with Connie Svabo Visiting Scholar, Stanford University Assistant Professor, Roskilde University
We have since dealt with some of the loose ends introduced in the paper, as well as editing out some repetition and redundancy. The bibliography is incomplete in this version.
keywords: phone camera, photography, new media, place, space
April 2012. Instagram, a free photo sharing app(lication) for mobile phones, was bought by Facebook, the social networking giant, for $1 billion. Instagram is a small Silicon Valley start up with less than two dozen employees and 30 million users. Their elegant app lets you filter your photos, usually making them look like something taken on an old camera from the 1960s, and share them with friends. The typical user owns an iPhone, the most popular camera on earth. The 16 GB device holds around 15,500 photos and is in the pockets and purses of more than 100 million people. When the app was made available to the Android platform a month earlier, over a million were downloaded in 12 hours. Facebook was not buying into the photosharing world. At the time of the purchase over 250 million photos are uploaded daily by Facebook’s 800 million users. But the mobile app for Facebook is clunky; Instagram lets you simply and easily tell visual stories: visuality and mobile presence are the keystones of the online social experience. And Facebook has just bought the memories of those 30 million Instagramers (and owns the intellectual property). Each photo is geo-tagged. Facebook can tell what you like, when, with whom, and where — rather useful information for the advertisers that supply its revenue base.
Two months earlier, in January 2012, Eastman Kodak, the 113 year old pioneer of film photography, the company that dominated the photoworld of the twentieth century, inventor of the snapshot and popular photography, filed for bankruptcy.
Mixed realities: the intersections of media and place
Media have gone to ground. Media affect the way people make sense of the world, and with the spread of mobile media this power and function is ever more pertinent. Mobile media and ubiquitous computing create mixed and hybrid realities where the digital realm and physical environment are intertwined. Mobile media provide users with a portable media reality which they may access from almost any physical location, and digital functions are increasingly also embedded in non-screen based materials (Kuniavsky 2011). Mobile media devices know where they are to within a few meters; locational information is a key component of many of their functions, whether that simply be to offer maps of immediate and distant vicinity, or a review of the restaurant across the road, or notification that a friend is around the corner. The tendency is that we will not just access the virtual world via a computer, but live in mixed and hybrid realities. For this reason there is a growing need for interdisciplinary approaches and studies that deal with both mediation and spatiality, and for a detailed theorising of the interactions between users, media and physical space.
This evolution of media has, of course, been noted in the academy. A ‘spatial turn’ has been proclaimed in media studies (Falkheimer & Jansson 2006), and more generally in the human and social sciences (Bjerre & Fabian 2010). At the same time there is a reverse orientation towards media and mediation in spatial disciplines (Adams 2010: 37; Thielmann 2011). In order to build a sophisticated understanding of mediated engagements in physical space, it is relevant to draw on disciplines such as cultural and human geography, archaeology and anthropology, which foreground issues of human life, time and memory, physical environments and spatial experience. These intellectual traditions underpin this article, which furthermore is informed by science & technology studies, and media & cultural studies. Our contribution is articulated from the hotspot where these disparate disciplines and fields of study coincide in theorizing social and cultural reality as emergent, socio-materially constituted and performatively enacted. The central point we hope to make is that phone camera photography comprises ongoing, processual engagements with the everyday. We wish to shift attention from the photos that cameras take to the political economy of these engagements.
Mobile phones are a communication technology with immense cultural and social implications. They are everywhere. The number of mobile phones in use in 2011 was well above 5 billion globally and in economically rich countries people do not just own one phone, they own several; one or two in frequent use and a couple of old ones lying around in unorganized drawers. Not everyone in the world lives in such material abundance, but also in developing countries the pervasiveness of mobile phones is very evident. The United Nations Telecommunications Union (ITU) reports that in June 2010 more than half of rural households in developing countries have mobile phonesi. Although they may not own a phone, and the phone probably is not a smart phone with internet access, it is not a gross overstatement to say that almost everybody in the world has access to a mobile phone.
In economically rich countries, mobile phones are abundant in number and pervasive in use. People have their phones with them all of the time and everywhere. Mobile phones have profoundly changed everyday interactions in private and public spaces. They have changed how we coordinate activities and how we communicate with each other. They are at hand whether at home, at school, work or on the go. In all sorts of situations of watching TV, cooking, waiting for the bus, riding the train, walking the street, driving a car, people are engaged with their phones. They are used as watches, alarm clocks, telephones, minicomputers, tv screens, gaming consoles, textprocessing units, calendars, notepads, calculators, texting devices and cameras. People are constantly linked to their phones, and a prognosis is that we won’t even need the device itself in the future; we will be able to use our skin and clothes as touchpad and interface, and will thus have taken the ultimate step towards realizing our hybrid cyborg character (Laptop magazine, January 2012).
