The Geospatialization of Calculative Operations

Tracking, 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 tracking and sensing have emerged across the consumer, state and corporate sectors. These practices are amplified in the case of megacities as they strive to keep pace with rapid urban development. All movement is subordinated 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 offers 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 also offers new structuring principles and political orientations, which are particularly 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 potential not only to protect and inform but also to violate.

Theory, Culture & Society 2010 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore), Vol. 27(6): 68^90 DOI: 10.1177/0263276410382027

Crandall ^ The Geospatialization of Calculative Operations

Key words embedded systems j RFID j smart structures j tracking j urban sensing j video analytics

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of tracking is rooted in the figure of the surveillant ^ the observational expert, stationed at the monitors of policing, military and intelligence agencies, interpreting movements on images, maps or screens. Yet tracking practices have developed in ways that complicate this centralization of human agency. They have come to rely, increasingly, on algorithmic procedures and automated systems, and they have been incorporated into distributed network environments ^ augmented by new 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 also ontological ones: as the urban environment, through embedded networks and distributed cognitive systems, gains agential and communicative abilities, it complicates the distinctions between body and space, as well as between 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 new hybrid urban entities and events that these tracking practices register and engender ^ as these actors increasingly combine sensing, processing and actuating functions that complicate conventional ontological categories, forms of knowing and formats of subjectivity. Within the context of megacities, these new developments in tracking and sensing practices are magnified and their political repercussions particularly urgent. Not only does increased urbanization bring increased tracking, but the amplification of tracking in extremely dense, large-scale, and complex urban environments around the world has introduced comprehensive ideals of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) that attempt to consolidate and render interoperable all urban phenomena within standardized calculative architectures. The concept of SDIs for megacities is based on the idea that, through tracking, sensing and locationing practices, spatial information capture has advanced to the degree that it has now become indispensable for urban development, planning and management ^ especially as it is integrated with data mining, analytics and data management through Geographic 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 and transportation. At the same time, as access to GPS-enabled mobile phones and Web 2.0 applications at the citizen level continues to increase, it involves the
HE HISTORY

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need to integrate the citizen-generated spatial information that has become exponentially abundant through mapping mash-ups, participatory urban sensing, social networking and location-based services. The main challenges in the development of these comprehensive SDIs is to implement formal data-sharing arrangements between various urban agencies, in order that data and services from various sources across the city can be accessed and merged, along with the integration of spatial and locationing information with new visualization strategies and analytic techniques. As well, it has involved the need to accommodate emerging forms of citizen-activated social data analysis that have the potential to augment proprietary data mining techniques, filling in the gaps in urban information needed for a more dynamic and inclusive understanding of megacities. Such comprehensive SDIs are understood to offer the potential of strengthening the urban change information available to city managers, providing more effective and timely information required to manage sustained development (McLaren, 2009: 2) while increasing the levels of citizen participation in city governance through new collaborative eorts and public infrastructures (Cuff et al., 2008). While acknowledging that new conveniences, sensibilities, social networks and participatory practices may result, the article points out that many 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 submits them to a calculative and representational violence that always has the potential to become real. Via these inclusive spatial data practices, tracking and targeting increasingly go hand in hand, infused with the potential to both protect and violate. The article also points out the limits of the spatial orientations and quantifications of movements that have been integral to the development of tracking. Historically, tracking has established an organizational and ontological frame for the movements of the city that is based in specific modes of characterization and standardization. It has subjected the agencies of this movement to its analytical procedures and agential categories, shaping an urban environment where movement is understood as calculable and predictable: a world where all entities are regarded as locatable, yet subordinated to movement, and thus able to be tracked, modified and transported (Thrift, 2008: 89^100). While trackings cartographic tradition endures in geospatial frames of reference, new organizing principles are required that, while building on these historical orientations, can accommodate the new conductive forms in accordance with which tracking, sensing and locationing practices are now functioning, many of which do not require visual representations, spatial orientations or conventional understandings of movement. GIS systems are simply one modality of interfacing data: the geo-spatialization of calculative operations. Locationing augments geospatiality, overcoming the limits of the geographical as well as the rigidity of large-scale networks. It is able to

