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The Geospatialization of

Calculative OperationsTracking, Sensing and Megacities

Jordan Crandall

Abstract

In a modern, calculative world, the techniques of tracking are everywhere in

the ascendant. Enhanced by algorithmic procedures and analytics, they have

been incorporated into distributed network systems, augmented by new

sensing and locationing technologies, and embedded into mobile devices,

urban structures and environments. Simultaneously, new practices of track-

ing and sensing have emerged across the consumer, state and corporatesectors. These practices are amplified in the case of megacities as they

strive to keep pace with rapid urban development. All movement is subordi-

nated to a condition of calculative mobilization , whereby the urban realm is

understood through the spatialization of algorithmic operations. And yet,

due to their unique large- and multi-scaled accumulations of data-enhanced

actors and their complex, stratified modes of proximity and interoperable

relationality, the particular densities of megacities challenge conventional

spatial formats of movement and positioning. This article off ers new formats

of analysis for these calculative practices and the agential and ontological

status of the hybrid urban entities that they register and engender. It alsooffers new structuring principles and political orientations, which are parti-

cularly urgent as we witness the ascendance of Spatial Data Infrastructures

(SDIs) that are often promoted as participatory and inclusive while remaining

largely inaccessible, pursuing proprietary aims, and infused with the poten-

tial not only to protect and inform but also to violate.

j Theory, Culture & Society2010 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore),

Vol. 27(6): 68^90

DOI: 10.1177/0263276410382027


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Key words

embedded systems j RFID j smart structures j surveillance

j tracking j urban sensing j video analytics

THE HISTORY of tracking is rooted in the figure of the surveillant ^the observational expert, stationed at the monitors of policing, mili-tary and intelligence agencies, interpreting movements on images,

maps or screens. Yet tracking practices have developed in ways that compli-cate this centralization of human agency. They have come to rely, increas-ingly, on algorithmic procedures and automated systems, and they havebeen incorporated into distributed network environments ^ augmented bynew sensing and locationing technologies and embedded into mobile

devices, buildings, cars and urban infrastructures. As this has occurred,new practices of tracking and sensing have emerged across the consumer,state and corporate sectors, in both proprietary and participatory forms.These tracking practices not only complicate political questions, but alsoontological ones: as the urban environment, through embedded networksand distributed cognitive systems, gains agential and communicative abili-ties, it complicates the distinctions between body and space, as well asbetween human, artifact, and computer (Hayles, 2009: 48).

This article offers new formats of analysis for these new tracking and

sensing practices, along with the agential and ontological status of the newhybrid urban entities and events that these tracking practices register andengender ^ as these actors increasingly combine sensing, processing andactuating functions that complicate conventional ontological categories,forms of knowing and formats of subjectivity.

Within the context of megacities, these new developments in trackingand sensing practices are magnified and their political repercussions parti-cularly urgent. Not only does increased urbanization bring increased track-ing, but the amplification of tracking in extremely dense, large-scale, and

complex urban environments around the world has introduced comprehen-sive ideals of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) that attempt to consolidateand render interoperable all urban phenomena within standardized calcula-tive architectures. The concept of SDIs for megacities is based on the ideathat, through tracking, sensing and locationing practices, spatial informa-tion capture has advanced to the degree that it has now become indispens-able for urban development, planning and management ^ especially as it isintegrated with data mining, analytics and data management throughGeographic Information Systems (GIS) and database tools, many of which

are already widely used in such fields as urban planning, land surveying,defense, communications, utility services, crisis management andtransportation.

At the same time, as access to GPS-enabled mobile phones and Web2.0 applications at the citizen level continues to increase, it involves the

Crandall ^ The Geospatialization of Calculative Operations 69


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need to integrate the citizen-generated spatial information that has becomeexponentially abundant through mapping mash-ups, participatory urbansensing, social networking and location-based services.The main challengesin the development of these comprehensive SDIs is to implement formal

data-sharing arrangements between various urban agencies, in order thatdata and services from various sources across the city can be accessed andmerged, along with the integration of spatial and locationing informationwith new visualization strategies and analytic techniques. As well, it hasinvolved the need to accommodate emerging forms of citizen-activatedsocial data analysis that have the potential to augment proprietary datamining techniques, filling in the gaps in urban information needed for amore dynamic and inclusive understanding of megacities. Such comprehen-sive SDIs are understood to offer the potential of strengthening the urban

change information available to city managers, providing more effectiveand timely information required to manage sustained development(McLaren, 2009: 2) while increasing the levels of citizen participation incity governance through new collaborative eorts and public infrastructures(Cuff et al., 2008).

While acknowledging that new conveniences, sensibilities, social net-works and participatory practices may result, the article points out thatmany citizens and consumers do not have access to this spatial information,or to the tracked patterns from their everyday activity as this data is used

to depict, monitor or target them. It protects and informs, yet it submitsthem to a calculative and representational violence that always has the poten-tial to become real. Via these inclusive spatial data practices, tracking andtargeting increasingly go hand in hand, infused with the potential to bothprotect and violate.

The article also points out the limits of the spatial orientations andquantifications of movements that have been integral to the developmentof tracking. Historically, tracking has established an organizational andontological frame for the movements of the city that is based in specificmodes of characterization and standardization. It has subjected the agenciesof this movement to its analytical procedures and agential categories, shap-ing an urban environment where movement is understood as calculableand predictable: a world where all entities are regarded as locatable, yet sub-ordinated to movement, and thus able to be tracked, modified and trans-ported (Thrift, 2008: 89^100). While trackings cartographic traditionendures in geospatial frames of reference, new organizing principles arerequired that, while building on these historical orientations, can accommo-date the new conductive forms in accordance with which tracking, sensingand locationing practices are now functioning, many of which do not require

visual representations, spatial orientations or conventional understandingsof movement. GIS systems are simply one modality of interfacing data: thegeo-spatialization of calculative operations.