So phones are no longer phones. They are hybrid, morphing, multifunctional devices. They are not just devices. At the heart of mobile media lies the interoperability of global networks, physical infrastructures of cabling, production and management facilities, server farms and satellites, and the standards upon which interoperability is established — agreements over data and transmission formats, regulation of patents, intellectual property, access to bandwidth. And more and more the visual is offered as a key component — pictures, moving and still, accompany every function of mobile devices.
Mobile media phone cameras: the quotidian and the vernacular
The camera, as a function of mobile devices, has become a protean and invasive network. Its images are pervasive, viral, sticking to everything, propagating everywhere. The snapshot is a popular genre that takes photography into family rituals and vacations, an aesthetic counter to professional and studio photography. Photography now is reaching deep into the everyday.
Mobile phones invite us to think of photography as an aspect of interactive, multimedia practices, as processes of participatory engagement, and as hybrid experiences. Smart phones acting as mobile cameras differ from other kinds of (digital) cameras by their ubiquity, multifunctionality, computing capacity, internet access and location sensitivity. With ubiquitous mobile devices photography becomes an even more common way of engaging with the everyday, and the genre of snapshot photography is expanded with more images of more mundane objects, situations and places. This does not radically change the genre, but it accentuates that ubiquitous mobile phones are integral and constituent features of hybrid experiences of the everyday, and forms the basis for understanding phone camera photography as sensory engagement with the world where the point of exchange between person and world repeatedly is extended into the camera phone. The mobile phone/camera has become a sensory prosthetic, and not just of vision.
The pervasiveness of mobile phones, their multifunctionality and their strong computing capacity that, among other things, gives access to the internet, changes contemporary culture and social interaction in the everyday. This also affects photography. With mobile phones cameras also become a pervasive technology which is always there and coupled up to the internet. Photography is already a common cultural practice, but with mobile phones photography becomes an even more inherent aspect of everyday life, and not just in situations of tourism or leisure, which otherwise has been the typical domain of snapshot photography (Lee 2010; Van House 2011). Phone cameras give people the possibility of taking pictures in all sorts of situations while going about their everyday activities. Mobile phone cameras give users the option of visually reflecting on and appropriating their physical surroundings; as well as the option of publishing and distributing images via messaging, publication on social networking, photo sharing and other web sites. Phones are used both to consume and produce culture, and because of the multiple functions of phones, phone cameras are more frequently in use than other types of digital cameras.
Old snapshot photography, one of the features of the everyday in the twentieth century was also systemic. Easy picture taking depended upon infrastructures of manufacture and supply (cameras, film, chemicals), processing, distribution, standards of chemistry and format (35mm, Kodachrome, APS etc). Photography has broken free from these networks, by means of new types of engagement with the everyday.
The phone camera works relationally. This means that the importance of the phone camera lies in its relations to numerous ‘others’, both material and immaterial. The phone camera in itself is a technology of multiplicity (Mol & Law 2002). It is a device with multiple functions, and in this sense may be seen to be dependent on its own ‘implicit others’. What this means is that the various capabilities of being phone, camera, calendar, clock etc. mutually enforce each other. The many functions create a metamorphic device, a device which asserts its own importance through its multiplicity. It is not singular, but a hybrid conglomerate of entertainment, organization, navigation, communication and creation (Svabo 2010: 189). Much of the value of photography now lies in linkage – and the more heterogeneous connections the better.
Furthermore, the mobile phone is, relationally, a sociotechnical assemblage. Obviously technological infrastructure is a central constituent feature; it is not much fun having a phone in areas where there is no coverage, let alone electricity. But also aspects such as pockets, prices, existing cultural practices and transportation systems form part of the sociotechnical practices in which phones are entangled and upon which they depend (Ito 2005:13; Van House 2011; Bijker & Law; Law 2002; Latour 2005).
Mobile interactive multimedia devices: (process, performance, time)
To reiterate: mobile devices are not phones. They are devices that offer a phone application, among many others. (Consider that the iPod Touch from Apple is a mobile connected device just like the iPhone, it just doesn’t offer telecommunications connectivity.)
For the past two decades the desktop computer has been synonymous with everyday computer use, but this is no longer the case. Users carry a computer with them all of the time – in the form of their phones: as of February 2012 nearly half (46 per cent) of American adults are smartphone owners, the same figure applies for the UK, which is the EU country with the highest rate of smart phone penetration, seconded by Spain’s 45 per cent. Japanese mobile internet use is the highest in the world with more than 85 per cent of adults having a mobile phone, and almost all of these (97 per cent) being phones with access to minimum 3G internet.
