Introduction

While the WTO protests in Seattle are now commonly cited as having marked the symbolic beginning of a new radicalism, they also signified the emergence of a neo-tribal collectivism brought about by mobile connectivity (a kind of ‘tech-nomadic’ space that McCluhan would have called an acoustic space ). At the protests, the police moved on the demonstrators as a phalanx, their strategy synchronized through a central dispatcher. The protesters, however were able to scatter at one moment, and come together the next, by using their cell phones to communicate their movements to one another, demonstrating a collective behaviour that has been compared to that of birds flocking [17]. 

With mobile telephony having been adopted at a rate that is unprecedented in communications history, we are only just beginning to consider its potential impacts on patterns of social space. In what follows, I consider some of the potential promises and implicit dangers of networked mobility by focussing on what has been hyped as the technology’s killer app.: location-awareness. This articles attempts to turn theory into practice, by discussing the design of a potential forum for this ‘tech-nomadic’ collectivism modelled on graffiti and based on the creative use of positioning information in the context of public Wi-Fi networks. Designed by Karlis Kalnins, Pablo Mochkovsky and myself , the Geographiti project discussed below is an open-access system for location-aware mobile networking that allows its users to post and receive geo-coded ‘virtual graffiti’ to architectonic space.

With the development of communications technologies, we have witnessed the progressive de-localization of information.  Where once people required a definitive "here" to receive information, communication advances have allowed for greater amounts of distance between the sender and the receiver, to the point where, with the Internet for example, information, in terms of access, has no real location at all. In location-aware computing however, data is associated with distinct physical locations on the geo-sphere, and accessed by mobile users based on their relative position in relation to that information. With accurate methods for positioning of a wireless device, new mobile interfaces can effectively ‘co-register’ spatial data with real space, thereby creating what Virilio refers to as ‘stereo-reality’ [22]. A particularly resonant example of this can be found in the ‘pervasive gaming’ phenomenon. With AR Quake, for example, a level of the popular online video game has been scaled, aligned and co-registered with GPS (the Global Positioning System) so as to be navigable in geographic space with a translucent head-mounted display  [15]. Given the centrality of surveillance to this new technique for information visualization, I propose grounding my theoretical analysis of this technology in Paul Virilio’s radical critique of ‘hypermodernism’ and subsequently focussing on the potential for location-aware technology as a tool for individual creative expression and community building with reference to social constructivist theory.

“One cannot understand the development of information tech, without understanding the evolution of military strategy.”
Paul Virilio [23]

Though lauded as a post-modern philosopher of science and technology, at his core Paul Virilio is a peculiar sort of military historian whose theories paradoxically hinge on the city as the site of struggle between military control and anarchic liberation. In Virilio’s military origins of the city, urban space is controlled by military cartographers, whose lines of sight have determined the extent of mappable, and thus, controllable territory. The further the cartographer’s view of the territory/city extended, the more time it allowed to defend the city, and the further in turn the city grew outwards; making the city a temporal event related to control of the territory. Thus the Atlantic Wall of bunkers that the Germans built to defend fortress Europe in World War II, in Virilio’s theory, transformed Europe into a continent wide city [16]. Following this line, the entire planet has become a generalized urban security zone, surveillanced by military satellites such as GPS, with which one’s exact location can be determined from anywhere on the planet by triangulating the time of arrival of satellite transmissions.  “Sovereignty no longer resides in the territory, but in the control of the territory” [21], and, as William Bogard notes, in the generation of its simulation which distracts attention from the underlying disciplinary regimes of power in space [4]. 