Locationing augments geospatiality, overcoming the limits of thegeographical as well as the rigidity of large-scale networks. It is able to

70 Theory, Culture & Society 27(6)


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detect and harness physical activities that are too fine-grained for GPS sys-tems ^ such as a gesture ^ and which may be too casual for Internet con-nectivity. As casual connections between devices come into play, many ofthem in extremely small-scale spaces, or in the extremely dense, stratified,

data-enhanced spaces particular to megacities, the relevant relationshipsbetween these actors can no longer be confined to the fixed infrastructuresof the Internet ^ a simple ad hoc interoperability must be achieved, atlower networking levels (McCullough, 2004: 98^102). Architectural ele-ments of physical space, as well as social architectures, often frame and cueactions ^ some very minute and instantaneous. As calculation, action andmateriality intertwine, gestures, objects and environments can speak, how-ever seductively or violently, in ways that are not always addressed tohumans or known by them. To use a portable GIS device for real-time trac

information is a performative and declarative act. The question is theprogram at work in the environment within which these acts register andcongeal.

To that end, the key structuring principle introduced in the article isthat of program. In my conception, a program is not simply an algorithmicprocedure but an organizational and standardizing practice that occursacross the affective, symbolic and rhythmic registers of experience ^where it can be understood in terms of psychological orientations (such asdesires or fears), social entities, spaces, events or behaviors. I suggest that

a focus on program is a key move for analysis and political engagement, forto delve into the nature of the programs at work in urban environments ^programs within which human agency is often concealed ^ is to questionthe naturalization of an ambient, calculative surround, its congealmentinto a standardized or default space, a normalized atmosphere or force,which is no longer seen in terms of specific analytics operations. It is toinquire as to the embodied practices and algorithmic procedures thatconstruct the norm against which the event, as an affirmation or a violentdeviation, erupts.

These practices and procedures are conditioned by, and embeddedwithin, urban environments themselves. They can only function as such asa result of the rhythms and regularities embedded in urban architecturesthrough everyday governmental, labor and leisure practices ^ commutingtimes, travel patterns, transport timetables, transfer hubs, pedestrian inter-changes, traffic regulations, police routes, shopping locales and buyinghabits ^ and they build on the norms therein constructed. It is here, in thereciprocal exchanges between the habits of a populace and the built struc-tures and infrastructures that circumscribe it, that the concept of programis performatively situated as a material and materializing practice that tra-

verses conventional epistemological and ontological categories. All urbanactors, at whatever scale ^ from the pedestrian to the megacity itself ^respond to embedded regularities they help to materialize and normalize,in cognitive, affective and rhythmic ways.The event, as an instance of fasci-nation or concern, is constituted as an amplification or deviation from this



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normalized space ^ a norm constituted in co-determining regularizationsand enactments of urban activity ^ through the arousal of its attendantactors, however violent or soothing.

The question is how to situate the struggle for the terms of program ^

its calculative, symbolic and affective dimensions that, relentlessly material-izing, always have the potential to reinforce, mislead or violate. Such a strug-gle involves some degree of rhetorical experimentation, and, toward thatend, the article aims to employ a degree of vivid speech (Harman, 2009):the forging of new concepts that may take on a life of their own, like goodctional characters, and at times exceed the boundaries of traditional forms.

Tracking, Analytics and the Event

To movement. . .

everything will be restored, and into movement every-thing will be resolved, writes Bergson (1913: 250). Yet to subordinatepassage to position would seem to thrust the world into chaos. Rather thanbeing restored to its status as enabling ground, movement is ratherenhanced through its technological outttings and calculative structurings,which intoxicate us with the illusion of control, the ability to catalyzeevents and shape outcomes. Motion is built atop motion like layers of codeatop code, rarely to be excavated because it seems to work, it allows us toagree that it works. In a modern, calculative world, all movement is

subjected to tracking: translated into a measurable form that can be durablyreproduced, in ways that standardize this movement, optimize it andinfuse it with the potential to be predicted.

The history of tracking begins with the mid-20th-century advent ofcomputing. It is rooted in the figure of the vigilant observer, harnessed tothe screen, interpreting movements on images or maps, however pictorialor schematic, urban or geographic: the observational expert, stationed atthe control room monitors of military and intelligence agencies and the sur-veillance banks of megacities. Within its calculative matrices, moving phe-nomena are detected and codified, their future positions extrapolated, inorder to gain strategic and tactical advantage. Most of this tracked informa-tion escapes notice, owing to the limitations of representation ^ no pictureis perfect ^ and the instability of human attention levels, which tend tobuckle under the pressure of an ever-increasing magnitude of data receivedfrom the cameras and sensors that are multiplying around the world. Asever, the techniques of war, along with those of commerce, are propelledby efficiency demands. The gap must be narrowed between detection andengagement, or desire and its attainment, in order to institute a real-timeperceptual agency, a live concert of forces, that can transcend the limitations

of the real. A networked agency is demanded that is not simply predictivebut proactive.

In the science of video analytics, movement is tracked algorithmically.It uses a variety of rules tailored to the observed scene and its objects.Most of what analytics software apprehends is subsumed within the



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domain of the ordinary: the spatial and temporal norm of a given environ-ment. As with all observing technology, it helps constitute this normthrough the categorization and standardization of information. As it helpsconstitute the norm, video analytics aims to detect activity that might devi-

ate from it, before such unusual activity can gather as an incident ^ anevent that has suddenly become a matter of concern. In order to allow thisaberrant activity to be inferred, algorithms screen out non-critical move-ment activity, in ways that strive to minimize distraction and maximize theattention span of human operators.

Video analytics systems are increasingly used in cities for generalsecurity, government, retail, transport and financial services. A typicalapplication is perimeter protection analytics, which allow the user to iden-tify specific areas where intruders will be identified ^ virtual fence lines

that are triggered when an intruder crosses over them, such as in restrictedareas. Dwell time or counter-flow analytics allow parking lots, one-waystreets, doorways and other specific areas to be monitored to avoid carsbeing left in no parking bays; to identify vehicles or people moving in thewrong direction or against the flow (up one-way roads, up exit-only gang-ways at airports); and to highlight excessive loitering (such as in airportsor transport hubs). Abandoned object detection analytics allow the identifi-cation of objects that have been left behind or left stationary for too long.Congestion detection analytics monitor the densities of humans or cars:

people amassing or traffic jammed.When used for marketing purposes, analytics applications such asdwell time are useful not in gauging danger so much as desire: to identifywhether customers stop at product displays and how long they remainthere, absorbing the seductive messages conveyed therein. Here the eventis not something to be prevented so much as courted: the object left station-ary too long is none other than the spellbound shopper, dwelling in theimage of an idealized world.