Throughout the past decade, Japanese internet use via mobile phones has been a heavy counterweight to the orthodoxy of stationary computer use, based upon desktop immersive engagements. Mobile devices in Japanese everyday life show patterns of use which are now also increasingly common in the US and Europe, namely internet access as ubiquity, portability and lightweight engagement (Ito 2005: 6). Reportedly, the growing orientation towards phones as central entryways to the internet is also causing a shift in investments in digital services towards mobile based services (New York Times April 11, 2012).
Mobile devices very much embody the pervasiveness of computing for everyday users. Although computing is built into all sorts of things – buildings, surveillance systems, car keys – many of these computing abilities are more or less unnoticed; they are background or embedded services or capabilities. Because of the internet access which phones provide, the devices’ computing aspects are up front, directly accessed and in use. The phone is appreciated for this quality and the access it gives to virtuality. One of the central things which the device does,is to provide ‘fluid, individualized connectivity’ (Chun 2006:1).
Mobile phones form part of a new internet and network based, decentralised media reality, where the internet is both a central repository for known cultural forms (Miller 2010:14) and a constituent feature in new forms. One central aspect of this new media reality is that the production of media content is dispersed. Centralized media production and transmission is being supplemented with user driven media production and distribution. It is for this reason that digital media are characterized as participatory and interactive (Jensen 1998). New media forms make the central role of users as producers very apparent. The productive role of the user in relation to new media is to choose, produce and alter content as well as to consume it (Jensen 2002). People increasingly are assuming roles as co-producers. Media technologies form part of dialogic processes. At the heart of digital media is interactivity, the dynamic, which takes us from the ‘object’ (document) towards event and processes of documentation.
A pertinent and major example here is that of journalism. From the point of view of news corporations, reporting is in crisis because people with mobile devices at the location of a news event can share that event, offering access, presence, a sense of authenticity, long before a professional reporter gets to the scene. The ongoing manifestation of a news event has come to take precedence over a scripted and polished report. The result is that media companies cannot maintain journalism in the way they once did and have lost their monopoly on broadcasting stories about the everyday. Instead savvy newspapers and news agencies have turned to offering features analysis and the curation of news — organizing, packaging and presenting aggregates or assemblages of on-going documentation. Again, process, mediated experience of newsworthy event, real-time accounts of being there and witnessing, are taking precedence over media product, the news story.
Photography carried out with phones is one of various interrelated forms of multimedia communication – all anchored by the mobile device. With its capability to interact with various modes of communication such as text, sound, and images, the phone may be characterized a multimedia device (Okada 2005: 47). The mobile device runs in time-based media, in the flow of interaction, linkage, exchange and communication:
“Once we start to consider digital media as producing processes, experiences, or conversations in continual flux more than they are producing finite ‘objects’, the more we are able to see how digital media have as much as, or perhaps more, in common with the tradition of the telephone or other telecommunications than with the aesthetic tradition of the novel or the painting.” (Miller 2010:31)
This implies a move from thinking about the digital image as a stable object, fixed, frozen – akin to a painting, and instead thinking of the practice of photography as process, where, if compared with other art forms, it most would resemble performance for its ephemeral qualities.
From media to modes of engagement
The term medium has usually referred to an institutional agency of communication, such as TV, or the materials and methods used in the production of an artwork, such as oil on canvas. Media have typically been seen as formalized methods for conveying specific kinds of information to specific participants, involving issues of control and negotiation, for example in relation to institutional control of technologies. This is changing.
At the heart of the digital is fungibility: the ability to transform and morph from one form into another while retaining the fidelity of an original. Fungibility makes the original multiple. The choreography of previously diverse and discrete materials (image, text, sound, video) through the digital realm inevitably breaks down the structural properties of what have been commonly referred to as 'media'. Fungibility, the fluid manner in which visual material, for example, is turned into animation, photographic print, painting, digital video grab, film, photographic transparency and so on, means that material form is less and less important in defining the 'medium' of the product generated. Instead, and in celebration of Roland Barthes notion of the 'death of the author', the way a reader or viewer is engaged by those agencies which distribute cultural works, and the way authors/makers engage their audience in specific ways, occasions and sites is an increasingly significant factor in any attempt to mark the difference between given works. Hence we propose that the notion of mode of engagement offers a more accurate and useful way to categorize the format and placement of cultural works in the public or private arena. Crucially, these formats are not being driven so much by subject matter or discipline (one concern of The Academy), nor the material or form (one concern of The Studio), but by an interface or hybridization of distributing institutions, individuals, families and social or professional groupings. Media are now so evidently about social/cultural groups making themselves via things/interactions/information transfers. As the revenue problems of the traditional media industries like journalism and Hollywood show, media are less now material/technological forms or forms of discourse (TV, publishing, movies, the music industry). Media are not ‘media’ per se — coming between, mediating units that are given, a posteriori, primacy, but are intimate aspects of the fabrication of the social and cultural fabric.
