Scott Fisher

An example of a mdeia art project that fits into Sterling's "Spimes" thesis is MILK, winner of this year's Golden Nica at Ars Electronica. With MILK, the artists, Esther Polak and Ieva Auzina, used GPS traceroutes to create a form of landscape art for network society. MILK is based in part on a project by Polak and the Waag Society, "Real Time Amsterdam" in which Amsterdam bicyclists created a map of city's bizarre traffic routes by the sedimentation of paths measured by their GPS transponders over a period of weeks. Polak's latest work connects Manuel Castells's "space of flows" with his "space of place" by tracing the path of an agricultural product, in this case milk, from its origins in rural Latvia to a cheese vendor in the Netherlands.: MILK suggests a powerful vision of locative technologies which allow one to trace the origins of foodstuffs—a much sought after ideal in this era of global mega-viruses—thereby making visible the networked society.

I believe it was this reading of MILK that drew Bruno Latour to include the project in his ZKM exhibition "Making Things Public." According to Latour in the catalogue essay: "'Things' are controversial assemblages of entangled issues, and not simply objects sitting apart from our political passions. The entanglements of things and politics engage activists, artists, politicians, and intellectuals. To assemble this parliament, rhetoric is not enough and nor is eloquence; it requires the use of all the technologies -- especially information technology -- and the possibility for the arts to re-present anew what are the common stakes."

To be fair, the MILK project's artists are not interested in Latour's reading, seeing their work more as a form of romantic landscape art, indeed when making the project they came to a fork in the route that led in one direction to McDonalds and in the other to the Dutch cheese show, they chose the former. Nevertheless, Latour's reading is the one that interests me here and I am looking at MILK's as emblematic of that condition, regardless of the project's intent.

In a text entitled "Locative Utopia" (http://www.rixc.lv/reader/txt/txt.php?id=186&l=en&raw=1) i wrote of MILK:

"It would not take an expert in sociometrics to tell you that this proposal for a consumer advocacy mapping project of this sort would be practically impossible at this stage; for one, companies producing at a global level like to keep their organizations oblique and are rarely required law where their products originate. Evocative projects like MILK help us envision the horizons for the endocolonized eye of the 21st century. while campaigns for ethical consumption have traditionally attempted to reach the consumer through a process of reasoning and argumentation, this tends to requires a commitment of both time and concentration that many people feel they do not necessarily have to spare. imagine a form of locative media that tactically uses the aesthetic appeal of maps to reach people more on the level of affect. Operating on a register closer to that of entertainment, such a project might seek to captivate the consumer by presenting itself as a kind of X-Ray device into the black box of consumer society, that permits one the experience of peering under the organized surface of consumer society to reveal a Matrix-like web of interconnected decentered complexity."