On the surface the technology might seem contradictory. It is bothproductive and preventive: it anticipates the event, yet it also seeks to pre-vent the event from occurring. As an attention-worthy incident, a matterof fascination or concern, the event is also irresolute: on the one hand it isa violation, yet on the other, it is an affirmation. The event is a disruptiveoccurrence, an exception, a deviation from the established norm ^ a violentagitation of the sanctity of the default. At the same time, it is a cooperativecongealment, an affiliation of actors that have come together to engendersomething ^ a constructive affirmation of the salience of the gathering.

The event destabilizes, yet it also sets forth a demand for interopera-bility. The technological, social and institutional programs of analytics, as

these intertwine with those of the event, compel adherence to their demandsfor movement, convertibility and translation: for all information ^ whethertext, image or sound ^ to be digitized and rendered interoperable, able tocross the boundaries of the specific domains within which it was convention-ally produced and utilized, and ordered according to common standards,



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categories and formats, as these last are embodied in all manner of newpractices.

Data Mining, Statistical Inclination and CorrelationThese imperatives push the development of video analytics science as it hasemerged within the cartographic tradition, through video surveillance, andthrough modern techniques of data mining, as these practices are trans-formed by technological and ideological change. For many, this is a deep his-torical shift that is fundamentally transforming the practice of science.According to the computing researcher Jim Gray (cited in Markoff, 2009),a new scientic paradigm is emerging due to an exaood of observationaldata that is threatening to overwhelm practitioners ^ an era in which the

amount of information available may well subsume all existing data sources,technologies, methodologies. Demands for interoperability ^ movement,conversion, translation ^ are accompanied by a crisis in the structural man-agement of a data ood that threatens to consume us. The only way to copeis to develop a new generation of scientic computing tools to manage, visu-alize and analyze this exaood. The goal is not to have the biggest, fastestsingle computer (which until recently has been the focus), but rather, tohave a world of distributed computing ^ a world of cheaper, interoperableclusters of computers.

Technological change brings new models of inquiry. Fueled byincreased capacities of information storage, processing power and network-ing, and new data mining tools and techniques, tracking technologies areable to reach far back into the past ^ further back than was previously pos-sible with earlier generations of observation-based tools ^ through the useof regressions. These are statistical procedures, or analytics, that allow pat-terns to be envisaged in the datasets where tracked phenomena, as detectedand codified, reside ^ patterns that might suggest a continuity, a propensity,a taste of what is to come.

It is a matter of the stability of the pattern. And so the pattern is putto the test: more analytics, including random back-trials, are used to gaugeits accuracy, durability and ability to forecast. This pattern might be stabi-lized, made operational in a formula ^ a functional modeling of datamined analytics, a locus where statistics are stabilized in a productive, work-ing form. Yet the formula is a precarious congealment, since new factorscan always be introduced that may destabilize and modify it. The aim isnot for rigidity but provisional stability ^ something stable enough to dothe job.

The formula, as with all congealments of calculative operations, all sta-

bilizations of data mined analytics, functions as an actor ^ a material andmaterializing entity, an entity endowed with the ability to generate effects.Human agency is bundled within it, though this is often repressed,obscured or concealed. To regard an actor in terms of the materialfactors and structuring principles ^ however technological, social or



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institutional ^ that congeal it, and which it congeals, is to regard it in termsof its program, as this program intertwines with that of the event that itmay conduct or oppose. Such an actor does not simply register what moves,but participates in the mobilization of its object. The movement is achieved

by way of its becoming calculable. Tracking emerges from, and perpetuates,this calculative mobilization.

One plugs specified attributes into the regression formula, and nearlyany moving phenomenon ^ a shopper, a biological process, a product orpart ^ is codified and understood in a historical trajectory. From this, itssubsequent position may be extrapolated. With ever-expanding volumes ofstored data to draw upon, and new ways of connecting people, machinesand forces ^ distributing and sharing their functions in a larger field ofhuman and machinic agency ^ relationships are uncovered among widely

disparate kinds of information. Through a technologically enhanced percep-tion, a mathematical seeing, patterns come into view that previously couldnot be seen by the naked eye, in ways that augment, or occlude, traditionalobservational expertise and human intuition.

Technologies, practices and mindsets inform one another. Statisticalanalysis, supplemented with increasing amounts of data, processing powerand storage, challenges the relevance of all other tools. Since statistical algo-rithms do the work, data can be analyzed without hypotheses ^ withoutcoherent models, unified theories or mechanistic explanations ^ to the

extent that, for Anderson (2007), it not only introduces a paradigmaticshift in science but heralds the end of the scientic method itself, alongwith all theories of human behavior: Who knows why people do what theydo? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprece-dented delity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.Causal models become irrelevant ^ correlation is enough. From this view-point, the barrier to the truth is not the reality, but the limitation of thetools used to analyze it ^ limitations that recede with the rise of abundantdata, processing power, storage and data mining techniques as authentic

identities advance to the fore, conjured out of the data that record habits,transactional patterns and characteristics, and the statistical algorithmsthat conduct its mobilization.

This emphasis on the past, however, is one that Popper (1995: 20^1),for one, would minimize. For him, causation is just a special case of propen-sity ^ a determining demand, or force, for realization. A probable constructexists that stands in relation to reality as its tendency. It congures as a sta-tistical inclination, a weighted possibility. It becomes a silhouette thatmodels future positions, a ghostly forebear into which reality ows. For

Popper (1995), propensities are actors ^ they can act, they are actual, theyare real ^ though they are more on the order of situations than objects.One might place causes and eects on the same plane of action, and regardthem as actors one and the same. Though an actor can aect otherentities, it is, as DeLanda (2006) would say, catalytic rather than causal.



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Echoing Andersons (2007) statement, but in a very dierent sense, theissue is not causality but correlation.