Consider the many modes of engagement with a digital image: projected on a large screen in a lecture room and viewed together with a large audience of enthusiasts for its subject matter, printed in a photo album and shared in the family kitchen, viewed absent-mindedly from a car on a billboard alongside a freeway, scrutinised on the high resolution screen of a mobile phone held in the palm of one’s hand as one walks a pet dog. An oil painting may have been copied as an engraving or a photograph and subject to different modes of engagement. What is different now is the ease of translation from one type of engagement to another. And the exact same (original) digital image file is shared among all the experiences that are otherwise very different in their location, circumstances, and in their rhetoric.
Photography has been an integral part of popular culture throughout the 20th century, and with phone cameras are emerging new practices of vernacular photography. The internet and mobile phones are translating photography into new media practices.
“The snapshot camera, which was introduced by Kodak in 1883, is an old portable medium that allows users to record personal experiences. The camera makes it possible for anyone to visualize his or her being in the moment, thus pursuing democratized aesthetics. However, these possibilities were not fully explored, as snapshot practices were institutionalized mostly as constituents of family rituals and tourism.” (Lee 2010: 266)
It is interesting to explore the use of digital photography in situations that are not tourism or ‘family ritual’, and it appears that pervasive phone cameras expand the genre of vernacular photography to include the spontaneous and erratic photography of the everyday; the utterly mundane becomes notable, if not always memorable (consider the new genres of photographs of ordinary meals, or of completely heterogeneous points of interest). These photographic engagements have not supplanted typical motifs in snapshot photography such as the family or situations of leisure or tourism, but phone cameras are used for taking more pictures of more ordinary things – a tree, the supermarket, the gym, me inside the elevator and the like (Lee 2010). From research into personal photography Van House reports that people pursue personal photography for four primary (and overlapping) purposes: for memory, for creating and maintaining relationships, for self representation and self expression (2011: 130). What do people do differently with digital technologies? Van House and colleagues report that people make better images, more images, more varied and more often.
Mobile phone cameras are used as a way of engaging with objects and places of the everyday.
“Images can be made any time, any place, without prior planning. Digital cameras and especially camera-phones support spontaneous, opportunistic image-making and experimentation. While people still make traditional kinds of images, what is considered photo-worthy has expanded to include the everyday (Murray 2008; Van House et.al. 2005; Van House 2009).” (Van House 2011: 127)
The finding that the mundane, the everyday, increasingly is the object of mobile media photography is also reported in other studies of mobile phone camera use. In a study of the use of cameras in Japanese everyday life Okabe and Ito found that phone cameras lead to more pervasive phototaking of ‘interesting or unusual things in everyday life’. Mobile phone cameras are used for taking photos of incidental occurrences and sightings (Kato, Okabe, Ito, Uemoto 2005: 305). Lee reports something similar. People take pictures of everyday things, situations, places, people, and Lee points out that this is an emotional practice and a practice of self expression. According to Lee people use digital cameras to express emotions about places of the everyday, and such practices contribute to ‘the ongoing hybridization of physical and digital experiences’ (Lee 2010: 267).
Camera phones are used as technologies of expression and experience. They are used as mediators of vision and voice, as ways of expressing a relation to something. Phone cameras are used to explore and reflect on things and places of interest and appreciation. Images are used to convey emotion; what a person is seeing and feeling at a given moment (Lee 2010: 269) — “I saw this and liked it”. The phone camera thus mediates personal, creative and critical modes of engagement with the everyday.
Flickering processes of engagement: duration and the ephemeral
The disposability of the camera, in the sense that it is available for use, and the disposability of the images, in the sense that they are low cost, digital and easy to delete, creates a flow of discardable, instant images: the trash can appears prominently in every photo app.
“The photographic image is no longer a printed image, it is much more likely to be seen on a screen than on paper. Images can be easily shared and disseminated via the web, which has superseded the traditional modes of presentation and publication. They can be tagged and commented on and archived for prosperity. Photography has never been so instantaneous or so disposable, one click to capture and another to delete.” (Vickers 2006:9)
We may shift our understanding of photography from the image, the cleaned up reality of the mise-en-scène, the picture-perfect moment arrested for memory (Shanks 1997), and consider photography as unfolding in the present, as a continuous process of engagement. The temporality of this kind of photographic practice involves the image stopping the flow of time in what may aspire to be a manifestation of momentary emotional intensity. In contrast, the large numbers of images created also suggests that phone camera photographic practice is an engagement that stretches out over time as an incessant flicker — a continuity of fragmented or arrested moments.
