Polyrhythmia: How reindeer can help bring temporality to the analysis of locative media.

• Main Author: Southern, Jen
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: Northern Sweden; sami
• Online Access: https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/61520/

Recent discussion of locative media and the geoweb focus on the spatialization and localization of data. (Gordon & De Souza E Silva, 2011; Thielmann, 2010). This paper uses the GPS tracking of reindeer in Northern Sweden to ask how temporality and movement change the way we think about maps and movement in mobilities research and locative art practice. The paper builds on previous analysis of locative media through actor-network-theory (Galloway, 2010; Thielmann, 2010; Tuters, 2011) to discuss temporal actor networks. In this context Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis technique (Lefebvre, 2004) offers two important ways to think about GPS tracking and spatial data firstly by focusing on the multiple temporal rhythms that are co-present in environments and secondly in suggesting that it is necessary to combine being caught up in the rhythm of a place on the street with the distance of anaylsis. The paper uses the case study of the GPS tracking of reindeer by Swedish Sami reindeer herders. I discuss how movement can be thought of as a mode of experience in which environments, people, animals and technologies are co-produced, and how this ontic-epistemic way of thinking about the world (Verran, 1998), or the ‘dwelling perspective’ (Ingold, 2000) might speak to the more formal and scientific language of western mapping in Geographical Informations Systems (GIS). It introduces the theoretical argument that landscape is co-created through movement and that in tracking movement GPS can be used to speak back to mapping traditions that have lost their temporal qualities and the process of their making. Using Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis I focus on the temporal and seasonal nature of reindeer herding, describing the landscape as co-produced by a series of different temporal rhythms that are left out of traditional maps. The partial and processual knowledge that is produced by the migratory tradition of reindeer herding is difficult to reconcile with the GIS maps of the forestry industry. In conflicts over land use the GPS ...