“there is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.”
 Giles Deleuze [7]

While, in an increasingly mediated society, military derived technologies of surveillance and simulation attempt to control people, there remains a destabilizing force at the heart of Virilio’s city. While cartographers organize space by attempting to control its flows, the city essentially emerged at the intersection of the flows when nomads settled down in walled cities, giving-up some of their freedom in exchange for protection (thus urban space is a defensible space of ‘habitable stasis’ [18]). The anarchic Virilio believes that the city’s streets retain a connection to the nomadic territorial order and continue to introduce nomadic vectors which cannot be controlled and out of which all the meaningful movements in history have emerged. Inspired by Virilio’s early work [7] Deleuze and Guattari developed the concept of nomadology as a way of constructing space that grows out of a territorial connection with place [6]. As an example, they present the itinerant labourers who built the great cathedrals of Medieval Europe. These ‘freemasons’, whose guilds have always remained outside of the State, constructed space from the rock itself, in contrast to the conceptual space of the architects according to whose plans the monuments were built. Similarly, for Henri Lefebvre, all social movements produce their own integral fluid spaces, while architects and urban planners, as handmaids of the State, produce ‘representations of space’ that encode hierarchical power dynamics into the built environment, where they become naturalized and erased from view [11]. These ‘representations of space’ marginalize and fracture the social body so that the head can no longer see the feet (Lefebvre), severing meaningful connections with place (Deleuze and Guattari), and ultimately, through an abstract spectacle of circulation, they exert perceptual control on the atomized individual generating a cultural nihilism which manifests itself as a will to speed (Virilio). Yet, while the State attempts to channel the flows of the nomad, it is sedentary and static while nomads are mobile and emergent (for which Deleuze and Guattari use the metonym of the rhizome; a decentred, heterogeneous collective assemblage). Exemplified in the aforementioned case of the Seattle protesters, we can thus conceive of a contemporary nomadic space as a sort of jumping scale rhizome extending from the space of the body through to a free society in which people become architects of their own space, time and being.

“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 [2]

As a tool to facilitate the emergence of nomadic social spaces, the Geographiti project has created an open access location-aware communications system based on the metaphor of graffiti. Etymologically derived from the Roman practice of scratching political messages onto public walls (graffito), graffiti has a long political history throughout many cultures, as a radical tactic for free expression. Yet, despite graffiti having flourished globally into arguably the art of ‘the streets’ over the past 30 years, it invariably remains perceived as an invasion of public space. From Baudrillard’s perspective, graffiti is clearly a manifestation of the nomadic territorial order in contemporary urban society, however as a violation of the most basic principles of social order, an academic defence of a ‘graffitists’ right to tag on these abstract grounds is practically a difficult argument to make. The Geographiti project emerged as an attempt to resolve this dilemma. Geographiti can be conceived of as a kind of ‘virtual graffiti’ that is accessible through special digital mobile devices only, allowing users to invest space with a symbolic component without visibly altering the landscape. With Geographiti, a user creates a waypoint  on a location-aware mobile device and uploads it, via a network link, to the GPSter database. Any subsequent, similarly equipped mobile user can then also request waypoints from the database and, via the network link, receive messages particular to that point in space as well.  After having realized the initial goal of the project --to create a universal open-access waypoint-sharing (Figure 1.) -- we developed a proof-of-concept mobile client application to send and receive waypoint data from the field (Figure 2.). Users enter range, keywords and coordinates to search the GPSter waypoint database and results can be viewed on maps or automatically as one enters into their respective locations via the wireless client application. “It is based on a simple idea: every person has some favourite spots on this planet, so why not share those with others?”[2]

Fig. 1                    Fig. 2 
Fig 1: The GPSter search interface (www.GPSter.net/search.html). Fig 2: The Geographiti client searching by location and keyword 

  The other imported aspect of the graffiti metaphor for the sake of this project is the notion that the messages in this virtual space should be accessible by everyone on the system.  As opposed to other experiments in location-based services that have conceived of the technology as a marketing tool for broadcasting advertisements to consumers, the concept of Geographiti, like that of the original Internet, was designed as a distributed, non-hierarchical communications tool. Examples of the corporate, advertising driven, future envisioned for location-based services include Starbucks experiments with pushing customers SMS messages to alert them to the presence of a branch outlet in the user's cell zone and Hewlett Packard’s Cooltown project (whose ridiculous corporate videos envision a global infrastructure for a proprietary HP location awareness whereby only HP licensed hardware will access HP licensed content [1]). In our opinion, these corporate visions of location-awareness are invasive, exclusive and depersonalizing. We have thus conceived the Geographiti project, in response, as a means for people to access the potential of location-based communications technologies as a tool for community building. 