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detect and harness physical activities that are too fine-grained for GPS systems ^ such as a gesture ^ and which may be too casual for Internet connectivity. As casual connections between devices come into play, many of them in extremely small-scale spaces, or in the extremely dense, stratified, data-enhanced spaces particular to megacities, the relevant relationships between these actors can no longer be confined to the fixed infrastructures of the Internet ^ a simple ad hoc interoperability must be achieved, at lower networking levels (McCullough, 2004: 98^102). Architectural elements of physical space, as well as social architectures, often frame and cue actions ^ some very minute and instantaneous. As calculation, action and materiality intertwine, gestures, objects and environments can speak, however seductively or violently, in ways that are not always addressed to humans or known by them. To use a portable GIS device for real-time trac information is a performative and declarative act. The question is the program at work in the environment within which these acts register and congeal. To that end, the key structuring principle introduced in the article is that of program In my conception, a program is not simply an algorithmic . procedure but an organizational and standardizing practice that occurs across the affective, symbolic and rhythmic registers of experience ^ where it can be understood in terms of psychological orientations (such as desires or fears), social entities, spaces, events or behaviors. I suggest that a focus on program is a key move for analysis and political engagement, for to delve into the nature of the programs at work in urban environments ^ programs within which human agency is often concealed ^ is to question the naturalization of an ambient, calculative surround, its congealment into a standardized or default space, a normalized atmosphere or force, which is no longer seen in terms of specific analytics operations. It is to inquire as to the embodied practices and algorithmic procedures that construct the norm against which the event, as an affirmation or a violent deviation, erupts. These practices and procedures are conditioned by, and embedded within, urban environments themselves. They can only function as such as a result of the rhythms and regularities embedded in urban architectures through everyday governmental, labor and leisure practices ^ commuting times, travel patterns, transport timetables, transfer hubs, pedestrian interchanges, traffic regulations, police routes, shopping locales and buying habits ^ and they build on the norms therein constructed. It is here, in the reciprocal exchanges between the habits of a populace and the built structures and infrastructures that circumscribe it, that the concept of program is performatively situated as a material and materializing practice that traverses conventional epistemological and ontological categories. All urban actors, 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 fascination or concern, is constituted as an amplification or deviation from this

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normalized space ^ a norm constituted in co-determining regularizations and enactments of urban activity ^ through the arousal of its attendant actors, 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 materializing, always have the potential to reinforce, mislead or violate. Such a struggle involves some degree of rhetorical experimentation, and, toward that end, 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 good ctional characters, and at times exceed the boundaries of traditional forms. Tracking, Analytics and the Event To movement . . . everything will be restored, and into movement everything will be resolved, writes Bergson (1913: 250). Yet to subordinate passage to position would seem to thrust the world into chaos. Rather than being restored to its status as enabling ground, movement is rather enhanced through its technological outttings and calculative structurings, which intoxicate us with the illusion of control, the ability to catalyze events and shape outcomes. Motion is built atop motion like layers of code atop code, rarely to be excavated because it seems to work, it allows us to agree that it works. In a modern, calculative world, all movement is subjected to tracking: translated into a measurable form that can be durably reproduced, in ways that standardize this movement, optimize it and infuse it with the potential to be predicted. The history of tracking begins with the mid-20th-century advent of computing. It is rooted in the figure of the vigilant observer, harnessed to the screen, interpreting movements on images or maps, however pictorial or schematic, urban or geographic: the observational expert, stationed at the control room monitors of military and intelligence agencies and the surveillance banks of megacities. Within its calculative matrices, moving phenomena are detected and codified, their future positions extrapolated, in order to gain strategic and tactical advantage. Most of this tracked information escapes notice, owing to the limitations of representation ^ no picture is perfect ^ and the instability of human attention levels, which tend to buckle under the pressure of an ever-increasing magnitude of data received from the cameras and sensors that are multiplying around the world. As ever, the techniques of war, along with those of commerce, are propelled by efficiency demands. The gap must be narrowed between detection and engagement, or desire and its attainment, in order to institute a real-time perceptual agency, a live concert of forces, that can transcend the limitations of the real. A networked agency is demanded that is not simply predictive but 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 environment. As with all observing technology, it helps constitute this norm through the categorization and standardization of information. As it helps constitute the norm, video analytics aims to detect activity that might deviate from it, before such unusual activity can gather as an incident ^ an event that has suddenly become a matter of concern. In order to allow this aberrant activity to be inferred, algorithms screen out non-critical movement activity, in ways that strive