For Kallinikos and Maria tegui (2007), data mining practices servelittle more purpose than to inate the present. The abundance of informa-

tion makes the event and its ephemeral constitution central elements ofsocial and institutional life. Information is about novelty ^ in order to beinformative, it must pick up a new fact or state and convey it. But noveltydoes not and cannot last. It dies out at the very moment it is consumed(2007). The increasing abundance of data serves only to make it more eet-ing, more perishable, more disposable, and so, this pending evaporation ofinformation triggers a complex institutional game to maintain its valuethrough a variety of mechanisms (2007). If information is an actor, itmust, like all actors, maintain itself in a continuing move. Witness the cul-

ture of the update, as well as the constant need for information to simplyproliferate itself: data begetting more data, the constant expansion of theuniverse of data. Without constant updating, the information-rich environ-ment would implode ^ markets around the world would collapse. And yet,as this perpetual updating escalates, it only serves to facilitate a more rapidexpiration of the data upon which it depends.

Calculative Mobilization, Ubiquitous Computingand Urban Sensing

Tracking has shaped a world in which movement is understood as some-thing quantifiable and predictable. Movement is divided into components,analyzed and extrapolated with the aid of a computational support. Such cal-culative mobilization is the foundational condition of a contemporary urbanspace everywhere driven by computational architectures and analytics. It isamplified in the case of megacities as such calculative mobilization requireskeeping pace with rapid urban development as it strives to subsume allurban phenomena into its calculative architectures, compelling adherenceto demands for movement, convertibility, translation and standardization ^even those phenomena which have heretofore resisted these demands forinteroperability and consolidation, such as affective responses, whetherunderstood in terms of desire or fear, protection or violence. It not onlycompels a particular orientation in the megacity, but also performs the cityentirely in its own image, its own character, down to the very consumptionand experience of place (Graham, 2005: 1). In so doing, it generates anenhanced environment in which potentially every entity, dened in termsof its location and its tracked and anticipated movements, can become thesubject of its calculative procedures (Thrift, 2008: 89^100).These analytical

procedures inltrate social life, dene priorities and relevancies, frameapproaches and motivations, and construct the perception of urban events(Kallinikos and Maria tegui, 2008). All actors in the world are locatable,yet subordinated to movement, and thus fundamentally able to be tracked,modied and transported.



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With tracking, movement becomes calculable. Yet a much more perva-sive field of calculation, characterized by distributed forms of cognition(Hayles, 2009), has, at least since the mid-20th century, constituted itsenabling horizon. Since then, contemporary urban space has been driven

by computational architectures and analytics. Following Thrift (2008: 95),one could look to its genesis in global architectures of address, which pro-duced a genuine locatability such that objects could be followed from loca-tion to location as a continuous series so simulating movement in a waythat was, for all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from movementitself ^ a process that gave rise to the need for standards and protocols inorder that all parts of a system are able to be transcoded or located by allother parts. Or, one could look to its beginning with the mid-20th-centuryinvention of logistics ^ a set of knowledges synonymous with movement,

eectively the science of moving objects in an optimal fashion (Thrift,2008: 95) in order that the right information and materials can be brought,spatially and digitally, to the right place at the right time.

As the nodes used to access the Internet diversify and shrink into allmanner of mobile devices, access to communications becomes increasinglywidespread. Advances in coverage and bandwidth of wireless channels, espe-cially in rapidly developing megacity environments that require the bypass-ing of conventional communication lines, are met with improvements ininterface design. Networked computing elements become embedded into

physical objects and environments ^ in appliances, buildings, cars, infra-structure ^ to the extent that the Internet becomes a part of everydayspace, allowing the environment to gain digital qualities, such as computer-addressability through unique identification codes and the ability to com-municate wirelessly among its actors (Kang and Cuff, 2005).

Of vital importance to this environment of pervasive calculation andubiquitous computing is sensing research ^ spatial sensor networks devel-oped within the sciences and the military ^ as this research places greaterimportance on data, data processing, and mathematical and statistical

models for environmental and urban phenomena.A sensor responds to a change in state. This state might be mechani-

cal, electrical, magnetic, hydrostatic, flowing, chemical, luminous or logical.The change, the event, might be registered as a singularity, scalar stabilityor configurative multiplicity: as a discrete eruption or exception; as the grad-ual attainment or crossing of a threshold; or as the stabilization of a pattern(McCullough, 2004: 75). Sensors measure the physical world, detectingmechanical, thermal, biological, chemical, optical, acoustic and magneticphenomena (sight, sound, weight, pressure, heat, moisture, acceleration,

electromagnetic radiation, particulates). Seismic sensors measure groundvibrations (for detecting vehicular trac, earthquakes); chemical sensorsdetect harmful residues or explosive agents inside packages, parcels, con-tainers, tanks and vehicle compartments; acoustic sensors recognize explo-sions, breaking glass, engine noise and high-decibel screams.



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links); it supplies many traffic lights and traffic systems; and it is imple-menting new systems to monitor roads and automatically identify licenseplates.

The tracked patterns from consumer activity are bought by companies

that recombine them into profiles to be used for targeting their promotions.Consumers rarely have access to the profiles that are used to define themand thus are unwillingly subject to their recombinatory violence.Interoperability is key in the production of these aggregated profiles: insur-ance companies combine information about individuals that is spreadacross different digitized sources ^ banks, medical records, tax returns,travel agencies ^ to produce individualized premiums that map risk andlife profiles; police forces construct profiles of criminals by data miningaggregate financial transactions, travel records, communication and other

data (Kallinikos and Maria tegui, 2007).At the same time, embedded network sensing has entered the social

arena in the form of new generations of citizen activated sensors in theurban environment. Perhaps chiefly, this occurs through the agency of thecell phone. Cuff et al. (2008) note that mobile phones are passive sensorsthat can silently and continuously collect, exchange and process informationin terms of sound, sight, and location: they sense sound (voices); theysense images and movement through built-in cameras; they sense locationthrough GPS receivers or basic triangulation. New generations of citizen-

activated sensors are visible through the proliferation of geocoded data andthe accompanying GIS platforms for its visualization, through GoogleEarth, mapping Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and location-based services. Such geographic information systems, which merge cartogra-phy and database technology to capture, store, analyze, manage and presentdata linked to location, are widely used across all sectors of megacities, inurban planning, land surveying, crisis management and navigation. Web2.0-enabled applications oer the ability to mash-up or otherwise displaycustomized layers of sounds, images, video and statistics on visual sche-matics or maps, combining content from multiple sources into integratedexperiences. Through data-rich mobile applications, the processing, visualiz-ing and uploading of sensor data will certainly increase as accessibility tomobile communications increases globally and new sensing capabilities areadded.

