Soumis par admin le 9 juin, 2008 - 16:09

I always have a vague yet persistent feeling of uneasiness when it comes to mobile and locative media art: a sense of play and liberty coupled with a tragic consciousness of locative media's capitalist blood ties. The politics and economics of mobile locative art have been partially addressed in issue 7 of .dpi , “Hard Mobility”, on mobility and hacking, 1 but can be further illustrated here by relatively well known projects that make use of Global Positioning System (GPS) enabled cellphones and PDAs to transform cities into sites of play. These projects include the various works of Blast Theory 2 and the likes of Urban Tapestries 3 by Proboscis, 4 which all clearly show how blurry the lines can become between artistic practice, academic research and corporate interests. Various military-industrial-entertainment complexes are part of today's reality and determine the terms of our contemporary constructions of utopia.