Mary University of London. These workshops operated in a reduced form with a greater focus on the crafting of a speculation. They were attended by 10 engineers from a range of backgrounds, including three satellite engineers. The participants were organised into teams of two and asked to create a future scenario within the following projected world: 2050 Satellite Systems Become Self-Directing After a series of technical advances and budget cuts on earth, in 2040 it is decided to remove ground support from the world’s GNSS systems. Technical advances in machine learning mean that the system can maintain and correct itself to the standards required to support existing uses. The corrective model has been trained on existing use data (in terms of physical environment - terrestrial and extra-terrestrial, time, terrestrial navigation, military support). After 10 years, the system has continued to evolve and LEORKE & WOOD | ‘Alternative Ways of Being’ 83 begins to identify and work towards its own goals, both on the earth and in space. Each group’s response wrestled with the question of the satellite network’s motivations. Typically, the first suggested motivation was survival. Participants assumed that the future satellite network would seek to sustain and propagate itself. One group proposed a scenario where satellites would meet in orbit and perform a kind of mating dance with each other to see if they were suitable partners. Having identified a partner, to reproduce they would break off some of their machine parts and combine them to make a new satellite. Another group proposed leveraging a current application of the GPS network: the use of GPS timestamps to synchronise cross-border financial trades. This group proposed that, to accumulate resources for themselves on earth, satellite networks from different countries would compete to rig the stock market for personal profit. Other groups proposed more complex motivations. One saw the satellites as a force for the protection of earth, imagining that they would make a series of interventions to protect the environment from humans. Another group proposed the GPS satellites would work as part of a complex stack of machine-learning elements which would still, ultimately, be directed by humans. This final project did not see such a radical break with present combinations of human-machine infrastructure, rather that each element would be able to act more independently towards a shared goal. The goal they chose was the optimisation of farming, with the GPS network able to perform complex soil analysis to increase crop yields. These participant responses are all grounded in speculation, but also work to interrogate present day uses of the GPS network. When the GPS network plays the stock market, it emphasises a little-known, but highly influential application of GPS. The project to increase farming yields understands GPS as one element in a wider infrastructural ‘stack’ in Benjamin Bratton’s (2015) terms. In this stack, the nature of interaction between machine and human elements is made more complex and interconnected, resembling what Bratton (2016: 5) describes as an ‘accidental megastructure’ that nonetheless forms a ‘coherent and interdependent whole’ with infinitely conceivable applications. Media Theory Vol. 3 | No. 2 | 2019 http://mediatheoryjournal.org/ 84 Case Study #2: GPS Tarot Wood sought to further explore such speculative methods in an exploratory project that builds on the one developed as part of the ‘DIY Cultures in the Anthropocene’ workshop mentioned above. The project, GPS Tarot (2016-present) (Wood et al, 2017b), involves tarot readings in which the cards are positioned according to the overhead positions of satellites. The readings are given either in person or via text message. Using a system developed over the course of the Sound Development City artists’ expedition, Wood reads one line of cards for events that are taking place in someone’s life, and another for their emotional trajectory. These readings should not be understood as fortune telling. Rather than telling the future, they are telling the present. This shift is not least for technical reasons: because of the speed at which the satellites move, a reading taken an hour later will involve placing cards in different positions and may have a radically different outcome. In this way, the rapid orbits of the satellites (at least rapid relative to the earth) offer a different type of temporality in which the present is fleeting and any understanding gained from a combination of satellite signals can only be held for a moment. In many user-facing applications temporal disruptions such as this are smoothed over by corrective algorithms. But here they are taken as conceptually significant, resulting in a conception of the present, and the narratives around it, which is fleeting and unstable. The project also interrogates one of the key design inscriptions of GPS today: the quest for greater accuracy. Readings are understood as interpretive and open-ended, not interested in giving an objective position in time and space, and certainly not one which comes from an object outside the environment in question. In this, it echoes the sentiment of Bruno Latour’s ‘geostories’ (2013), which are framed against those of NASA’s authorised narratives and visions of space. The external view of NASA’s planet science (and that implied by GPS mapping in all its forms) is abandoned in favour of one which is messy and open to multiple readings and interpretations. People who receive readings are entering into a different kind of hybridity, one in which the technical, emotional, and esoteric aspects of the practice intermingle so that these aspects can no longer be recognised on their own. This interdependence echoes the acts of ‘making kin’ proposed in Haraway’s (2016) call for acts of ‘worlding’, albeit in communion with technology rather than nature. LEORKE & WOOD | ‘Alternative Ways of Being’ 85 In GPS Tarot, a system from an alternative world is proposed: one in which GPS is used for spiritual as well as spatial navigation. This radical shift in the type of practices afforded by GPS takes us further away from our familiar uses and re-imagines the satellites as objects performing a different mode of address, one which we can hear if we listen in a different way. The project also uses the symbolic power of satellites to feed off a linguistic trick around their relationship with stars. An array of satellites is called a constellation, and, while people have long enjoyed multiple uses of star constellations for navigation, storytelling, and