Artrite 5 k.way 2008

Katherine S. Willis, “Sensing Place – Mobile and Wireless Technologies in Urban Space”, in Lars Frers & Lars Meier (eds), Encountering Urban Places – Visual and Material Performances in the City, Hampshire & Virginia: Ashgate, 2007, pp155-
168.
The question that Willis purports to explore is how our perceptions of space are transformed in this “increasingly mobile society with ubiquitous access to communication technologies.” She writes, “In order to understand the consequences of this transformation it is important to first investigate our experience of space.” 1
Willis’s writing stumbles along under par to her stated intentions, and the more unsupported statements I read the less energy I had to try and find some depth or excitement throughout her enquiry. I was under whelmed by statements such as “we identify with space having visual appearance and physical form”2 and “places are the settings in which people interact, and as such space, frames human action and also importantly behaviour.”3
I found myself increasingly irritated by closed assumptive beliefs around both identity, “to understand something of the content and structure of images is an essential prerequisite for understanding identity” 4 and resource access- “Mobile and wireless technologies have been proliferating and have…become common means of enabling communication.” 5
The closest Willis came to any exhilarating analysis is hinted at on the final page in her summary where she writes “…our essential spatial perspective on the world is called into question with mobile and wireless technologies, a form of ubiquitous computing where the focus is not on the technology itself, but rather on what it is enabling.” 6 (my emphasis).
I decided to use myself as a guinea pig and investigate how my perceptions of place might be transformed by employing said technology in a place I closely identified with.
Katharine Willis is thirty-five years old; she is a Libran, born in the zodiac year of the Rat. She is an architect by training and has, for the last five years, been exploring ways in which we interact with our environment by way of installations, observation and photographic documentation. She looks kind of vulnerable and sad. How do I know? This information came directly into the place of my home, to the space of my laptop from her blog 7 address through my Sierra wireless portal.
So OK, I found that rather than transforming my perceptions this little exercise only mildly entertained. However, her blog postings of 1) the cocaine inspired artwork and 2) images from Google maps, led me to a greater depth and interest in the question. In addition, with a very brief reference to de Certeau on page 168 of her article, Willis opened the understanding of space to be considered as a ”field of interaction, composed of intersections of mobile elements…actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it.”8 Following this lead a rather more interesting discourse on space, place and the enabling of wireless technology to transform perception came alive.
“In The Practice of Everyday Life, where Certeau makes another crucial distinction between "place" (lieu) and "space" (espace) [115-30]. The difference between these terms is to a large extent a matter of propriety: "The law of the 'proper' rules in the place; the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own 'proper' and distinct location, a location it defines." Because each element in a place rests in the position in which it belongs, place "implies an indication of stability" [117]. Space, on the other hand exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. . . . Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities. . . . In contradistinction to the place, it has thus none of the univocity or stability of a "proper." [117] Space, then, cannot be "proper" because it is a product of action and movement. "In short," writes Certeau, "space is a practiced place"9
A story. This morning my partner Andrew showed me images he captured on his mobile phone of a baby orca that had been stranded up a small estuary of the Waitemata It had been rescued and transported across the harbour bridge on the back of a truck and released at Takapuna beach where it ‘happily’ swam out to sea. If Andrew was techno-savvy he could have transmitted the images directly to my e-mail, and as I was online at the time, we could have watched the release together, but not in the same physical space. How fantastic is that.
However at the time I was excitedly exploring the new Google map service, (likewise accessed through computer technology connected to an active Sierra wireless portal device), so that when he arrived home with his orca images I was able to show him not only the traditional street map of New York, but by clicking on a ‘yellow man’ icon and shifting it to a street address, I could take him on a spherical and linear 360degree virtual image tour of the physical places I had visited, and more, by moving the curser around I could virtually lie down in the street and contemplate the New York skyscape whilst remaining static in my kitchen in Beachaven.
Now our perception of space has been transformed, because as de Certeau opened an understanding of place being stable, and space being the effect produced by the operations that orient it by using wireless image capturing device that can also that could transfer (the ‘effect’) images through space to a place of viewing, interconnected the place (of the orca, the truck, the sea, the laptop computer, our home) to space (which is a product of the action and movement), he furthered this investigation by considering the example of cartography.
He explained that old maps used to be more like a history book or log, recording experiences pictorially. Later maps
“became more autonomous." They gradually diminished the signs of their own creation, reducing them to the "figurations" of ships or monsters: "these figurations, like fragments of stories, mark on the map the historical operations from which it resulted. Thus, the sailing ship painted on the sea indicates the maritime expedition that made it possible to represent the coastlines." But, according to Certeau, "the map gradually wins out over these figures; it colonizes space; it eliminates little by little the pictural figurations of the practices that produce it." The result is the map in its "current geographical form...” 10

When Google Maps is activated a page opens with an image of the traditional map. It is flat, an image of grid-like lines depicting land mass outlines, geographical areas and streets, a map de Certeau described as “bereft (through a gradual process of forgetting) of the visible evidence of its own construction”11 . Once the icon is activated, the map becomes layered, the traditional grid remains as a foundational visual locating device. This image is then superimposed with virtual photographic images that show the experiences of a journey through stable place whilst mingling with active space. 12

1. Katherine S. Willis, “Sensing Place – Mobile and Wireless Technologies in Urban Space”, in Lars Frers & Lars Meier (eds), Encountering Urban Places – Visual and Material Performances in the City, Hampshire & Virginia: Ashgate, 2007 P.155
2. Ibid. P.158
3. Ibid, P159
4. Ibid.P 157
5. Ibid.P.15
6. Ibid.P.168
7. ‘http://www.blogger.com/profile/07387808532281665502’.
8.Katherine S. Willis, “Sensing Place – Mobile and Wireless Technologies in Urban Space”, in Lars Frers & Lars Meier (eds), Encountering Urban Places – Visual and Material Performances in the City, Hampshire & Virginia: Ashgate, 2007 P.1161
9.Reynold, Bryan. Fitzpatrick, Joseph. Eds. The Transversality of Mechel de Certeau: Foucault's Panoptic Discourse and the Cartographic Impulse. Diacritics 29.3 (1999) 63-80
http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/journals/diacritics/v029/29.3reynolds.html
10.Ibid.P. 68
11.Ibid. P.69
12.http://maps.google.com/