Representing and Embodying Space, Place, and Identity
Definitions:
Space: that which we create in and around us by virtue of our bodily presence, by virtue of our relationship with other bodies (including objects), and by virtue of practices of representation (digital or otherwise).
Place: those specific spaces to which we are affectively attached, bound, or oriented toward by virtue of meaningful relationships with other bodies (including objects) and through embodied operations of power (biopolitics).
Identity: the enduring bodily and psychic perception and conception of self across spacetime(s), including the extension of self through cultural tools, technologies, and virtualities.
Questions:
1. Bjørn Sletto’s “‘We Drew What We Imagined’: Participatory Mapping, Performance, and the Arts of Landscape Making” and Jason Farman’s “Mapping and Representations of Space” made me think about questions of access. While the term has become increasingly fraught in light of oversimplified debates around “the digital divide,” I would like to consider its usefulness for thinking about the issues Sletto raises regarding power differentials between ethnographers and the communities in which they do participatory mapping projects, as well as the various uses for digital mapping and visualization Farman discusses. Sletto’s article suggests that social, cultural, and political belonging relies on granting access to certain spaces and modes of knowledge to some individuals while denying it to others; similarly, issues of power became most salient for him and his participants when the question of who could have access to GIS training and technology was raised. How is the liberatory potential of mobile technologies circumscribed by issues of access? This question at once seems too simplistic. How might power differentials inherent in the use of mobile technologies and visualization tools be used more effectively to create projects with an explicit focus on social justice, in a way that is not simply “giving technology to the masses”? On a related note, technology and the knowledge required to use it do not just “trickle down”—how can we use the increasingly pervasive nature of mobile technology to make the skills involved more accessible? What are the implications of advocating the representational powers of mobile and visualization technologies when the faraway (and not so far away) labor and lives that make it possible are made to be invisible or are supposedly impossible to locate and therefore imagine?
2. The pervasive, if not perfectly total, capacities of surveillance were a recurrent them throughout this week’s readings, and concurrently, the use of data-gathering to create markets and marketing strategies. Which bodies and subjects are considered outside the purview of or unworthy of surveillance? When, and where? If mobile technology has heightened or slightly shifted the panoptical nature of surveillance, what kinds of distinctions can we make about the types and degrees of surveillance, and what might this tell us about the neoliberalization of everyday life, for whom? From Farman’s chapter, it seems that the possibilities for subverting surveillance techniques proliferate in digital cultural productions, but how might locative and mobile technologies themselves be hacked or even “democratized” to change the kinds of surveillance to which we subject ourselves and others?
3. In thinking of landscapes as information interfaces via Farman, I recalled transgender scholar Eva Hayward’s writing about the experience of transitioning as the experience of growing new senses, of becoming more sensate and more responsive to one’s environment, of learning new ways of being in the world. She specifically describes living in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood and having to deal with new intensities of smell, taste, sound, and touch while undergoing hormone treatment. This makes me think of other embodied experiences of augmented reality that get away from digital mobile technology’s prioritizing of visual modes. How might we use technology, digital or otherwise, to extend our experience of emplacement in more haptic, extra-sensory ways? How might we learn to feel augmented reality as opposed to seeing it (not that feeling and seeing are completely separate from one another, of course)?