to minimize distraction and maximize the attention span of human operators. Video analytics systems are increasingly used in cities for general security, government, retail, transport and financial services. A typical application is perimeter protection analytics, which allow the user to identify specific areas where intruders will be identified ^ virtual fence lines that are triggered when an intruder crosses over them, such as in restricted areas. Dwell time or counter-flow analytics allow parking lots, one-way streets, doorways and other specific areas to be monitored to avoid cars being left in no parking bays; to identify vehicles or people moving in the wrong direction or against the flow (up one-way roads, up exit-only gangways at airports); and to highlight excessive loitering (such as in airports or transport hubs). Abandoned object detection analytics allow the identification 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 as dwell time are useful not in gauging danger so much as desire: to identify whether customers stop at product displays and how long they remain there, absorbing the seductive messages conveyed therein. Here the event is not something to be prevented so much as courted: the object left stationary too long is none other than the spellbound shopper, dwelling in the image of an idealized world. On the surface the technology might seem contradictory. It is both productive and preventive: it anticipates the event, yet it also seeks to prevent the event from occurring. As an attention-worthy incident, a matter of fascination or concern, the event is also irresolute: on the one hand it is a violation, yet on the other, it is an affirmation. The event is a disruptive occurrence, an exception, a deviation from the established norm ^ a violent agitation of the sanctity of the default. At the same time, it is a cooperative congealment, an affiliation of actors that have come together to engender something ^ a constructive affirmation of the salience of the gathering. The event destabilizes, yet it also sets forth a demand for interoperability. The technological, social and institutional programs of analytics, as these intertwine with those of the event, compel adherence to their demands for movement, convertibility and translation: for all information ^ whether text, image or sound ^ to be digitized and rendered interoperable, able to cross the boundaries of the specific domains within which it was conventionally 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 new practices. Data Mining, Statistical Inclination and Correlation These imperatives push the development of video analytics science as it has emerged within the cartographic tradition, through video surveillance, and through modern techniques of data mining, as these practices are transformed by technological and ideological change. For many, this is a deep historical 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 observational data 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 management of a data ood that threatens to consume us. The only way to cope is to develop a new generation of scientic computing tools to manage, visualize and analyze this exaood. The goal is not to have the biggest, fastest single computer (which until recently has been the focus), but rather, to have a world of distributed computing ^ a world of cheaper, interoperable clusters of computers. Technological change brings new models of inquiry. Fueled by increased capacities of information storage, processing power and networking, and new data mining tools and techniques, tracking technologies are able to reach far back into the past ^ further back than was previously possible with earlier generations of observation-based tools ^ through the use of regressions. These are statistical procedures, or analytics, that allow patterns to be envisaged in the datasets where tracked phenomena, as detected and 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 put to the test: more analytics, including random back-trials, are used to gauge its accuracy, durability and ability to forecast. This pattern might be stabilized, made operational in a formula ^ a functional modeling of data mined analytics, a locus where statistics are stabilized in a productive, working form. Yet the formula is a precarious congealment, since new factors can always be introduced that may destabilize and modify it. The aim is not for rigidity but provisional stability ^ something stable enough to do the job. The formula, as with all congealments of calculative operations, all stabilizations of data mined analytics, functions as an actor ^ a material and materializing 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 material factors and structuring principles ^ however technological, social or

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institutional ^ that congeal it, and which it congeals, is to regard it in terms of its program, as this program intertwines with that of the event that it may 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 nearly any moving phenomenon ^ a shopper, a biological process, a product or part ^ is codified and understood in a historical trajectory. From this, its subsequent position may be extrapolated. With ever-expanding volumes of stored data to draw upon, and new ways of connecting people, machines and forces ^ distributing and sharing their functions in a larger field of human and machinic agency ^ relationships are uncovered among widely disparate kinds of information. Through a technologically enhanced perception, a mathematical seeing, patterns come into view that previously could not be seen by the naked eye, in ways that augment, or occlude, traditional observational expertise and human intuition. Technologies, practices and mindsets inform one another. Statistical analysis, supplemented with increasing amounts of data, processing power and storage, challenges the relevance of all other tools. Since statistical algorithms do the work, data can be analyzed without hypotheses ^ without coherent models, unified theories or mechanistic explanations ^ to the extent that, for Anderson (2007), it not only introduces a paradigmatic shift in science but heralds the end of the scientic method itself, along with all theories of human behavior: Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented