Keitai mizu 139players’ guesses (what they thought were the native animals) and their location
through geo-tagging. This created a sense of emplacement but also displacement
as other players searched for some art objects that were either mistaken for
rubbish in the park or too small to see (some artworks, such as Yasuko Toyoshima,
were semi-transparent creatures only 5 cm long). The Spatial Dialogues website
became a series of emplaced visualities of the park through each of the players’
interpretations. The mapping of the park and its underground streams became a
series of Instagram clues. Players needed to pay attention to the environment as
an assemblage of the visible and invisible.
Part of the enjoyment of the project was not only the entanglements between the
methods and its transmission but also how the project lived on in different ways
that saw the participants taking the key role. For example, when one student group
came through to play, one of the other students took it upon herself to document
their experiences and responses and turn it into a short film that she then uploaded
onto Vimeo. This video was one of the few artifacts of transmission left after
the ephemeral work had ceased. Moreover, traces of the play could be found in
participants’ Twitter accounts, creating new nodes for co-present entanglement.
Conclusion: Visualizing the environment and ambient play
In this paper, we have proposed an understanding of mobile media as playing
an important part in rethinking the environment and a sense of belonging.
Through the case study of keitai mizu, we deployed Instagram and Twitter as
quotidian media to reconsider the entanglement between being connected to the
environment and intimate co-presence and ambient play within the everyday.
This example allows us to think through the ways in which art and mobile
media might provide alternative ways for understanding and talking about
environmentalism by asking players to reflect upon their natural environment
camouflaged within urban cartographies. Rather than mobile media just
contributing to the growing problems around e-waste, it can be a vehicle for
collaboration, agency, and politics.
Through the discussion of keitai mizu, we have sought to provide poetic
ways in which players can become investigators in understanding their everyday
environments in new ways. As we have argued, camera phone practices contribute
to the various performative cartography cultures emerging in an age of smartphones.
Camera phone images and sharing, especially through geo-tagging, create new
ways in which place can be depicted through overlays between the electronic and
social, geographic, and emotional. They can connect the political to the personal in
new ways that can provide insight into alternative understandings of being “green”.
References
Berlant, Lauren. 1998. “Intimacy: A Special Issue,” Critical Inquiry 24 2 (Winter): 281–88.
Carter, Paul. 2010. The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.