Map Apps: Locative Media and Performance

Abstract

Some may only consider the map app on their smartphone when it fails. In an era when nationalist borders and the siloed experience of the neoliberal order assert themselves, users more than ever share locative information through smartphone social media, dating apps, and other platforms. With this increased attention to the locative, ‘undefined’ areas take on new significance.

This paper makes a comparative analysis of performance practices that critique, center, or collaborate with locative media within urban environments. Case studies – from the provocative artist gestures of the 2016 Follower app by Lauren Lee McCarthy and Simon Weckert’s 2020 fake traffic jams to the “open-source urbanism” of the 2022 Manifesta Biennial – bring attention to the corporeal body through physical place, as opposed to the user, as data, in the abstracted space of proprietary map apps. Each of these approaches offer new ways to consider a technology that too often becomes default rather than decision. They do so by repositioning human agency in relation to transportation economies, surveillance, architectures, and international boundaries, and within urban centers.

The urban context best exemplifies how power utilizes map technology to arrange space, and the smartphone has become its accomplice in doing so. I identify a binary within the uni-directional expressions of top-down and bottom-up of map app technology, programming, and power structures. The import of performance interventions with map apps on a smartphone does not come from attempts to harness technology in terms of directionality but rather generate possibilities through collaboration.