According to Cuff et al. (2008: 26), embedded network sensing in itscitizen-activated variety has greatly reduced the technical barrier to visualizedata in real space, to construct maps of layered information, and to analyzelocational phenomena over time. It is creating opportunities for collectingand managing a wide range of urban information, whether environmental,

economic or social, and thus opens up possibilities for new participatorymodels, in contrast to the proprietary ones outlined earlier.

Perhaps these proprietary and participatory dimensions can bebrought together in practices on the order of what Cuff et al. (2008) referto as urban sensing. These sensing practices address the fact that



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centralized models ^ where sensors, the data they collect and the ways inwhich the data is processed are subject to centralized control by those scien-tic, corporate or state agencies who plan the sensor deployments ^ do notscale well to the megacity, as these agencies lack the property rights to

place instruments everywhere and humans enjoy privacy rights not grantedto nonhumans. Models of distributed citizen-sensing, or participatory sens-ing, sidestep these problems: although some central authority maintainsthe basic terms and conditions of data collection as well as the data reposi-tory, that authority allows citizens to become local data collectors.

This approach has been used in disaster and crisis management.McLaren (2009) points out that during the Hurricane Katrina disaster inNew Orleans, two software engineers, working with Google MapsAPI, cre-ated scipionus.com to allow citizens to post emergency information in the

wake of the hurricane, anchored to specic geographical points. It becamemuch more important than the ocial sources of information. During therecent forest res in California, a wide range of information was integratedfrom GIS professionals and distributed citizen-sensed data, much of itreal-time, to provide re ghters and the public with crucial disaster man-agement decision-making information.

An open-source reporting tool called Ushahidi was originally a simplewebsite mash-up, employing user-generated reports and Google Maps,created in 2008 to gather citizen-generated crisis information after the

post-election violence in Kenya, primarily to track reports of incidents ofviolence. Since then, the Ushahidi engine ^ with developers hailing fromKenya, Ghana, South Africa, Malawi, the Netherlands and the US ^ hasdeveloped into a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data viaSMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline, aggregating infor-mation from the public for use in crisis response. It has been used for track-ing the post-earthquake crisis response and recovery efforts in Haiti; forreal-time tracking of stocks of medical supplies at pharmacies in Kenya,Uganda, Malawi and Zambia; for monitoring mobile phone companies byordinary citizens in the Philippines; for monitoring the federal elections ofJuly 2009 in Mexico; for tracking violent crime in the Atlanta metro area;for tracking swine flu reports coming in from official and unofficialsources; and for mapping xenophobic violence perpetrated against non-South Africans. It serves as a citizen science project to track wildlife inKenya; as a citizen-driven election monitoring platform for the 2009Indian general elections; and as an information resource for traffickingand anti-trafficking activity globally. Al Jazeera has used it in its War onGaza site since January 2009, covering the activity happening in Gaza. Itis currently being used to track spill-related damage from the BP oil disaster

in the US Gulf of Mexico.As McLaren (2009: 10) points out, it is conceivable that citizen groups

within megacities will form crowd-sourcing communities to collect andmaintain timely urban information that will supplement and possiblyreplace some out-of-date information obtained from ocial channels.



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It has the potential to increase the levels of citizen participation in the gover-nance of megacities and to help to ll the current gaps in urban informationneeded to understand the dynamics of megacities (FIG Commission,2010). In this way, as urban sensing oers new conveniences, social networks

and urban sensibilities available to citizens, it has the potential to strengthenthe spatial data infrastructures and urban change information available(McLaren, 2009: 4). Some megacities, such as New York, have at leastsome elements of an SDI already in place. Such comprehensive SDIs wouldcreate the opportunity to optimize analyses, providing megacity managers ^and, ideally, thecitizens in these cities^ withmore eectiveandtimely informa-tion required to manage sustaineddevelopment (McLaren, 2009: 2). As fertileground for participatory, collaborative eorts, they have, for Cuff et al. (2008:29^31), the potential to constitute a new form of public infrastructure ^ a data

commons.Yet the fact remains that while new conveniences, sensibilities and

participatory practices may result, many citizens and consumers do nothave access to this information, or to the tracked patterns from their every-day activity as this data is integrated into profiles used to depict, monitoror target them. Participatory tracking can easily turn into a (non)participa-tory targeting: while at times protective and informing, it submits them toa calculative and representational violence that always has the potential tobecome actionable and real.

Agency, Animated Environments and Adaptive Systems

Data-intensive, multi-agential environments ^ characterized by combina-tions of inexpensive sensors, interoperable clusters of computing platforms,high-bandwidth networks and large-scale coordination among differentdatabase systems ^ are accompanied by analytical tools, modes of inquiry,forms of being and practices of movement. As information and the technol-ogies by which it is produced penetrate deeper and deeper into the fabric ofeveryday life, they remake a large range of everyday tasks, redefine themeaning of established ways of doing things and introduce new practices,habits and tendencies (Kallinikos and Maria tegui, 2007). Integrated withaects, sensations and rhythms, they perpetuate fantasies and fears, desiresand violent obsessions. Technological systems are bound up in the produc-tion of social norms and protocols; connected to political economies, discur-sive regimes and cultural mythologies, they acquire momentum andsymbolic force through discursive constructions of the future (Monahanand Wall, 2007).

This analytical, data-intensive surround can certainly be regarded as a

new kind of environmental space ^ a background host of calculations ofmovement (Thrift, 2008: 95) that has become naturalized as part of thenormal functioning of the world, to the extent that it now conditions allactivity, becoming synonymous with mobility itself. Within this informa-tion-intensive, analytics-driven megacity environment, tracking has become



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elevated into a condition. It is part of a new regime of ambient informatics,where information processing dissolves not only into space but also intobehavior (Greenfield, 2006: 24^6), sensation and combinatory modalitiesof agency.

