How can a Body Connecting to Locative Media Practice Urban Space? “Feeling” as the Technique of Orientation in the Digital Age

How does the body practice space in the digital age? This paper aims to study the everyday practice of walking in urban space as a theoretical object. This study consists of two questions: (1) Who does the body walk around with in urban space? (2) How does the body feel the emotions, sentiments, and moods of urban space? At a glimpse, the two questions seem distinct. However, they are to be integrated into one in the sense that the body divergently feels space when the body walks with locative media. It is an attempt not to view space as an objective reality, but to see it as ‘becoming,’ co-evolving when the body connects to locative media. By coupling the discourse of space with affect theory, this paper explores the role of forms of affect and their operation. Forms of affect toward locative media and the network of the non-human world jointly work as the technique of orientation in urban space.
Delving into the technique of orientation, this paper consists of two sections. The first section discusses the mutual embeddedness of the body and space. The emotional-sensory experience of urban space perception based on gender and sexuality signals that the body embodies space which it constitutes. The second section examines specific uses of map interfaces linked to locative media narrative strategies in the form of art. Consequently, I argue that both map interfaces and locative media narratives act as technologies of orientation, which enable the body to wander urban space according to the various levels and qualities of forms of affect. Through case studies of an old map interface, site-specific art, the Situationist International, and media arts, I have suggested that we can learn how the body plays with emotional-sensory experiences in urban space. In doing so, the everyday practice of walking in urban space with mobile phones could be problematized, and a reconsideration of a constitutive medium for cultural transformation could be facilitated. The initial finding of this study is that the emotion is not only the technique of orientation, but also that of disorientation. The emotion produces “queer space” where a political subject tries to reorient their direction in unprecedented ways. Therefore, the ultimate finding of this study is that the body and space are mutually embedded through the form of affect.