The construction of locative situations: locative media and the Situationist International, recuperation or redux?

Abstract

This paper will address the trend within locative media art of invoking the practices of the Situationist International (SI) as an art historical and theoretical background to contemporary practices. It is claimed that locative media seeks to re-enchant urban space though the application of locative technologies to develop novel and experimental methods for navigating, exploring and experiencing the city. To this end SI concepts such as psychogeography and the techniques of detournement and the dérive (drift) have exerted considerable influence on locative media practices but questions arise as to whether this constitutes a valid contemporary appropriation or a recuperative co-option, serving to neutralize their inherent oppositional qualities.The paper will argue that there is an identifiable strand of locative art works which through their contingent re appropriation of Situationist techniques can be thought of as being involved in the 'construction of locative situations' and that these (re)applications of the SI practices point to future directions for locative media's artistic engagement with the accelerating ubiquity of locative technologies.

The not-yet-tropical: mapping recombinant ecologies in a Sydney suburb

“…This was a discovery. (A, personal communication, 2019) Walking is an established research methodology in creative arts disciplines (Debord, 1981(Debord, [1958; Edensor, 2010;McGarrigle, 2010;Pink, 2007;Pink et al, 2010) and ethnography (Edensor, 2008;Ingold and Vergunst, 2008;Pink, 2007;Pink et al, 2010) and is often combined with mapping. Walking has also become a popular methodology to investigate embodied ways of knowing and understanding our environments (Vergunst, 2010).…”

Navigating the ‘archive city’

“…The work of scholars such as Ian Gregory, who have pioneered development in the field of Historical GIS (Gregory and Geddes, 2014), or Bodenhamer et al (2010), whose collection of essays The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship marked an important milestone in the disciplinary embedding of scholarship in this field, sit alongside that of a growing cohort of researchers and practitioners who are exploring the productive interface between space and place, memory and history and digital humanities practice. This is evident across a number of subject areas, including, most notably, film and cinema (Hallam and Roberts, 2014; Klenotic, 2011; Roberts, 2012a, 2012b; Verhoeven et al, 2009), but also literary studies (Cooper and Gregory, 2011; Cooper et al, 2015), popular music (Cohen, 2012; Long and Collins, 2012), theatre and performance (Robinson et al, 2011), architecture and the built environment (Speed, 2012), and psychogeography and artistic practice (McGarrigle, 2010), to cite just a handful of the emerging scholarship in this area.…”

Computingen plein air

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