Consider intelligent material systems as used in aircraft, advanced cardesigns and infrastructure. Such intelligent materials or structures cansense their environment and adapt to it, varying their properties autono-mously on the basis of external influences. Structures that can sense theirenvironment and generate data for use in health and usage monitoring sys-tems are already well established in the field of aerospace. An aircraft con-structed from a smart structure can self-monitor its performance to a levelbeyond that of current data recording, and provide ground crews withenhanced health and usage monitoring. Smart materials technology is

being developed for the monitoring of civil engineering structures in mega-cities, to assess durability and provide warning of structural problems ^ forexample, the current and long-term behavior of a bridge ^ as well as forbuildings and urban structures to automatically respond to adverse weatherconditions, energy shortages, acts of violence and local crime events.

As networked computing elements become embedded into physicalobjects and environments to the extent that they become a part of everydayspace, the urban environment, having gained digital and communicativequalities, becomes animated (Kang and Cuff, 2005) ^ it becomes able to

respond directly to what it apprehends, in ways that might be consideredautomatic (such as building climate control) or autonomous. Whether ornot one has a direct connection to this data-intensive surround does not nec-essarily matter, since its eects are everywhere, and the environment actsas a prosthesis which oers cognitive assistance on a routine basis (Thrift,2008: 98) ^ and, one might add, ontological assistance. There is an informa-tion ambience, a sense of continual access to information arising out of con-nectivity being embedded in all manner of objects.

To delve into the nature of the programs at work in these environ-ments ^ programs within which human agency is often concealed ^ is toquestion the naturalization of an ambient, calculative surround, its congeal-ment into a standardized or default space, a normalized atmosphere orforce, which is no longer seen in terms of specific analytics operations. Itis to inquire not only into the constitution of an event, but also into theembodied practices and algorithmic procedures that construct the normagainst which this event, as a violent deviation, erupts.

Consider the new generation of video analytics that incorporates adap-tive learning. First-generation video analytics is limited by its rules-basedrequirements: while human behavior exhibits relatively stable patterns, it is

impossible to write a set of rules that can be expected to cover the fullrange of possible behaviors for any given urban environment. Adaptivelearning video analytics aims to bypass this limitation. According to Eaton(2008), the basic concept of this relates to software-based performance man-agement and network security products that employ pattern recognition.



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These products, already widely used, analyze a systems performance overtime to learn normal patterns of activity; from this basis, they learn todetect abnormalities. Adaptive learning video analytics uses similar princi-ples, but it has extra layers of complexity because its roots are not only in

intelligent pattern recognition but also in observations made by video ana-lytic algorithms.

In essence, adaptive learning technology is a combination of video ana-lytics, computer vision and machine-learning capabilities. Like video analyt-ics, adaptive learning technology takes the input from existing videosecurity cameras and recognizes and identifies the objects in each frame tolearn what activity normally takes place within the area under observation.It then analyzes the changes, activities and motions of those objects, andbuilds a model of established behaviors. Unlike rules-based analytics, how-

ever, adaptive learning allows the computer to classify objects without anypre-programmed definitions or specifications.

A learning engine gathers information about dominant object content ^tracking, for each object, features like a subjects size, color, reflectivity,sheen, shape and level of autonomy. Humans are not required to defineparameters for the software to recognize behavior or objects ^ the systemitself decides how a human is classified as opposed to a car or animal or anyother object. The system, then, observes the scene to learn and identifynormal and anomalous behaviors by way of a constant study of the types

of objects that exhibit those behaviors in the scene. Learning from experi-ence, it can adapt to changes in the observed environment on its own,detecting, tracking and classifying abnormal behavior that was not previouslydefined or anticipated activity that might be deemed high-riskor potentiallyviolent.

Since they occur with little or no human involvement, minimizing theneed for human intervention or dispensing with it altogether, such activitiesare often understood to occur automatically or autonomously. In this waythe algorithm is dehumanized. However, as Alexander (2008a) reminds us,algorithms are human decisions expressed in code, and thus computationaldecisions are not necessarily objective. The role of humans is minimized orforgotten because we do not register their presence, and although code isgenerally written in the imperative or declarative, it is often perceived as pas-sive. Algorithms are powerful expressions of human will that humans canhide behind to dodge responsibility for their actions (Alexander, 2008a).And yet, what exactly do we mean by the term human? In a world of ambi-ent informatics where computing, materiality and behavior intertwine, isthere a human outside algorithm?

The fact that a deed was done by a computer does not make the deci-

sion mechanical, blind or objective (Alexander, 2008b: 471) ^ yet certainly,there is a combinatory agency at work. Qualities intercede within the realmof the algorithmic, and thus, when considering its orientation in the world,this is a combinatory mode of organization that carries with it a disposition.If human and machinic capabilities and functions are distributed in new



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sensor/processor/actuator aliations, then distinctions such as automatic,autonomous or unmanned are misleading due to their imposition of abso-lutes. If we begin with the assumption that there is nothing fully machinicnor fully human ^ all are multi-agential aliations ^ then the question

becomes one of the nature of the combinatory agency at work ^ an agencythat, in its combination of algorithm, materiality and behavior, is as itdoes. The question is, what does it do, and how is that activity harnessed,shaped, registered? To what does it tend? With what actors does it aliate?The emphasis shifts from an inquiry as to who or what is observing,toward one regarding the practice ^ the nature of the program at work.

To proceed in this way is to open the black boxof autonomy, the auto-mated or autonomous system within which human agency is concealed.According to Latour (cited in Harman, 2009: 34), an actor is always a mul-

tiplicity, but we black box it. To open this box, to look under the hood ofan actor is to witness a strange aliation of players ^ a bestiary of agency,kinds of relatings, and scores of time (Haraway, 1997: 6). It can require agreat deal of labor, and so it is often more convenient to agree to keep thehood closed. An aliation, as a multiplicity, is constituted as an accordance:it is a linguistic and formal device, a platform of departure, a stratum ofagreement, from which to examine the constitution of an event. And yet, itis not simply a symbolic construction but a material entity existing in theworld.

