Joshua McWhirter

Dispositioning Systems: Infrastructures of affect in the locative city is the culmination of several months of research into the emergence of geolocative, mixed-reality media as novel forms of urban practice and as harbingers of new, network-driven urbanization processes. This thesis traces the history of locative media and its urban applications, from experimental art to massively multiplayer games such as Pok_mon Go and Ingress. It analyzes the infrastructural, political-economic, and ideological entanglements of geolocation in an attempt to create a more robust space of inquiry into the ever-increasing digital mediation of spatial experience and everyday life within an uneven planetary urban condition. In addition to provoking an expanded notion of "urban" that encompasses a hybridity of real and virtual elements, I hope that this research challenges urban scholars and designers alike to radically re-think geolocative interfaces as a powerful distributed site of critical pedagogy, speculative design, and sociopolitical critique and action.