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Comobility: How Proximity and Distance Travel Together in Locative Media

The paper is based on empirical research at the intersections of art practice and the sociology of mobilities, using a custom built iPhone app, co-designed with Prof. Chris Speed at Edinburgh University, downloaded worldwide and used thousands of times. This paper is the first to identify, describe and theorise ‘comobility’ as a phenomenon occurring in location-aware and networked mobile-media.

The paper is a result of workshops at: Territorial Play, Broadway Media Centre, Nottingham (2010); Designing Environments for Life (convened by Professor Tim Ingold), Dundee Contemporary Arts (2010); International Symposium on Electronic Art, Belfast (2009); Futuresonic, Manchester (2009)

And exhibitions: Distance festival, Stoke Newington International Airport performance space, London (2010), The Experimental Society conference exhibition, Peter Scott Gallery, Lancaster (2010).

Associated papers:

Southern, J and Speed, C. 2009. Watch this Space: From Collective to Collaborative uses of Locative Media. In e-science 2009, peer reviewed proceedings of the Fifth IEEE International Conference on e-Science. Oxford, 9-11 December, Los Alamitos: IEEE Computer Society.

Speed, C., and Southern, J. 2010, Handscapes – Reflecting upon the Use of Locative Media to Explore Landscapes. Peer Reviewed Proceedings of Digital Landscape Architecture 2010 at Anhalt University of Applied Sciences. Eds. Buhmann/Pietsch/Kretzler. Berlin: Wichmann.

Lowry, C. Southern, J. and Speed, C. 2009. Modelling the Social in Locative Media: Collaborative GPS, Second Nature: International Journal of Creative Media, [online].

And presented at the conferences FutureEverything (2009), Mobilities in Motion the Pan American Mobilities Network conference, (2011) and Electronic Visualisation and the Arts (EVA) (2013). The work led to juried selection for two residencies at ISIS arts Newcastle, funded by Arts Council England, and an Embedded Residency, a Sound and Music initiative delivered in partnership with iShed, a part of Watershed, supported by Pervasive Media Studio and funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.