Photography is a stabilization, a freezing, bringing to a halt, and making a more or less durable image that might be taken up and looked at later. The photograph fixes a relation between the photographer and the depicted, and enacts a relation between the photographer and people with whom the image is shared (if there is any sharing). However banal the image is, it bears testimony to a past, a temporally located moment of capture, of emotional intensity, a relation, an encounter, a simple engagement. The act of taking a picture of someone, something, or someplace is capturing a moment (of intensity), and sharing it is an act of dispersing this engagement and intensity. Digital photography enhances this function of the photograph as a point of entry into a past moment, and a platform to communicate from, because the digital image is so easily made and dispersed, displaced from its site of origin.
This is a distinctively archaeological engagement, as was so clearly recognized a long time ago by Walter Benjamin (see Olivier 2011 and Shanks 2012). The homology between archaeology and photography concerns time, duration, materiality, memory, and displacement in what we are calling modes of engagement. An archaeologist does not discover the past, but mediates. In excavating a ruined site, the archaeologist establishes connections with what remains of what was, works on those remains, conserving, identifying, recording, displacing them into an archive or collection, transforming them into an account, a narrative, a museum exhibition.
Materially, the past does not exist as a sequence of events; and never did. Archaeologists never encounter time as flow or sequence. Ontologically the past is all around us, mingling, merging, decaying, disappearing in the present. The past does not exist as a sequence in any consistent or coherent sense or indeed as past substance, but as intermingling remains that persist through time by virtue of qualities of durability. Every site, every place contains vestiges of its history, because the past, in its materiality, hangs on. Not everything does: some things are more durable than others, or can be made more durable. Duration is one aspect of this archaeological temporality. The other is actuality: the conjunction of past/present at the site of encounter and recovery of the (remains of) the past, in working on the past-in-the-present, just as memory is not a coherent account of the past, but a process of discrete iterative acts of recollection, present moments prompting connections with something that remains.
There are two characteristics of this archaeological sensibility pertinent to our discussion of digital photography. The first is a particular sensitivity to location that accompanies actuality and the association of place and event — “this happened here”, “this could have happened here”, “this might happen here”. The ruin, the archaeological find, the photographic images bears testimony to both the connection and the potential. The second characteristic concerns the everyday, the quotidian. In searching through the ruins and everyday garbage of the past, anything, literally anything might be of interest, significant as information, as evidence. This is a forensic attitude towards place and relates to evidence and witnessing – “at a scene of crime anything might be relevant”. It shares the potential inherent in the act of connecting past and present. Everyday mundanity is charged with this potential: the archaeographer scans a site looking to collect things that might matter.
So photography is part of a particular nexus of modern and postmodern engagements that make up memory practices, archaeology included. These articulations of past and present through moments of encounter and capture create an archive of lapidary material forms (even when they are digitally bitmapped silicon). Photos are taken and displaced into collection. With digital photography the web has become a vast archaeological archive that begs acts of reconnection, in the Google search, in tagging someone in Facebook, in posting favourites in Flickr. As much as they are potential evidence witnessing the past, photograph and archaeological find reference essential gaps and lacunae, because they disrupt any flow or continuity in our experience of time.
What does it mean to be here, or there? Mobile phones and photography are often associated with the disruption of presence in a situation, through duration, actuality, displacement, as we have just discussed. The perception is that via phones or photography awareness is shifted out of the present per se. Perhaps the medium may also be contemplated as making visible (!) the disparate and deflective character of vision, characteristics which, if we follow philosopher Michel Serres, is what vision is all about: being on the move, voyaging, visiting (Serres 334; Connor 1999).
“In general, the bearer of the look, in traditional philosophy, does not move: it sits down to look, through a window at the blossoming tree: a statue posed on affirmations and theses. But we see things rarely in a condition of arrest, our ecological niche incorporates innumerable movements... The earth turns, our global position of vigil lost its stability long ago, even the sun, the giver of light, is in motion, en route to some other part of the universe.” (Serres: 405)
Engaging photographically with the everyday is flickering and erratic and can change direction at any moment. The person relates to the object of photography in hybrid sensory perception, a perception that is shifted into the prosthetic of the camera phone, and in the moment of photography, the photographer, object, and camera merge. Vision is distributed, hybridized. But this engagement is brief, disparate, voyaging; it is one the move. It is not a deep and intense looking, it occurs almost in a haphazardly manner, again and again, as flickers of intensity, of sensing, seeing, moving to and fro, visiting, displacing. Vision is on the move and is intimately related to the changeable (Connor 1999).