delity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves. Causal models become irrelevant ^ correlation is enough. From this viewpoint, the barrier to the truth is not the reality, but the limitation of the tools used to analyze it ^ limitations that recede with the rise of abundant data, 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 algorithms that 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 propensity ^ a determining demand, or force, for realization A probable construct . exists that stands in relation to reality as its tendency. It congures as a statistical inclination, a weighted possibility. It becomes a silhouette that models future positions, a ghostly forebear into which reality ows. For Popper (1995), propensities are actors ^ they can act, they are actual, they are 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 regard them as actors one and the same. Though an actor can aect other entities, 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, the issue is not causality but correlation. For Kallinikos and Maria tegui (2007), data mining practices serve little more purpose than to inate the present. The abundance of information makes the event and its ephemeral constitution central elements of social and institutional life Information is about novelty ^ in order to be . informative, it must pick up a new fact or state and convey it. But novelty does 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 eeting, more perishable, more disposable, and so, this pending evaporation of information triggers a complex institutional game to maintain its value through a variety of mechanisms (2007). If information is an actor, it must, like all actors, maintain itself in a continuing move. Witness the culture of the update, as well as the constant need for information to simply proliferate itself: data begetting more data, the constant expansion of the universe of data. Without constant updating, the information-rich environment would implode ^ markets around the world would collapse. And yet, as this perpetual updating escalates, it only serves to facilitate a more rapid expiration of the data upon which it depends. Calculative Mobilization, Ubiquitous Computing and Urban Sensing Tracking has shaped a world in which movement is understood as something quantifiable and predictable. Movement is divided into components, analyzed and extrapolated with the aid of a computational support. Such calculative mobilization is the foundational condition of a contemporary urban space everywhere driven by computational architectures and analytics. It is amplified in the case of megacities as such calculative mobilization requires keeping pace with rapid urban development as it strives to subsume all urban phenomena into its calculative architectures, compelling adherence to demands for movement, convertibility, translation and standardization ^ even those phenomena which have heretofore resisted these demands for interoperability and consolidation, such as affective responses, whether understood in terms of desire or fear, protection or violence. It not only compels a particular orientation in the megacity, but also performs the city entirely in its own image, its own character, down to the very consumption and experience of place (Graham, 2005: 1). In so doing, it generates an enhanced environment in which potentially every entity, dened in terms of its location and its tracked and anticipated movements, can become the subject of its calculative procedures (Thrift, 2008: 89^100). These analytical procedures inltrate social life, dene priorities and relevancies, frame approaches 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 pervasive field of calculation, characterized by distributed forms of cognition (Hayles, 2009), has, at least since the mid-20th century, constituted its enabling 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 produced a genuine locatability such that objects could be followed from location to location as a continuous series so simulating movement in a way that was, for all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from movement itself ^ a process that gave rise to the need for standards and protocols in order that all parts of a system are able to be transcoded or located by all other parts. Or, one could look to its beginning with the mid-20th-century invention 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 all manner of mobile devices, access to communications becomes increasingly widespread. Advances in coverage and bandwidth of wireless channels, especially in rapidly developing megacity environments that require the bypassing of conventional communication lines, are met with improvements in interface design. Networked computing elements become embedded into physical objects and environments ^ in appliances, buildings, cars, infrastructure ^ to the extent that the Internet becomes a part of everyday space, allowing the environment to gain digital qualities, such as computeraddressability through unique identification codes and the ability to communicate wirelessly among its actors (Kang and Cuff, 2005). Of vital importance to this environment of pervasive calculation and ubiquitous computing is sensing research ^ spatial sensor networks developed within the sciences and the military ^ as this research places greater importance 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 mechanical, electrical, magnetic, hydrostatic, flowing, chemical, luminous or logical. The change, the event, might be registered as a singularity, scalar stability or configurative multiplicity: as a discrete eruption or exception; as the gradual attainment or crossing of a threshold; or as the stabilization of a pattern (McCullough, 2004: 75). Sensors measure the physical world, detecting mechanical, thermal, biological, chemical, optical, acoustic and magnetic phenomena (sight, sound, weight, pressure, heat, moisture, acceleration, electromagnetic radiation, particulates). Seismic sensors measure ground vibrations (for detecting vehicular trac, earthquakes); chemical sensors detect harmful residues or explosive agents inside packages, parcels, containers, tanks and vehicle compartments; acoustic sensors recognize explosions, breaking glass, engine noise and high-decibel screams.

