For an Art Against the Cartography of Everyday Life

This text is a limited exploration of some relatively recent cultural practices that are connected in various ways to issues of geography and technology, what has been called a "spatial turn" in some academic circles, and a "locative turn" in the telecom industries and the niche art market commonly known as "new media". In particular, I'd like to read these practices, frequently referred to as “locative media,” and the discourse that surrounds them, through previous critical frameworks that have engaged with notions of "the everyday" and the formal language of documentary image making. My intention is to arrive at more questions than answers through this mediation, as it comes from conflicting positions of both distrust in, and desire for, the utopian aspirations driving much of this turn to the spatial in cultural production.