I have been interested in locative sound and locative media for awhile now. But it occurred to me that I had not really addressed the most fundamental issue regarding location. Is there an implicit desire for a modernist “all-knowing, all seeing” in such work (e.g. Magellan or google earth ), or is there room for an alternative individual psycho-geography (eg. Debord) that could take place? Clearly, projects using GPS fall into a dangerous zone of triangulation and surveillance. But harnessing these powers seems possible. The debates concerning technology are longstanding, and the totalizing desires of modernity to control and subject itself seem to only fuel these debates. Still, could this new, explicit form of categorzation of site be a potential site for unfolding and exposing these desires?

Certain projects have come to the fore in recent years that bring such questions into a zone of debate, as well as interesting conferences (such as the tactical urban map hack workshop and others at V_2 ). But if we are to attempt destabilize zones of totality in favor of local production, are there ways of linking these local sites without eventually falling prey to their very goals (oh my!). Not a small question, and certainly texts as beautifully flawed as Empire and critically infused as mike davis’ offer suggestions. But if the real issues regarding combined and uneven development are now being left for local solutions (and in the extreme, micro-politics of the body), is there a way to link these struggles?

Map Office spoke at Engaging the City here in New York recently, and I found their projects to be both challenging in their locality (they called individual zones Pixels) as well as radical in their emphasis upon informal economies and interstitial space use. In China’s Pearl River Delta, beneath bridges and highways are entire societies and industries, harnessing the power (literally, the electricity) and structure of the highways, entire non-cities grow and blossom. Should we categorize them? Does acknowledging them suffice? What can we learn from the in between spaces, without totalizing them. The Derives suggested by map office, who often walks or bikes for miles, learning new geographies, propose that there are certain structures of habitation that these sites have in common. However, there are many differences as well. Map Office noted one manufacturing plant in a “Pixel” that used water lillies to purify the company’s waste water, while others are so bland that they blend into one another to provide a new sort of generic horizon.

In this compulsion for commonality and complete understanding, it seems that informal zones of exchange and interaction are thriving as well. Perhaps simply siting these, that is, mapping them, does not destroy them per se, but allows a potential linking of these interstitial zones for new forms and constallations.Perhaps.