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Sensors are integrated with processors and actuators, such as in Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS), which integrate them with mechanical elements and decision-making and control capabilities. As sensors measure the physical world, actuators initiate physical response (moving, positioning, regulating, pumping, filtering), thereby intervening within, or controlling, the environment for some purpose. Along with sensors, microprocessors and actuators, such systems include communication links, tags, controls, displays and software (McCullough, 2004: 73^93). They increasingly include locationing capabilities, as in Sensor AIs acoustical signature recognition technology, which not only identies a gunshot prole but instantaneously pinpoints its location. Especially as location and temporal referencing becomes critical, tracking has become bundled into these systems. Networking and sensor technologies are used by law enforcement, military and national security, such as the Border Patrol to monitor international points of entry. They are incorporated into body-monitoring systems, sometimes via implants, in the military and medical spheres, where they participate in the translation of corporeal information (heart rate, hormone levels, temperature) into data, facilitating hyper-individualized control and the commodification of life functions (Monahan and Wall, 2007). In Radio Frequency Identication (RFID) systems, everyday objects, embedded with sensors and identiers, are endowed with properties of cognition, communication and action, yet much of this activity does not even involve humans, let alone consumers (Hayles, 2009). Over the past decade there has been a shift to embed RFID tags in an increasing number of personal items and identity documents, including office key cards, school IDs, credit cards, passports, drivers licenses, clothing, phones, groceries, transport and toll passes. Such information helps in understanding the migration patterns across cities and supports better planning of their transport infrastructure requirements. However, this scenario also has great surveillance potential: China, for example, is currently spending US $6 billion to roll out RFID-based national IDs to nearly 1 billion citizens and residents, and both Wal-Mart and the US Department of Defense now require major suppliers to RFID tag every object. RFIDbased tracking devices could track the movements of citizens in their daily activities; to some extent, this already occurs with toll passes and public transport passes. It also happens through satellite-based tracking systems. Consider Siemens new tracking system for the London bus network. Each day the London bus system carries some 6 million passengers on 700 routes, which makes it one of the largest and most complex in the world. The satellite-tracking system will be able to determine the position of all 8000 buses in real time and display passenger information based on this data on 2000 display panels. Siemens is adding this new capacity to its already substantial role in the tracking of bus, car and train transport systems in London: it supplies, services and maintains the trains on many suburban, regional and intercity rail lines (including two primary airport

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links); it supplies many traffic lights and traffic systems; and it is implementing new systems to monitor roads and automatically identify license plates. 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 them and thus are unwillingly subject to their recombinatory violence. Interoperability is key in the production of these aggregated profiles: insurance companies combine information about individuals that is spread across different digitized sources ^ banks, medical records, tax returns, travel agencies ^ to produce individualized premiums that map risk and life profiles; police forces construct profiles of criminals by data mining aggregate 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 the urban environment. Perhaps chiefly, this occurs through the agency of the cell phone. Cuff et al. (2008) note that mobile phones are passive sensors that can silently and continuously collect, exchange and process information in terms of sound, sight, and location: they sense sound (voices); they sense images and movement through built-in cameras; they sense location through GPS receivers or basic triangulation. New generations of citizenactivated sensors are visible through the proliferation of geocoded data and the accompanying GIS platforms for its visualization, through Google Earth, mapping Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and locationbased services. Such geographic information systems, which merge cartography and database technology to capture, store, analyze, manage and present data linked to location, are widely used across all sectors of megacities, in urban planning, land surveying, crisis management and navigation. Web 2.0-enabled applications oer the ability to mash-up or otherwise display customized layers of sounds, images, video and statistics on visual schematics or maps, combining content from multiple sources into integrated experiences. Through data-rich mobile applications, the processing, visualizing and uploading of sensor data will certainly increase as accessibility to mobile communications increases globally and new sensing capabilities are added. According to Cuff et al. (2008: 26), embedded network sensing in its citizen-activated variety has greatly reduced the technical barrier to visualize data in real space, to construct maps of layered information, and to analyze locational phenomena over time It is creating opportunities for collecting . and managing a wide range of urban information, whether environmental, economic or social, and thus opens up possibilities for new participatory models, in contrast to the proprietary ones outlined earlier. Perhaps these proprietary and participatory dimensions can be brought together in practices on the order of what Cuff et al. (2008) refer to 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 in which the data is processed are subject to centralized control by those scientic, corporate or state agencies who plan the sensor deployments ^ do not scale well to the megacity, as these agencies lack the property rights to place instruments everywhere and humans enjoy privacy rights not granted to nonhumans. Models of distributed citizen-sensing, or participatory sensing, sidestep these problems: although some central authority maintains the basic terms and conditions of data collection as well as the data repository, 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 in New Orleans, two software engineers, working with Google MapsAPI, created scipionus.com to allow citizens to post emergency information in the wake of the hurricane, anchored to specic geographical points. It became much more important than the ocial sources of information. During the recent forest res in California, a wide range of information was integrated from GIS professionals and distributed citizen-sensed data, much of it real-time, to provide re ghters and the public with crucial disaster management decision-making information. An open-source reporting tool called Ushahidi was originally a