The camera – architectures of engagement
To shift attention from the photograph itself to the taking of photographs, to engagements, invites us to think about the instrument of the camera. A clock for making images, the camera connects place and event. As in its name (“camera” is a room), the camera is an architecture. We can note its origin in antiquity — a small aperture in a temple wall projected an image of the outside world, upside down, onto a wall opposite: this is the camera obscura. Renaissance optics added a lens to the widow or aperture on the world and shrunk the room to a wooden box. Modern photography added a means of fixing the projected image. But the architectural relationships of viewer, room, window, viewed subject, remain the same. There are variations. The miniature 35mm camera of the twentieth century and fast image capture through improved film emulsions freed up capture to take on more of a nervous scanning character than had been possible with larger format tripod and studio based arrangements: the camera went out into the world.
As we aim to show, digital mediation draws attention to the processes of gathering that occur in these architectures. Photowork is an assemblage of people, purpose, instruments, chemicals, electrical flows, electromagnetic articulations, in different arrangements. These local architectures are inserted into different places: taking a photo in a stadium is different to taking in a ruin, a party, an insect on a flower, because they are different modes of engagement, different assemblages. We note here also the intimate connection between assemblage and assembly, in the political sense. These photo assemblages are particular distributions of agency, of power, distinguishing the represented from the representing, the viewed and surveilled from powers of report and record.
The pervasive character of phones let people use these devices in flickering engagements with the mundanity of everyday life. We have just introduced the architectural features of photowork. Photography participates in enacting a characteristic space of experience. Let us now supply some of the disciplinary background to our argument.
The common understanding of the term space is that it is an absolute phenomenon which may be geometrically measured and described. Space may be marked out on a two dimensional plane in maps or described in three dimensional systems of dots, lines and forms. Space, under this common understanding, is a kind of container for the activities which take place in it. It is considered to exist independently of use: as an arena, a background, a container. Throughout the past four decades this way of conceptualizing space in absolute terms, in what geographers refer to as Euclidean terms, has been contested with the argument that it is not sufficient to understand space in these geometrical, absolute terms. It is necessary to understand space as relational and to include the social in the spatial (Harvey, Massey, 2005; Simonsen, 2005; Thrift, 1996). (Hansen & Simonsen 2004:167), Soja)
So in the academy, the singular, absolute, Euclidean understanding of space has been expanded and multiplied into various relational spatialities. Seeing space as relational involves focusing on the intertwined, entangled, practiced and emergent relations between the spatial and the social or cultural. Social practice always involves spatial aspects and space is always also socially constituted - not solely, but also. Space thus becomes a relational and processual event. Space is continuously produced and reassembled. Space is constituted by and in the sociomaterial interactions which take place between people and material environment, and space thus is always in process. This implies that space is related to practice – to sociomaterial patterns of activity (Schatzki, 2001). Regardless of other differences between contemporary approaches in human geography, there seems to be common agreement that space is a relational occurrence. In the words of cultural geographer John Wylie:
“Much contemporary human geography in stressing the significance of networks, connections, flows and mobilities in the ongoing making of spaces, places and identities, could be said to have a relational vision of the world. There is here a general argument for ‘thinking space relationally’, such that it is viewed as ‘a product of practices, trajectories, interrelations’ (Massey, 2004, p.5). And this sense of space as a weaving and a relating, forever in the making, sets out to critique and supplant arguably more static notions of space in terms of territory, boundedness, area, scale and so on (Marston et al., 2005).” (Wylie 2007: 199).
This brings with it an orientation towards geographies which are on the move; towards shifting and morphing spaces, spaces in the making. In this ‘rematerialized cultural geography’, space is not an absolute thing, space is a practiced, performed and enacted sociomaterial pattern. Space emerges in patterns of use between hybrid users, material environment and other non-human entities such as animals and plants.
This understanding of space is in accordance with what is commonly called non-representational or more-than representational geographical approaches. These approaches have emerged as a ‘rematerializing’ reaction to the linguistic and discursive orientation of cultural geography in the 90s, and have the agenda of drawing attention to the “non-representational” aspects of people’s encounters with material environments. Central themes of study in a ‘rematerialized cultural geography’ are body, affect and hybridity (Haldrup & Larsen).
According to geographer Nigel Thrift non-representational geography is concerned with practices – with “mundane everyday practices that shape the conduct of human beings towards others and themselves in particular sites.” (1997:142). The discursive and linguistic orientation in human/cultural geography in the 90ies was criticized for obsessing over representation and meaning, and was thus with non-representational approaches challenged to move beyond an interest in ‘identity politics’ and other static representations of culture. In later discussions the term ‘non-‘ has been suggested nuanced to ‘more-than-representational’ approaches which acknowledge the more-than-textual and more-than-human character of the world, but also include critical inquiry into the intersections between representation and practice.