divination, the use of GPS satellites specifically has so far been more limited. Re-situating these satellites as objects of myth and divination imagines how they could be used in a different world, while at the same time questioning the uses we have for them in this one. The project was developed on the Sound Development City artists’ residency in 2016. Its starting motivation was a desire to develop an alternative mythology for GPS. The residency had set aside a provision for local fixers to connect artists with practitioners in Madrid. Wood requested to be placed in contact with psychics and fortune tellers hoping to speak to them about potential overlap between their practices and the symbolism of the GPS network. Unfortunately, local psychics were difficult to find so he bought a deck of tarot cards and set about teaching himself. The resulting system proposes an alternative reading system rather than an alternative set of cards that would form an indexical relationship between particular satellites and particular cards. A spread of cards is arranged in a way that matches the overhead positions of GPS satellites, then two lines are read in the chart; one for events and one for emotions. In this way shifting satellite positions influence the nature of these two lines. This influence is felt both in terms of the number of cards picked (dependent on how many satellites are in view) and the position of the cards in the spread (dependent on satellite positions). While the lines read in the chart remain consistent across readings, both the number of cards, and the relationship between cards inside and outside the reading lines can be highly influential. The project has not been subject to formal user testing, having been distributed as an artistic project through two modes: gallery exhibitions and the less formal route of business cards which pass from hand to hand (see Fig. 5 below). Since the project’s inception in autumn 2016, over 100 readings have taken place over text message and Media Theory Vol. 3 | No. 2 | 2019 http://mediatheoryjournal.org/ 86 in person. In the readings, Wood emphasises the importance of not understanding the outcome as a prediction of the future, but rather as a way of re-evaluating the present; the satellite network is extremely dynamic, with each GPS satellite orbiting the earth twice every 24 hours. The satellite positions which form the readings are therefore extremely temporary and fleeting, understood in the spirit of John Law’s call to ‘to make realities and hold them steady for a moment against a background of flux and indeterminacy’ (2005: 10; see Fig. 6). Figure 5. GPS Tarot business card for readings over SMS and WhatsApp. In terms of reception, participants typically reported interest in the GPS system, but took a greater interest in the context created in the reading for them to reflect on the narratives taking place in their lives. Tarot readings are, in part, a way of forming speculative narratives which people can compare to their hopes and expectations. This adds another speculative layer to the work, creating both a speculative reunderstanding of GPS satellites and speculation about participants’ lives. Informally, most participants have described these as ‘helpful’, ‘useful’ or ‘wonderful’. In 10 cases, Wood has done follow-up readings in the weeks following the initial contact. In this way, even if the project is not creating directly traceable critical or pedagogic outcomes regarding the operation of GPS, by acting as a poetic anchor or hook to the project the GPS network is still able to act in a new and engaging way and create new narratives and meaning for users. LEORKE & WOOD | ‘Alternative Ways of Being’ 87 Figure 6. A spread of cards in a reading. Note the matching arrangement of overhead GPS satellites as seen on the GPS Test app (top centre). Speculation, Locative Media, and Rethinking the Posthuman Both exploratory projects described above work to interrogate and complicate the ontological position of the GPS network. By ontological position we mean how the GPS network acts, what it signifies, and how a combination of those two things can enrich and deepen our understanding of what the network is and could be. This ‘zooming out’ provides a broader perspective and taps into speculative methods that dramatically de-contextualise the understandings of GPS built up through our everyday sociotechnical practices. The results are unlikely to lead to realised future technologies or mainstream reconfigurations of these networks and their implications. Media Theory Vol. 3 | No. 2 | 2019 http://mediatheoryjournal.org/ 94 towards an ontological repositioning of these technologies away from bodily interaction – through user-centred devices like sashes and umbrellas – and more towards the speculative, imaginative, and conceptual rethinking that other speculative works in design, fiction, art, and the moving image allow. They still require human presence and input in the form of drawings or gatherings around the tarot reading table. But they also decentre the human body in the process, shifting their participants’ perspective both spatially – from the local to the planetary – and temporally – from the present to alternative and future trajectories. Lastly, we acknowledge the limitations of speculation and imagination themselves within art, design, architecture, and performance. As Galloway (2013: 58) points out, speculative design, like science fiction, often remains tethered to the present. She quotes Carl DiSavlo: ‘Even as speculative design expresses alternatives it references, often mimicking, the status quo and replicates the various styles and themes of the moment. Because of this, close examinations of speculative design projects offer us a view of the present reinterpreted and in relief’ (2012: 2). Galloway contends, furthermore, that speculative design works still struggle to leave the art gallery or exhibition space; can be just as ‘normative and prescriptive as traditional, or “affirmative” product design’; and often rely on viral marketing techniques to gain wider traction (2013: 57-8). Galloway seeks to address these shortcomings more broadly by drawing attention to the production process itself within speculative design. She proposes a set of critical questions about process, drawing attention to the way speculative design is crafted and disseminated (2013: 61-2). These critiques are important, but we aim instead to explore more deeply how speculative fiction and design can explicate the materiality of locative media. By drawing on a combination of theory and practice