[Commlist] cfp: Geomedia Conference 2021

“Geomedia 2021 – Off the Grid”: The 4th International Geomedia Conference
Wednesday, 05. - Saturday, 08 May 2021Organized Locating Media | Media 
of Cooperation

The phrase “off the grid” is commonly understood to refer to the 
voluntary decoupling from established infrastructure networks such as 
electricity, water or gas supply. The implication is one of material 
independence and a self-sufficient lifestyle. Going “off the grid” means 
making yourself invisible by rebuking the social and technological 
structures that normally organize our lives. It is entering, or 
returning to, uncharted territory. The grid from which you disappear is 
often imagined like a web that we are woven into, at once providing 
security – of cultural connectivity, opportunities to work, or societal 
participation – while also limiting individual, political or 
technological agency.

The grid also speaks to the geographic coordinate system, an 
all-encompassing global structure which makes it possible to accurately 
locate any point on earth. This unified grid represents a dominant 
ordering principle for everything “locatable”. It is part of the 
technological infrastructure of many platforms, services and 
applications which fall under the definition of geomedia, most 
prominently the Global Positioning System (GPS). In this regard, “off 
the grid” is a move away from such Cartesian notions of space towards a 
situated relational account of (quotidian) practices carried out with, 
through, or in relation to, geomedia.

Going off the grid has also been seen as a form of renunciation of the 
conveniences of the late capitalist (media) world in order to lead a 
supposedly slower, less stressful and eventually less superficial life – 
as inspired by the transcendentalism of the likes of Henry David Thoreau 
and Ralph Waldo Emerson. But with so many people relying on the grid for 
purposes of work and entertainment in recent times, what does this mean 
for our relation to geomedia? What does going off the grid look like 
now? This presupposes, of course, that there is ipso facto a grid – an 
infrastructure – which one can connect to freely at any time. But a 
great number of people do not get to choose to decouple from the grid – 
a fact that speaks to questions of access to the socio-material 
infrastructures underpinning geomedia and associated communities and 
practices.

Arguably, practices of surveillance and countersurveillance concern the 
implicit or even involuntary participation in corresponding 
infrastructures. Here, optimization for a range of tasks and activities 
routinely involves a certain kind of surveillance; a default setting in 
the running of all kinds of media platforms used for navigation, video 
streaming or online gaming. In this, surveillance is wrapped up with 
profit-seeking practices, and the extraction of value from the ‘data 
fumes’ of platform users, who enter a form of “cooperation without 
consensus” as they stream movies, hire taxis, host videoconferences, 
ride public transport, or go on dates. In these various iterations, 
surveillance might look different, and/or be practiced in distinct ways 
to traditional forms of state or corporate surveillance, increasingly 
dependent on technological protocols and standards that not only 
underpin the grid but also govern our use of geomedia. One consequence 
is that the relation between private and public spheres is transformed, 
and introduces new questions of governance, exploitation and 
marginalization. It is of crucial importance, who is online, and who is 
offline might as well not exist. Yet these optimization processes are 
also subject to countermeasures that constitute new modes of existence - 
from anonymous accounts and the use of VPNs, to location spoofing, and 
other tricks and techniques to hide, erase, or obfuscate user activity 
and location.

Yet the grid is not all-encompassing, nor all-powerful. Whilst 
countersurveillance efforts resist, fight back and oppose, alternative 
geomedia projects imagine the grid differently – sometimes even plotting 
its demise. From community broadband initiatives, to independent media 
organizations, post-capitalist streaming platforms, and citizen science 
projects; there is a continued, concerted effort to build alternatives 
to state-based, or company-owned geomedia, operating at various scales 
from the hyperlocal to the global. Through these efforts, organizers and 
participants question the foundations of our collective social and 
technological infrastructures, redefining what it is to care, share, 
distribute, cultivate or reallocate funds, resources, opportunities and 
ideas – bringing new geomedia, and new imaginaries of hope (or perhaps 
fear), into existence.

Keynote Speakers:

  * Caren Kaplan – University of California at Davis, USA
  * Nanna Verhoeff – Utrecht University, Netherlands

Suggested paper topics include, but are not limited to:

  * Politics, philosophy and ethics of going off grid
  * Grid as Network, Grid as Default (Geomedia and Infrastructure)
  * Physical Geography/Relational Geography
  * Inhabiting Digital Geographies (VR, hybrid spaces)
  * Geomedia in the Global South
  * Urban and Rural Geomedia
  * The ‘geo’ in Geomedia, the ‘media’ in Geomedia
  * Governing Geomedia (smart city, sensor media, infrastructures,
    surveillance & countersurveillance)
  * Geomedia Activism
  * Digital detox, rationing, quarantine and isolation
  * Geomedia Histories

Geomedia 2021 welcomes proposals for individual papers as well as 
thematic panels in English.

/Individual paper proposals:/ The author submits an abstract of 200–250 
words. Accepted papers are grouped by the organizers into sessions of 5 
papers according to thematic area.

/Thematic panel proposals:/ The chair of the panel submits a proposal 
consisting of 4–5 individual paper abstracts (200-250 words) along with 
a general panel presentation of 200–250 words.

Conference timeline:

  * October 31st 2020: Submission system opens
  * January 7th 2021: Deadline for thematic panel and individual paper
    proposals
  * January 25th 2021: Notes of acceptance and registration opens
  * March 15th 2021: Last day of registration

For further information; pls. contact: (info /at/ geomediastudies.com) 
<mailto:(info /at/ geomediastudies.com)>
and see:
https://www.mediacoop.uni-siegen.de/en/events/geomedia-2021-off-the-grid/ <https://www.mediacoop.uni-siegen.de/en/events/geomedia-2021-off-the-grid/>

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