simple website 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 of violence. Since then, the Ushahidi engine ^ with developers hailing from Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, Malawi, the Netherlands and the US ^ has developed into a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline, aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response. It has been used for tracking the post-earthquake crisis response and recovery efforts in Haiti; for real-time tracking of stocks of medical supplies at pharmacies in Kenya, Uganda, Malawi and Zambia; for monitoring mobile phone companies by ordinary citizens in the Philippines; for monitoring the federal elections of July 2009 in Mexico; for tracking violent crime in the Atlanta metro area; for tracking swine flu reports coming in from official and unofficial sources; and for mapping xenophobic violence perpetrated against nonSouth Africans. It serves as a citizen science project to track wildlife in Kenya; as a citizen-driven election monitoring platform for the 2009 Indian general elections; and as an information resource for trafficking and anti-trafficking activity globally. Al Jazeera has used it in its War on Gaza site since January 2009, covering the activity happening in Gaza. It is 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 and maintain timely urban information that will supplement and possibly replace 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 governance of megacities and to help to ll the current gaps in urban information needed 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 strengthen the spatial data infrastructures and urban change information available (McLaren, 2009: 4). Some megacities, such as New York, have at least some elements of an SDI already in place. Such comprehensive SDIs would create the opportunity to optimize analyses, providing megacity managers ^ and, ideally, the citizens in these cities ^ withmore eective andtimely information required to manage sustained development (McLaren, 2009: 2). As fertile ground for participatory, collaborative eorts, they have, for Cuff et al. (2008: 29^31), the potential to constitute a new form of public infrastructure ^ adata commons . Yet the fact remains that while new conveniences, sensibilities and participatory practices may result, many citizens and consumers do not have access to this information, or to the tracked patterns from their everyday activity as this data is integrated into profiles used to depict, monitor or target them. Participatory tracking can easily turn into a (non)participatory targeting: while at times protective and informing, it submits them to a calculative and representational violence that always has the potential to become actionable and real. Agency, Animated Environments and Adaptive Systems Data-intensive, multi-agential environments ^ characterized by combinations of inexpensive sensors, interoperable clusters of computing platforms, high-bandwidth networks and large-scale coordination among different database systems ^ are accompanied by analytical tools, modes of inquiry, forms of being and practices of movement. As information and the technologies by which it is produced penetrate deeper and deeper into the fabric of everyday life, they remake a large range of everyday tasks, redefine the meaning of established ways of doing things and introduce new practices, habits and tendencies (Kallinikos and Maria tegui, 2007). Integrated with aects, sensations and rhythms, they perpetuate fantasies and fears, desires and violent obsessions. Technological systems are bound up in the production of social norms and protocols; connected to political economies, discursive regimes and cultural mythologies, they acquire momentum and symbolic force through discursive constructions of the future (Monahan and Wall, 2007). This analytical, data-intensive surround can certainly be regarded as a new kind of environmental space ^ a background host of calculations of movement (Thrift, 2008: 95) that has become naturalized as part of the normal functioning of the world, to the extent that it now conditions all activity, becoming synonymous with mobility itself. Within this information-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 into behavior (Greenfield, 2006: 24^6), sensation and combinatory modalities of agency. Consider intelligent material systems as used in aircraft, advanced car designs and infrastructure. Such intelligent materials or structures can sense their environment and adapt to it, varying their properties autonomously on the basis of external influences. Structures that can sense their environment and generate data for use in health and usage monitoring systems are already well established in the field of aerospace. An aircraft constructed from a smart structure can self-monitor its performance to a level beyond that of current data recording, and provide ground crews with enhanced health and usage monitoring. Smart materials technology is being developed for the monitoring of civil engineering structures in megacities, to assess durability and provide warning of structural problems ^ for example, the current and long-term behavior of a bridge ^ as well as for buildings and urban structures to automatically respond to adverse weather conditions, energy shortages, acts of violence and local crime events. As networked computing elements become embedded into physical objects and environments to the extent that they become a part of everyday space, the urban environment, having gained digital and communicative qualities, becomes animated (Kang and Cuff, 2005) ^ it becomes able to respond directly to what it apprehends, in ways that might be considered automatic (such as building climate control) or autonomous. Whether or not one has a direct connection to this data-intensive surround does not necessarily matter, since its eects are everywhere, and the environment acts as a prosthesis which oers cognitive assistance on a routine basis (Thrift, 2008: 98) ^ and, one might add, ontological assistance.There is an information ambience, a sense of continual access to information arising out of connectivity being embedded in all manner of objects . To delve into the nature of the programs at work in these environments ^ programs within which human agency is often concealed ^ is to question the naturalization of an ambient, calculative surround, its congealment into a standardized or default space, a normalized atmosphere or force, which is no longer seen in terms of specific analytics operations. It is to inquire not only into the constitution of an event, but also into the embodied practices and algorithmic procedures that construct the norm against which this event, as a violent deviation, erupts. Consider the new generation of video analytics that incorporates adaptive learning First-generation video analytics is limited by its rules-based . requirements: while human behavior exhibits relatively stable patterns, it is impossible to write a set of rules that can be expected to cover the full range of possible behaviors for any given urban environment. Adaptive learning video analytics aims to bypass this limitation. According to Eaton (2008), the basic concept of this relates to software-based performance management and network security products that employ pattern recognition.