As such, while tracking is being absorbed into locationing (howevernon-visually), and while locationing may be a vital component of the affilia-tion, the affiliation is not entirely subject to spatial dictates. Even thoughcharacterized in terms of affiliations, actors are never fully containedwithin them: transversal mixings, transmissions and bondings are alwayspossible, across multiple spatial and temporal scales, in larger or smallergatherings (DeLanda, 2006). The intra-play between such states must beconceptualized in non-reductive and non-reective ways (Fuller, 2005), soas to incorporate not only transmission, coding and calibration, but also

thresholds of translation: those points or zones across which one thing sud-denly becomes something else, a gathering of actors enters into a more-orless-complex state, an event erupts as a violent destabilization of the norm,or a novel occurrence congeals against the backdrop of the ordinary.

A Politics of Program, a Politics of the Event

Actors exert cumulative influence to the extent that they can facilitate pro-grams. Through programs, actors aim for cooperative agreements that havethe potential to become standards, and which cultivate a submission to the

settings of the default. Standards are imposed through requirements andenforcement mechanisms (such as sets of human interface guidelines fordifferent operating systems), and they are voluntarily adopted when theybecome popular among actors (users, programs, businesses, societies).A feature becomes a standard not simply because it is a tradition or



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a requirement, but because it has become influential beyond its initial lim-ited sphere. And yet, standards are actively designed to be taken up in thisway ^ designed to accommodate many commands, run as components ofmany programs, on many systems, in order that they can sediment into

practices to the point that they become necessary. The ultimate test of astandard is voluntary adoption in the marketplace (Galloway, 2004: 128). Aproduct is understood to be successful when it becomes part of daily pat-terns ^ a default mode.

In order to reproduce themselves, standards must gain a sufficientdegree of regularity and stabilization. They must gain durability throughrecurrent practices ^ processes of adjustment and acclimation wherebyaffective responses are linked and repeated, and actors nervous, cognitiveand hormonal systems are brought into some degree of alignment with one

another (Brennan, 2004: 68). Structural agreements must come into play,engendered through attributes that are relatively reproducible, sustainedand shared, allowing discernments to be made from a common basis ofunderstanding among invested actors ^ a basis that is linguistic, aectiveand rhythmic, as when speech is populated with conversational or behavioralvalves that adjust the actors to a common pace. The question is whetherthe actors respective attributions allow a shared relational, resonating andreplicating bond.

This is a process that leans toward sameness. It is based in the affir-

mative negotiation of a structural similarity (code or frequency) throughwhich an interoperability among actors can be achieved. Standardizingactors cultivate relevance and endurance in cooperative struggles, mutuallybeneficial negotiations. Relinquishments are required, a degree of weaknessor vulnerability essential. If desire is operative here, it is not grounded inalienation, lack or misapprehension but in accordance and affinity, in waysthat do not privilege difference and identity (Bersani, 2000: 649). Anactor is inclined toward another actor in ways that are not necessarilybased on an identication with that actor. The basis of this inclination isthe guiding principle of a structural similarity.

Programs are the guiding principles of this structural inclination.They are non-differentially based relational modes that amplify certainstructural and standardizing potentials: they allow actors to affiliate inways that, through continuity, consistency and regularity, can engender aheightened level of interoperable redundancy. The political object of engage-ment is not program itself, but the particular modality of structural inclina-tion that programic relationality engenders within the calculative paradigmof tracking. As performatively constituted action-densities (Barad, 2007)inferred through calculative, predictive or pro-active operations, an actor

integrates and internalizes, consolidates and extends within the organiza-tional and ontological horizon of tracking ^ a eld that harbors a fundamen-tally anticipatory orientation. Actors are characterized by what they do ^instantiation is action ^ and what they do is inected by what they willdo. Actuality is conditioned by tendency. Embroiled in a calculative,



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mobilizing externality, agency pushes and is pulled outward, as if seeking tobecome the predisposition that it courts.

Programs are practices, performatively instituted in material andmaterializing ways. Like any algorithm, program calls for its questioning

as a material object, as a means of production, as a human-technicalhybrid, as medium of communication, as terrain of political-economic con-testation (Mackenzie, 2006: 2). It is a site of social negotiations that struc-tures and organizes agency, behavior and attention (Mackenzie, cited inHayles, 2008: 138). Its constitutive rules depend on classications and stan-dardizations that, as Kallinikos and Maria tegui (2008) remind us, presup-pose the operation of a logically constructed scaold on which categoriesare crafted and make sense ^ a scaold that gains signicance at theexpense of other ways of perceiving and framing life events. What appears

in algorithms and databases must pass through this scaold as well as thestandardized forms of information that the system as a whole admits. Asthis occurs, contemporary forms of life are constituted as derivatives ofthese associations. The challenge, following Bowker (2005: 256), is tocreate exible databases that are as rich ontologically as the social and natu-ral worlds they map.

This suggests a mode of critical engagement that is both reductive andextensive. It calls for the analytical uncovering of the agency that programgathers and conceals, its structuring principles, its tendencies, its engender-

ings of default spaces and settings, while at the same time it calls for theextension of program to allow for the accommodation of more structures oflife ^ working with program to expand its potential, its ontological and epis-temological horizon.

Program is bound up in the materialization of the norm ^ a normativefield within which the event as an exception or amplification can bedetected. Programic normalization is achieved as a stabilization against abackdrop of destabilization, and, in this sense, it is a cooperative congeal-ment ^ an affiliation of actors (human, environmental, expressive, linguis-tic) drawn together in attendance. And yet the event is also a violentexception, a disruption of this established norm ^ a destabilization of thestabilized field. To delve into the nature of the programs at work in urbanenvironments is to question this naturalization within the paradigm oftracking. It is to question the embodied practices and algorithmic proce-dures that constitute a calculative surround no longer seen in terms of speci-fic analytics operations, and within which human agency is oftenconcealed. These practices and procedures are as densely layered as softwaredevelopment is itself: it involves the ongoing introduction of new elementsand structures, the mixing and rewriting of code atop code, in a way that

is more like sedimentation than construction (MacKenzie, 2006: 115).Yet program constitutes the event as an object of fascination or con-

cern not only through the normalization of space but through the arousalof its attendant actors, however violent or soothing. Operative across theaffective, symbolic and rhythmic registers of experience, and traversing



