Interesting essay over at Network Publics titled Beyond Locative Media:
In contrast, Sterling provides us with a darker, more idiosyncratic vision. Humans don’t control Sterling’s world of Spimes. On the contrary, it is an unruly object world in which people are, at best, â€spime wranglers.“ At the dawn of the Internet of Things we have to wonder if we aren’t entering a world in which the object becomes sentient, thereby finally liberating itself from human bondage. If, in the Enlightenment, we learned that nature—in its role as background to human activity—had been replaced by human second nature, then today we are perhaps at the threshold of a machinic third nature. It is the task of whatever remains of art after the locative turn to get involved in the messy business of this new world of objects, even if the Utopian and critical moments that can emerge as a result are only temporary and contingent.
The overall message I took out of it is that the current round of “media” is much less interested in distancing itself from everyday practices. However I can’t help but think about the massive gulf that I see between the issues written about in that article and the kinds of questions I’ve been getting in preparing for the Mobile Monday on location based services. There just still seems to be such a disjoin between the two that they don’t even seem like the same topic.
