Landscape, Locative Media, and the Duplicity of Code

This chapter aims to recognize that locative digital technologies are (increasingly) significant actants in everyday life. The chapter first argues that the coding of landscapes should not be viewed simply as a discrete and highly technical series of practices involved in the programming of specific high-tech systems and spaces, but rather as a more diffuse set of subjective processes and practices enrolling individuals in more or less obvious ways in the writing of cultural landscapes. It reflects on the ways in which geographers are beginning to understand locative technologies as constitutive of remediated regimes of visuality entailing particular subjects and objects of a coded gaze. The chapter then turns to questions of positionality, and how locative technologies work to produce particular kinds of coded subjects. Finally, it evokes code's role in the recombination of multiple discourses and temporalities into indeterminate presents and thereby in shaping memory and memorialization.