Mobile Fictions, Interactivity & the Social Reconfiguration of Public Space

Abstract

This article examines two recent mobile fictions, “I Like Frank in Adelaide” (1) and “Go this Way”(2). Both creative events were performed through interaction with mobile communication technologies. I argue that to understand the production of interactivity in these works and the reconfiguration of urban sites as new media spaces, one needs to explore how the technological is cultural, and how telecommunication technologies that allow a sense of being/journeying in place/space mediate and produce subjectivity, identity and the experience of place in these new media spaces. A further intention of the article is to engage with the concerns that writers like Palmer express for a renewed focus on modes of “spectatorship” as they apply to digital media and artistic practices (Palmer 2001). “Spectatorship” is not an appropriate word for electronic and networked communication spaces that imply mobility and interactivity with publics, however it acts as a provocation towards an investigation of the relationships between the works themselves and the publics who interact/produce them. An unfortunate contribution to misunderstanding the public’s relationship to many locative media art works is the argument that telecommunication events, as immaterial art works, produce no new media objects and therefore cannot be conceived in the same way as other art or media forms. (Manovich 2001). This argument is often used to support the problems associated with documenting the events or regarding them as significant objects of aesthetic or ethnographic enquiry, events in which artists provide a context but where publics themselves in real time in fact produce the event. The institutional research context has more recently accommodated and invested in the technological aspects of selected locative media works, however, an understanding of their producer/participants often remains camouflaged within the dynamics of the events themselves. This article does not propose an approach or methodology for designing new forms of research that might address these problems, however it consciously draws on writers who critique the development of interactivity and subjectivity in new media environments from the perspective of their understandings of their precursors in earlier media forms, such as writing, television and radio. It must be stated here also that the article is not a “description of two interactive events”, designed to evidence theories about interactivity or “spectatorship” with mobile and locational based media works. Rather, it takes those events as objects to explore the relationships produced between components of their social construction from a cultural studies perspective. The article’s broad intention is thus to contribute to the existing scholarly conversation that concerns itself with a reconceptualisation of the “subject”, “place” and “identity” with sitespecific art.