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the strata and surfaces of bounded spaces and bodies, programic affiliationundercuts conventional ontological distinctions, subjecting actors andevents to common programs even though it may appear otherwise onceagential distinctions have performatively adhered (Barad, 2007). Even as

they traverse actors and events, such commonalities inform physio-psycholo-gical orientations (anxieties, desires, fears) and motivations that may be dis-cerned in violent oppositions once judgments congeal. The actorsoccasioned by the event are each disposed to act in certain ways, and,through recurrent practices involving sensation, rhythm and attention,they are mutually attuned and stabilized in accordance with this disposition.The stabilization can be disrupted ^ the event can slice through it ^ or itcan be met, perpetuated. A scrim of expectation is overlaid upon the real,which all of the actors in attendance uphold.They uphold it to some extent ^

they extend into and across one another in a web of inuence, expectation andmotivation.This web, however, is tenuous: it is provisionally stabilized, boundup in violent destabilizations that both threaten and strengthen it.The coopera-tion can simply occur in the form of a subtle agreement; the violation, as anexpressiveoutburst or physical act.

Within the context of megacities these political possibilities and reper-cussions are particularly urgent. The amplification of tracking and sensingpractices in extremely dense, large-scale and complex urban environmentsaround the world has only reinforced its organizational and ontological para-

digms ^ its analytical constitution of movement; its agential distinctions;its formats of standardization and structural inclination. Embroiled withinpolitical economies, social narratives, urban forms and embodied practices,its calculative procedures and categories, exponentially increased, infiltrateall domains of urban life ^ framing actions and tendencies, determiningwhat or who counts as meaningful, and conditioning not only the cognitivebut also the sensory apprehension of events. Its calculative mobilizations,however understood in terms of space or locationing, are magnified in com-prehensive ideals of SDIs that often traffic as participatory and inclusivewhile pursuing proprietary aims, infused with the potential to protect,inform and violate. The particular densities of megacities allow large-scaleand multi-scaled accumulations of data-enhanced actors that are unavailableelsewhere, with extremely complex and multi-leveled modes of proximityand interoperable relationality that may not involve any conventional spatialor geospatial orientations or understandings of movement, and which,through their incorporation of qualities as well as quantities, traverse thelimits of the calculative paradigm. As tracking becomes elevated into a con-dition, dissolving into behavior, sensation and all manner of embodiedsocial practices in the data-intensive, analytics-driven spaces of megacities,

the sense of continual access to information that arises out of the connectiv-ity and interoperability among all kinds of data-enhanced actors (Thrift,2008: 92^9) is not necessarily grounded in a direct access. It is not simplya matter of whether one has a direct connection to this data-intensive sur-round, since it increasingly constitutes a dening horizon against which the



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phenomena of the megacity are understood ^ a calculative ambience thatimposes its distinctions, categories and ways of being onto all facets ofurban life ^ as it acts as a cognitive, ontological, and experiential supple-ment for the simplest forms of ordinary routine.

Questions of a sense of access to this data-intensive surround mustbecome political, but this sense of access cannot solely be regarded in con-ventional political terms, because it is also a sense rooted in all manner ofpsychic, somatic and social practices, activated not just by individuals butby complex affiliations of agency that span familiar designations and onto-logical distinctions, while connecting deep into the realms of the sensorialand the imaginary. As Thrift suggests, space is outfitted with new kindsof locational fantasies and fears, new ambulatory tropisms and tendencies(2008: 101) and new formats of motivational propensity (2008: 26). Space

is infused with desires and aggressions, contradictory potentials for affinityand violence, to the extent that this constitutes an urban unconscious ^and perhaps more comprehensively, what Hayles (2008: 139), in order toavoid the prioritization of human psychology and further integrate the arti-factual environment, refers to as a technological nonconscious. FollowingBersani (2004: 169), such a political orientation must be thought in im-perso-nal terms where subjectivity, no longer based in the unique personality cen-tral to modern notions of individualism and aware of its inescapableconnectedness, is disseminated into new formal and aective alliances or

anities ^ a reservoir of correspondences of phenomena ready to be acti-vated. We are challenged to look to relational modes whose foundationalstructures resituate the balance between sameness and dierence, in waysthat are not repressive or reductive.

A politics of the event involves the amplification of its programicpotential, while at the same time a critical engagement of its acquiescenceto the particular modality of program engendered within the calculative par-adigm of tracking. The terms of this engagement are less oppositional thancompositional: they necessitate the development of extensive or excessiveapproaches that involve stepping out of the skeptical of the known into aninadequate confrontation with what exceeds it and oneself (Moten andHarney, cited in Clough, 2007: 28). Such a course of action involves thetransformation of the event itself into a practice. A politics of program is apolitics of the everyday: a Foucauldian ethical arts of existence whose trans-formative intensications are not just about the self but about a largereld of actors becoming cooperatively and dynamically co-present.

Is it possible, within the analytical orientations, structural inclinationsand motivational propensities of tracking, to cultivate an ethic of dynamicalco-presencing in the megacity? In tracking, actors and events are constituted

in anticipation, their ontological excess weighted forward as if conjured outof trackings strategic and tactical aims: its procedures of calculative maneu-vering that, while seeking a real-time perceptual agency, always aim to tran-scend the limitations of the real. For Bataille (1991: 218, 222), since one isalways in a state of anticipation, one is always more or less in a state of



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Jordan Crandall is a media artist and theorist based in Los Angeles. He isAssociate Professor in the Visual Arts Department at the University ofCalifornia, San Diego. His video installations have been presented innumerous exhibitions worldwide; currently, in group exhibitions at theTate Modern, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the WalkerArt Center. His most recent video installation Hotel (2009) probes intothe realms of extreme intimacy, where techniques of control combine withtechniques of the self and paranoia combines with pleasure. Crandall is cur-rently developing a new philosophy of the event entitled Gatherings, whichworks across the life sciences, the social sciences, the digital humanities,

urban design and architecture. Crandall writes and lectures widely. He isthe founding editor of the new journal Version (http://version.org).[email: [email protected]; (http://jordancrandall.com)]


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