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These products, already widely used, analyze a systems performance over time to learn normal patterns of activity; from this basis, they learn to detect abnormalities. Adaptive learning video analytics uses similar principles, but it has extra layers of complexity because its roots are not only in intelligent pattern recognition but also in observations made by video analytic algorithms. In essence, adaptive learning technology is a combination of video analytics, computer vision and machine-learning capabilities. Like video analytics, adaptive learning technology takes the input from existing video security cameras and recognizes and identifies the objects in each frame to learn what activity normally takes place within the area under observation. It then analyzes the changes, activities and motions of those objects, and builds a model of established behaviors. Unlike rules-based analytics, however, adaptive learning allows the computer to classify objects without any pre-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 define parameters for the software to recognize behavior or objects ^ the system itself decides how a human is classified as opposed to a car or animal or any other object. The system, then, observes the scene to learn and identify normal and anomalous behaviors by way of a constant study of the types of objects that exhibit those behaviors in the scene. Learning from experience, it can adapt to changes in the observed environment on its own, detecting, tracking and classifying abnormal behavior that was not previously defined or anticipated ^ activity that might be deemed high-risk or potentially violent. Since they occur with little or no human involvement, minimizing the need for human intervention or dispensing with it altogether, such activities are often understood to occur automatically or autonomously In this way . the algorithm is dehumanized. However, as Alexander (2008a) reminds us, algorithms are human decisions expressed in code, and thus computational decisions are not necessarily objective. The role of humans is minimized or forgotten because we do not register their presence, and although code is generally written in the imperative or declarative, it is often perceived as passive. lgorithms are powerful expressions of human will that humans can A hide behind to dodge responsibility for their actions (Alexander, 2008a). And yet, what exactly do we mean by the term human? In a world of ambient informatics where computing, materiality and behavior intertwine, is there a human outside algorithm? The fact that a deed was done by a computer does not make the decision mechanical, blind or objective (Alexander, 2008b: 471) ^ yet certainly, there is a combinatory agency at work. Qualities intercede within the realm of 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 absolutes. If we begin with the assumption that there is nothing fully machinic nor fully human ^ all are multi-agential aliations ^ then the question becomes one of the nature of the combinatory agency at work ^ an agency that, in its combination of algorithm, materiality and behavior, is as it does. 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 automated or autonomous system within which human agency is concealed. According to Latour (cited in Harman, 2009: 34), an actor is always a multiplicity, but we black box it. To open this box, to look under the hood of an 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 a great deal of labor, and so it is often more convenient to agree to keep the hood closed. An aliation, as a multiplicity, is constituted as an accordance: it is a linguistic and formal device, a platform of departure, a stratum of agreement, from which to examine the constitution of an event. And yet, it is not simply a symbolic construction but a material entity existing in the world. As such, while tracking is being absorbed into locationing (however non-visually), and while locationing may be a vital component of the affiliation, the affiliation is not entirely subject to spatial dictates. Even though characterized in terms of affiliations, actors are never fully contained within them: transversal mixings, transmissions and bondings are always possible, across multiple spatial and temporal scales, in larger or smaller gatherings (DeLanda, 2006). The intra-play between such states must be conceptualized in non-reductive and non-reective ways (Fuller, 2005), so as to incorporate not only transmission, coding and calibration, but also thresholds of translation: those points or zones across which one thing suddenly becomes something else, a gathering of actors enters into a more-or less-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 programs. Through programs, actors aim for cooperative agreements that have the potential to become standards, and which cultivate a submission to the settings of the default. Standards are imposed through requirements and enforcement mechanisms (such as sets of human interface guidelines for different operating systems), and they are voluntarily adopted when they become 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 limited sphere. And yet, standards are actively designed to be taken up in this way ^ designed to accommodate many commands, run as components of many programs, on many systems, in order that they can sediment into practices to the point that they become necessary. The ultimate test of a standard is voluntary adoption in the marketplace (Galloway, 2004: 128). A product is understood to be successful when it becomes part of daily patterns ^ a default mode. In order to reproduce themselves, standards must gain a sufficient degree of regularity and stabilization. They must gain durability through recurrent practices ^ processes of adjustment and acclimation whereby affective responses are linked and repeated, and actors nervous, cognitive and 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, sustained and shared, allowing discernments to be made from a common basis of understanding among invested actors ^ a basis that is linguistic, aective and rhythmic, as when speech is populated with conversational or behavioral valves that adjust the actors to a common pace. The question is whether the actors respective attributions allow a shared relational, resonating and replicating bond. This is a process that leans toward sameness. It is based in the affirmative negotiation