we seek to challenge, reconfigure, and decentre existing understandings of the assemblage of human and non-human actors imbricated in the operation of locative media technologies, opening up avenues for further examining the possibilities and limitations such an approach affords. Conclusion In this paper we proposed a modest intervention into debates around locative media materiality that we hope will encourage debate and criticism about the various methods for understanding these technologies. We have not explicitly sought to address the LEORKE & WOOD | ‘Alternative Ways of Being’ 95 question of how to convey this understanding to a broader range of users beyond the limited scope of scholarly literature and artistic projects, as this is a much larger topic for another paper. Nonetheless, speculative fiction and design, we argue, provide a rich means of problem-forming which can be of use to designers and also to users whose practices consist of adapting, reforming, and re-interpreting locative technologies. Such work requires profound addressability (Lury and Wakeford, 2012) to the object of research and, to achieve this, we recommend that speculative methods get involved with the work of problem-forming by critiquing existing understandings of locative technology and its boundaries. Through a destabilisation of our contextual assumptions, speculative methods are particularly effective at questioning the ways locative technologies can be and act. In doing so, they aim to thicken these understandings in a way that inspires new questions and perspectives. Such enrichment of the object of research can take us beyond existing paradigms offering beneficial new perspectives for researchers, designers and users. 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Notes 1 We note that the term GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite Systems) may be more appropriate here as a collective name for the American GPS system, the Russian GLONASS system, and the Chinese Beidou system, among others. However, we have decided to use the more familiar, colloquial term ‘GPS’ to refer to all these systems. 2 Such blocks or disruptions in the performance of locative media can be caused by any number of factors. The most common environmental factors include buildings that block the receiver’s ‘view’ of the sky or cause signals to bounce off surfaces before reaching the device, preventing or delaying it from getting a location fix from the GPS satellites above; or differences in air humidity that can alter the speed at which signals travel. Corrective algorithms can mitigate these effects, but the receiver’s ability is always subject to such changing conditions. Milner (2016: Ch 6) also notes how GPS is vulnerable to deliberate disruption, such as jamming (i.e. truck drivers using signal jammers to prevent Media Theory Vol. 3 | No. 2 | 2019 http://mediatheoryjournal.org/ 102 companies from tracking their routes) and spoofing (devices or apps that generate a fake GPS signal which replaces the real one, fooling GPS-enabled devices and objects into thinking they are elsewhere). Such factors illustrate the extent to which GPS should be understood as a profoundly environmental and temporal infrastructure, as well as a spatial one. 3 A deeper explanation of the distinct genealogies and positions of ANT, OOT and related fields is beyond the scope of this article. But briefly, Barad’s work (2007) and other ANT-influenced approaches focus less on the ontologies of objects, demonstrated by their phenomenologies, and more on the actions that we ascribe to objects. In ANT terms, discreet, contained ontologies of objects appear to come about through repeated actions. These actions are not causally necessary, but may occur frequently enough to give rise to seem ontologically firm and immutable. Ontology, such as it is, should rather be understood as constantly emerging through a network of actions and interactions. 4 In this passage, the protagonist of White Noise (DeLillo, 1998: 148-9) is asked by his son, ‘What is a radio? What is the principle of a radio? Go ahead, explain. You’re sitting in the middle of this circle of people. They use pebble tools. They eat grubs. Explain a radio.’ The protagonist responds, ‘There’s no mystery. Powerful transmitters send signals. They travel through the air, to be picked up by receivers.’ To which his son replies: ‘They travel through the air. What, like birds? Why not tell them magic? They travel through the air in magic waves. What is a nucleotide? You don’t know, do you? Yet these are the building blocks of life. What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air? It goes from computer to computer. It changes and grows every second of every day. But nobody actually knows anything.’ 5 The full text of the drawing reads: ‘I imagine there has been a rift. A break between one civilisation and the next. A great forgetting. There has been no transfer between them. No passing on of knowledge or language. Only that which was stable enough to last without maintenance and repair remains. Can you find meaning in abstractions without being part of the same symbolic world? Is there a universal grammar based on embodied pattern recognition? We were asked about alternative uses of technology, but what about alternative meanings, attributions, hopes and fears? Alternative ways of being, dwelling and living with technology. Of recognising the signals not as technology but as beings or part of the world as it is.’ Dale Leorke is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies at Tampere University, Finland. His research focuses on the role of games and play within the cultural and economic development of cities. His other research interests include mobile and location-based media, smart cities, and the intersection of digitisation, cultural institutions and urban policy. He is the author of Location-based Gaming: Play in Public Space (Palgrave, 2018) and co-author (with Danielle Wyatt) of Public Libraries in the Smart City (Palgrave, 2018). His most recent publications can be found at: https://uta-fi.academia.edu/DaleLeorke Email: [email protected] Chris Wood is a researcher and artist whose practice centres on the ways in which sensory technologies construct space, both on an individual, phenomenological level and across networks. Chris also works professionally as a radio producer and sound designer. He recently completed a PhD in Media and Arts Technology at Queen Mary, University of London, and has exhibited installations and workshops internationally in Europe and North America. Email: [email protected]