The Space of Simultaneity

The Space of Simultaneity Maureen Engel (bio) The prompt: proliferation. I immediately thought of pack rats, pirates, archives, urbanism, interface. I thought I'd write something incisive about the confluence of Scandinavian crime drama and the emergence of the pirate party in the context of global networked culture; I imagined what the digital world of the Collyer brothers, the original hoarders, would look like if their one hundred and forty tons of ephemera was on portable hard drives; I thought maybe I'd be a provocateur and challenge you all to embrace the term "data" over the term "text." But it didn't take long for me to land on a concept I work with frequently—space and place—and to think about the ways that a term like proliferation always implies a certain wanton cluttering or filling up of space and something of a crisis of its limits. If ideas, text, data, capital itself keep proliferating, then the visceral feeling is that we'll all be surrounded, suffocated, drowned. I want to challenge us to think differently about space, to see space not just as something that is filled up but as something produced, layered, inhabited, experienced. Proliferation also incents us to rewrite space—to reclaim it through its narration and augmentation. As Foucault argued, attending to space foregrounds that we are in "an epoch of simultaneity [End Page 15] … a complex network of connections" (np) that stands in contrast to the linearity of conventional historical narratives. This simultaneity is produced in the particular spatial mechanism I want to discuss here—locative media and augmented reality—and the place-based mediatizations that such technologies give rise to. Locative media enacts a juxtaposition between the immaterial, proliferating world of data and the material, finite world of bodies in space. It does not allow us to maintain spurious distinctions between the real and the unreal, the here and the there, or the past and the present. Instead, it challenges us to imagine that the virtual and the real are far more co-constitutive than we might imagine. I want to offer three examples as food for thought. Example 1: Occupy the Screen Occupy the Screen is an art installation that produces telepresence between different cities. A screen is installed in a public square in each city. People then see themselves projected on their own screen, alongside of a projection of people from another city. Recognizing this means that they also become aware that they are being projected across space into someone else's public square. Interactions and communication ensue—people wave, mimic each other, dance—and we witness language developing on the fly. Variations on the installation place users in relation to simulated environments (like a picnic), challenging them to interact with both the virtual environment and the other participants. Another instantiation developed a game that could be played between the sites. Here, space is produced, not simply occupied. Example 2: The Museum of London app (The Londinium) In this app, historical photographs from the museum's collection have been geo-located onto the streets of contemporary London. When the app is activated, the mobile device turns on its rear camera, giving the user the illusion that they are looking through their device. It then superimposes historical images over contemporary, physical space. My favourite example can be triggered at the gates to Buckingham Palace where the contemporary street scene is augmented by the image of Emmeline Pankhurst being arrested and physically removed. The hybrid reality that this moment produces re-animates an entire history of suffrage activism, placing the viewer not at the end of a distant historical trajectory from it but, rather, on its very same ground; it simultaneously challenges the meanings of Buckingham Palace itself, layering that space with one event [End Page 16] but calling us to imagine how many more are also proliferating in that space. History as presence. Example 3: Go Queer My current project, Go Queer, retells the queer history of Edmonton through locatively triggered media, including text, audio, and images. Instead of acting like a tour, however, the app integrates itself into the users' everyday. The app's queer sites are hidden from...

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