The goal (and challenge) of this material cultural and practice oriented geography is to understand and describe spatio-temporal aspects of human existence; for example to understand how body and materiality co-constitute orders of meaning, practices, institutions, places and spaces. Gardens, landscapes, urban sites and a range of other places are explored as they emerge as effects of encounters between hybrid bodies and material environments (Haldrup, Lorimer). Encounters between hybrid bodies and material environments produce, mediate, practice, perform and enact space[2]. Space is what emerges in the encounters between heterogeneous entities, in practices which are both social and material.
Space is not considered: “ ‘independently as an unshakeable frame of reference inside which events and places would occur’ (Latour 1987: 228 emphasis in original), but conversely, the result of inter-action, ‘consequences of the ways in which bodies relate to one another’ (Latour 1997a: 174, emphasis in original).” (Bingham and Thrift 2000:288).
The emergent and practiced understanding of space extends also to the notion of place. Anthropologist Sarah Pink:
“Recently, sociological and anthropological renderings of practice theory and developments in spatial theory across philosophy, anthropology and geography have opened up new arenas. These ideas enable us to reconceptualise place theoretically as ‘open’ and shifting - a ‘constellation of processes’ (Massey 2005), unbounded, constituted through movement, and as a type of entanglement or ‘meshwork’ (Ingold 2007, 2008) (....) Thus, a place is theoretically, at least, not a fixed locality, but as Massey (2005) puts it, an ‘event’. Place-as-event is continuously changing through the movement of its components, at different rates and in different ways.” (Pink 2011: 93)
Place is thus both the context for practice and the product of practice, taking us back to Giddens notion of the duality of (social) structure (1979). Place is created in practices of interaction, and lived experience supplies its sense (Pink 2011:94, referring to Creswell 2003: 26).
Pink relates this to photography: “If we can, following Ingold (2000), take the idea that we are moving perceiving beings as a starting point, then the experience of place can be seen as the experience of moving through and participating in an environment, the taking, manipulation and viewing of amateur photographs becomes part of this perceptual and experiential activity.”
Photography thus becomes part of a perceptual, experiential place-making activity. The experience of place is the experience of moving through and participating in an environment, and photography becomes an aspect of this movement and participation. Photography is an aspect both of the participation in and production of place and space.
We should note that there is a long disciplinary and cultural genealogy to this understanding of representation and place. Chorography was a predisciplinary genre of the antiquarian that flourished up to the formalization of modern disciplines in the nineteenth century (Shanks and Witmore 2010; Shanks 2012; see also Pearson and Shanks 2002). As regional representation, chorography combined topographical description, toponymy, archaeology, folklore, demography, historical sources, natural history, architectural history, genealogy, travel writing, cartography in hybrid works, typically delivered as books illustrated with engravings, plates, and photography. Chorography was an engagement with the formation of national and regional structures in early modern Europe, and, as discourse, helped shaped these trends. It was precisely the kind of hybrid practice we are encountering here in the nexus of mobile communication device and the political economy of contemporary digital media, albeit, of course, located in very different historical contexts.
Pink works from a relational and processual approach to space and place, but argues that this approach is not sufficient in order to understand experiences of place. For this reason Pink goes against Massey and Ingold’s critique of Casey and argues that a phenomenological approach is necessary in order to contemplate the lived experience of photography and of place. Pink resorts to phenomenology in order to understand experience, but an alternative is to draw on post phenomenological / post structuralist approaches, such as the philosophy of Serres. The mediated character of experience, which is so evident in the case of photography and in the ways that photography helps people relate to place, calls out to the stream of ideas which already have been mentioned as non-representational or more-than representational approaches.
Hybrid spatial experience / mediated spatial experience
In geography and archaeology the orientation towards experience is especially (but not only) represented by phenomenology (Crang & Thrift; Shanks 1992; Tilley 1994). The term experience is problematic when it brings with it an essentialist notion of an inner, contained and experiencing self. This has been criticized and deconstructed by post phenomenological/poststructuralist philosophy, and the reverberations of this critique are found widely across the human and social sciences. For example a comprehensive critique of essentialist perspectives of the human subject has been articulated in psychology, and various social psychological approaches counting discourse, narrative and social constructionist approaches have demonstrated the relational character of fundamental aspects of human life, such as emotions, knowledge, learning etc. The post phenomenological/poststructuralist critique of essentialist perspectives makes it necessary to separate experience from internalist and essentialist connotations. Experience has to be “separated from a self-evident ' thisness'” (Crang & Thrift) and understood as dispersed and distributed in fields that go far beyond the old notion of the perceiving and experiencing subject (Shanks 1992 after Shanks and Tilley 1987a and 1987b, Olsen et al 2012).
