by Ulf Treger
(Journal for Northeast Issues Nr. 4: Spacemaking, 2005)
Datatrails
While sitting in a train from Mainz to Cologne, the train passes the Rhein valley, which is commonly perceived as beautiful and worth viewing. The compartment is almost empty, only one other person is sitting opposite me. This person uses the built-in-camera of his mobile phone to take pictures through the window of some old castles on the hills along the river. The built-in-camera makes a funny digital sound each time the release button is pressed and another picture is taken. The tone sounds cheap and hollow, it is a 8-bit simulation of an analogue camera release button, an echo, a remembrance of the old-school photography. The sound assures the photographer, that a picture is successfully made. An outmoded user-feedback, because digital technologies basically don't make any sound. The taken pictures have a shabby pixel quality with a vga-resolution. But this doesn't matter, these cameras are not made to create a hi-quality, full-rez brilliant photographs, they are made to get instant-snapshots and to save them as a digital memory or to transmit them on the GSM-net instantly. Imagine a moving system (like this train from Mainz to Cologne) in a landscape of rivers, hills and other parts of a photo-wallpaper. Its occupants create different kinds of data with their mobile phones - digital sounds and voices in phone calls, pictures from built-in-cameras, and texts (sms or email) - and transfer their data-packages to different more or less distant places. Thus the mobile space, like the train, is multi-time connected with other spaces that may be fix or mobile themselves.
Some (or all) parts of the generated data will leave its traces on the net, on the caches, proxy servers and log files of the communication providers. This data for example is also used to feed provider's billing systems and usage statistics or in some cases to be redirected to a security office or secret agency, where it is tried to be filtered by keywords or to locate the geographical position. Mobile Communication produces multiple traces of our physical activities and transfers them from the space where they actually happen to another space, the electronic space and vice versa. Thus, mobile communication can be selfempowerment of the user and the surveillance of his activities at the same time. The mobile phone gets, in a double meaning, a “remote control of our life” (H. Rheingold: »Smart Mobs«).
Bodycount
Switching to another physical space and another form of mobile devices: The »Baja Beach Club« nearby Barcelona. On a hot summer day, it is not really comfortable to carry a wallet in your light club wear. The club recently established a new payment system that allows the guests to leave their money, checks and credit cards at home. The visitors just have to let implement a small RFID-chip in their right upper arm (a kind of electronic piercing), and the cashiers with its wireless sensors reads the ID from the chips. This information is collected for the bill of the evening and transferred to the billing system of the cooperating bank institute. The guests have nothing to do than to let their bank account pay the monthly amount, while the owner of the club can optimize his service and logistics with the collected data trails. While this derives from a strange understanding of freedom, namely the freedom of consumerism, the technology of surveillance migrates from a mainly static and spatial to a mobile and personalized form. With volunteer individuals as hosts, surveillance cross the border between environment and individuals most private part: the body.
Datavolunteers
Facing an increasing presence and use of networked, ubiquitous and personalized communication tools, the question is, how to deal with the digital echoes of our activities, our “data bodies”. The Orwellian vision of total control is wrong as the market vision of consumers total freedom, although the efforts of control are increasing continuously. It will be necessary to rethink the common concepts of privacy that are based on a clear separation of private and public spheres. Media makes the barriers between private and public more and more obsolete (just think of the web with its variety of personal publishing tools like blogs – personal, web based diaries –, webcams, google-traces, etc.). Current practices of how our personal data is getting used for a multiplicity of purposes, are already far beyond the defensive claims of the advocates of privacy. Facing this development, common concepts of privacy must be rethinked. Additionally, more offensive approaches are necessary. One perspective strategy could evolve by generating data in a volunteer and self-aware way.
While urban space is penetrated and so changed and interfered by different layers of data-trails, this augmented space will only remain public if urban users are willing to publish, contribute and share data beyond the given terms of use of their electronical devices. This kind of, so to say "data-voluntarism" will enable a appropriation of public space on different medial and physical layers. There is a commercial vision that presents users also as producers and calls them “prosumers”, a combination of producer and consumer. But producing is meant here only in terms of using devices like digicams, pdas and cellular phones in a determined way to produce data that can be transferred to other devices. What if we don't use these gadgets to take a thousand times the same pictures of old castles at the Rhein valley, but if we produce and generate new forms of cultural production, of expression, meaning and critique?
Multicast
To create multi-frequencies of nondeterminable communication, and to keep these frequencies clear, it is necessary to produce, share and resample data. By using portable computers and with free urban wireless networks, an unlimited number of shared radio channels can be created – not broadcast but multicast, not permanent and professional, but instantaneous, temporary and experimental ones. This vision sounds nice, but who will produce (and listen) to 1000 channels of data streams? What if the vast majority of users just wants “zero-media”, where they don't have to do anything else than sitting in front of their tv and future entertainment systems and listening, viewing and consuming? How about common understandings of the "quality" of contents, who can assure it's relevance or reliability? Questions like these originate from the concepts of a one-to-many communication. But networked, multicast communication is transitory. With multicast media, there will be no need and even no possibility for, in a classical sense, measuring or justifying the content of the distributing channels. Since the difference between author and recipient, between original and copy vanishes apparently, relevance feedback will automatically become evident through the use of multicast media itself: if no one is interested, no one will listen to it, re-use it again, or give feedback.
In a situation of continuously promoted electronic hypes, its commercial exploitation and the ongoing defence of existing operation modes, what is the role of cultural practices? Once they were called net art for example, and more or less only scraped on the surface: a process of approach and assimilation. Today it would be more exciting and politically relevant, not only to design and test new games and gadgets in terms of “what funny things can we do with that technology?”, but to build and strengthen the variety of open channels of communication, to develop, enhance and use open protocols, archives and tools to enable production and sharing of open data. Multicast media leaves the old one-to-many media behind and enters the physical parts of public space. Thinking about future forms of social practices is essential.