MA Creative Media, University of Brighton
(mjm20) Digital Cities
leeoneill2014@gmail.com
Lee O’Neill _mjm20.m4v from leeoneill on Vimeo.
“I am lost in the crowd, I am anonymous. In my phone, in my space, I matter.”
(Bassett, 2003:350)
This finalised piece is a short movie that uses geolocative augmented reality (AR) to illustrate the mutual constitution of software and socio-spatial practice. It could be argued that the immersive seduction of a digital co-presence mediates and re-codifies urban space through a process of negation and investment in an economy of sustained attention. Ubiquitous and pervasive mobile technologies are blurring the borders of time, community and space facilitated by gamification, quantification and surveillance; conflating online and offline identity and making it increasingly difficult to determine which side of the screen is which. The short film exploits the graphic infancy of contemporary AR technology to illuminate the sophistication of situational data aggregation and commodification. This critical reflection seeks to discuss the accumulation of intimate and long-term data of desires and behaviours in the context of civil liberty and freedom of mobility.