Thinking about experience with Serres implies thinking about experience as constantly on the move; "experience is a mobile quality in which time and space are briefly patched together" (Crang & Thrift). Multiple, shimmering relations between the human subject and the world are the central theme in Serres’ philosophy of mingled bodies (also called “The Five Senses” (Serres 1985/2008). The central notion of the philosophy is that of mingle; an incessant, fluid and flickering blend of human and world (also, from a perspective of performance see Pearson and Shanks 2002). Human and nonhuman are continuously merged and mixed. Serres highlights shifts, mediations, shimmer and the multifaceted. The human is dispersed into various nonhuman elements, and the senses play a central role in this dispersement, in this propagation. The senses are points of exchange between the world and the body (Connor 1999: 11; Svabo 2010: 115). It is relations which are centre stage (Olsen et al 2012). Relations ‘spawn objects, beings and acts, not vice versa’. (Serres and Latour 1995: 103, 107; Bingham & Thrift 2000: 290), and so relations also are central in experience.
In contrast to an understanding where experience is located in the individual subject, we shift focus to the relational engagements of experience, experience distributed, displaced through assemblages, such as we have been describing for the camera-phone. Experience takes place in relations and processes of interaction between various heterogeneous elements. People, things and places are intertwined in experience. Things, instruments, prosthetics like phone cameras participate in creating experiences.
Talking about hybrid spatial experience is a way of accounting for experience which emerges in relations between heterogeneous entities: the human subject (experiencing), a mediating device (hence the hybrid), and spatial (referring to enacted space or place-event). The term enacts aspects of the experience of a physical environment that are mediated by a specific thing or technology, here, for example, the mobile camera device. This is an analytical move of foregrounding the interrelations not only of people and their surroundings, but also of the mundane ’middlemen’, the intermediaries, the mediators. This unsettles the essentialist understanding of experience by accounting for experience as propagation, as mediation and distribution, as sensory discourse, journey and engagement. Viewed in this way photography constitutes a particular hybrid, spatial experience that we describe as an ongoing flickering mode of engagement. It is mediated; the phone camera is a central constituent element.
Vernacular acts of photography and disseminating images, either through instant messaging, publishing them on a social network, or submitting them to a collective art or media platform, are all micro-manifestations of encounters between hybrid bodies (person with phone camera) and material environment. Both the act of photography and the act of sharing an image (through whichever channel) are mediated modes of engagement with the everyday and the enactment of hybrid spatial experience.
What about place then? Like Massey, Serres and Latour deal in place-events, that is; combinations of spatiality and temporality. Place-events are topological folds, spatial and temporal situations, located interactions, very much like what Ingold refers to as intensities of lines. Viewed in this way photography makes a place-event; bringing together space and time, as we explored with archaeology. An image is a place-event. One is ephemeral; streams of images supply an intensity which adds to the durability of a place-event.
New visual technologies “can be conceived as being central to ‘meshing together’ and constituting place as well as the management of personal social space, (...), and are worked with and ‘practiced’ as part of our everyday lives.” (Graham et al 2011: 89f)
We have illustrated how important we think it is to shift attention from the image to the political economy of media, here photography. As much as instruments and objects, we have explored engagement and connection through media assemblages, the displacement, flow and distribution of resources and events across mixed reality experiences in everyday life. We are seeing how the digital is precipitating shifts in the balance of access to authorship and dissemination or publication. Howard Rheingold notes the rise of smart mobs (2003), Clay Shirky (2009, 2011) how crowd sourcing and collaborative authoring unleash the extraordinary creative potential of cognitive surplus, while lawyer Lawrence Lessig (2002, 2005) has pioneered new instruments for managing copyright and intellectual property rights so as to avoid their monopolization by wealthy corporations and institutions.
At the core of these shifts is the quotidian – the creative constitution of the structures of contemporary society and culture in ordinary everyday practice. The concept of the vernacular captures well what is at stake. The vernacular, etymologically, is the world of the verna, the household slave. The term immediately, though implicitly, refers us to agency, dominance and subordinance in access to means of speaking, authoring, building, sharing. Public and private are again matters of dispute as social media offer stages for self expression while the information generated achieves astronomical capital value.
All of this is embedded in the assemblage that is the Instagram snapshot of an evening’s restaurant dinner that looks as if it were taken on outdated film stock by a 60s plastic toy camera posted on a Facebook account for all to see in celebration of personal style, purchasing power, and zipcode.
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