  The Alpha prototype for the Geographiti system ran on a wireless local area network over the 802.11 (or Wi-Fi) standard, and used a GPS device for positioning. While the addition of a GPS receiver gave the application a degree of positioning that allowed users to exchange messages every 10M+/- or so, one could also implement a Geographiti system over Wi-Fi that would not require any special hardware, by using Wi-Fi Cell-ID for positioning . Open-access public Wi-Fi networks are being set-up for seamless wireless roaming in large cities; the idea being to share bandwidth (each operator offers their access point for public usage in exchange for access to other access points). The relatively local nature of public Wi-Fi networks as well as the communitarian spirit from which they are growing fits perfectly with the philosophy of the Geographiti project, making them ideal environments for deploying this type of system. 

Geographiti on a public Wi-Fi network would create a kind of 3-D ‘virtual graffiti wall’ only visible to those looking for it, however, unlike ‘tagging’ this graffiti would not be invasive. Following socio-constructivist thought one could argue that graffiti is a manifestation of the nomadic territorial order positioned in opposition to the despotic State, which destroys graffiti in order to reinforce its own dominant representation of space. But, while the streets, as Virilio contends, may be the forum from which all the meaningful movements in history have emerged, a universal defence of graffiti on these grounds is surely an unenviable task. With the Geographiti system of virtual graffiti however, censorship would be replaced with intelligent social filtering on the level of individual. Invisible to those who do not wish to see, this digitally geo-coded realm would free both nomadic territoriality and the architect’s spatial imagination from the tyranny of consensual reality empowering us to create and inhabit the ultimate utopian dream of the wall-less architecture or the frameless film. 

“Step through it!”
Roni Size [13]

Bibliography

Rasa: my version of word completely destroys the bibliography, so best use the original version. It looks fine, just a typo in the first entry (promotional)

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  In contrast with the linearity of visual space that McCluhan claims the written word strongly biases, the acoustic spaces of our networked society envelop us in environments whose ‘centre is everywhere but whose margins are nowhere.’
  Police have now started to blackout cellular frequencies at the site of possible demonstrations.
  We consider the Geographiti project as being a local chapter of a global project for developing open-access location-aware computing.
  According to one noted expert: “soon a level of accuracy will be achieved for both indoor and outdoor locations that will allow the colour to be set for a cubic centimetre of space, forming volumetric pixels ([or] Voxels)” [14].
  Virilio claims that the commercialization of GPS technology, which is available for US$100 +/- and accurate to 10M +/- “constitutes the event of the decade as far as the globalization of location goes” [20]
  In his later work on what he calls dromology, “the logic of the race”, Virilio frames his study of social control via the governance of ‘flows’. Here, the centralized discipline of Foucault’s enclosure become superseded, by “ultra-rapid free-floating forms of control”[18], where power articulates itself through the control of phenomenological ‘flows’ and interruptions on the phenomenological level of perception itself. According to Virilio, the growth of the media industries in the post-war era can be considered together with the birth of the military industrial complex as constituting a general miltarization of society. “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.” [19] Virilio’s thesis is given credence by a 1997 the National Research Council White paper written for the US department of defence that outlines the mandate for the military to work together with game developers to share innovation and recruit gamers [8].
  A waypoint is a reference point to ones geographic location that normally has a few words attached to it (such as, for example, ‘John Coltrane’s Grave N 4045.0780 W 07324.1920’). Typically waypoints are created by mariners, geographers or outdoors enthusiasts to aid in mapping and plotting courses of navigation and are not generally shared, nor, before GPSter, had there been any system for sharing waypoints across large numbers of users.
  An access point’s hardware address can be associated with a discrete geographical location to create publicly available positioning information accurate to 100M+/-. This coarse positioning can, in turn, be semantically divided into sub-zones to which users can leave messages (e.g., "by the soda machine"). A model for a location-based information system of this type has been developed at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science [12].
  The project is scheduled to do a large-scale test of the Alpha application at the University of Tennessee, which has 1300 access points on one network.