of a structural similarity (code or frequency) through which an interoperability among actors can be achieved. Standardizing actors cultivate relevance and endurance in cooperative struggles, mutually beneficial negotiations. Relinquishments are required, a degree of weakness or vulnerability essential. If desire is operative here, it is not grounded in alienation, lack or misapprehension but in accordance and affinity, in ways that do not privilege difference and identity (Bersani, 2000: 649). An actor is inclined toward another actor in ways that are not necessarily based on an identication with that actor. The basis of this inclination is the guiding principle of a structural similarity. Programs are the guiding principles of this structural inclination. They are non-differentially based relational modes that amplify certain structural and standardizing potentials: they allow actors to affiliate in ways that, through continuity, consistency and regularity, can engender a heightened level of interoperable redundancy. The political object of engagement is not program itself, but the particular modality of structural inclination that programic relationality engenders within the calculative paradigm of 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 organizational and ontological horizon of tracking ^ a eld that harbors a fundamentally anticipatory orientation. Actors are characterized by what they do ^ instantiation is action ^ and what they do is inected by what they will do. Actuality is conditioned by tendency. Embroiled in a calculative,

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mobilizing externality, agency pushes and is pulled outward, as if seeking to become the predisposition that it courts. Programs are practices, performatively instituted in material and materializing ways. Like any algorithm, program calls for its questioning as a material object, as a means of production, as a human-technical hybrid, as medium of communication, as terrain of political-economic contestation (Mackenzie, 2006: 2). It is a site of social negotiations that structures and organizes agency, behavior and attention (Mackenzie, cited in Hayles, 2008: 138). Its constitutive rules depend on classications and standardizations that, as Kallinikos and Maria tegui (2008) remind us, presuppose the operation of a logically constructed scaold on which categories are crafted and make sense ^ a scaold that gains signicance at the expense of other ways of perceiving and framing life events. What appears in algorithms and databases must pass through this scaold as well as the standardized forms of information that the system as a whole admits. As this occurs, contemporary forms of life are constituted as derivatives of these associations. The challenge, following Bowker (2005: 256), is to create exible databases that are as rich ontologically as the social and natural worlds they map. This suggests a mode of critical engagement that is both reductive and extensive. It calls for the analytical uncovering of the agency that program gathers and conceals, its structuring principles, its tendencies, its engenderings of default spaces and settings, while at the same time it calls for the extension of program to allow for the accommodation of more structures of life ^ working with program to expand its potential, its ontological and epistemological horizon. Program is bound up in the materialization of the norm ^ a normative field within which the event as an exception or amplification can be detected. Programic normalization is achieved as a stabilization against a backdrop of destabilization, and, in this sense, it is a cooperative congealment ^ an affiliation of actors (human, environmental, expressive, linguistic) drawn together in attendance. And yet the event is also a violent exception, a disruption of this established norm ^ a destabilization of the stabilized field. To delve into the nature of the programs at work in urban environments is to question this naturalization within the paradigm of tracking. It is to question the embodied practices and algorithmic procedures that constitute a calculative surround no longer seen in terms of specific analytics operations, and within which human agency is often concealed. These practices and procedures are as densely layered as software development is itself: it involves the ongoing introduction of new elements and 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 concern not only through the normalization of space but through the arousal of its attendant actors, however violent or soothing. Operative across the affective, symbolic and rhythmic registers of experience, and traversing

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the strata and surfaces of bounded spaces and bodies, programic affiliation undercuts conventional ontological distinctions, subjecting actors and events to common programs even though it may appear otherwise once agential distinctions have performatively adhered (Barad, 2007). Even as they traverse actors and events, such commonalities inform physio-psychological orientations (anxieties, desires, fears) and motivations that may be discerned in violent oppositions once judgments congeal. The actors occasioned 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 it can 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 and motivation.This web, however, is tenuous: it is provisionally stabilized, bound up in violent destabilizations that both threaten and strengthen it.The cooperation can simply occur in the form of a subtle agreement; the violation, as an expressive outburst or physical act. Within the context of megacities these political possibilities and repercussions are particularly urgent. The amplification of tracking and sensing practices in extremely dense, large-scale and complex urban environments around the world has only reinforced its organizational and ontological paradigms ^ its analytical constitution of movement; its agential distinctions; its formats of standardization and structural inclination. Embroiled within political economies, social narratives, urban forms and embodied practices, its calculative procedures and categories, exponentially increased, infiltrate all domains of urban life ^ framing actions and tendencies, determining what or who counts as meaningful, and conditioning not only the cognitive but also the sensory apprehension of events. Its calculative mobilizations, however understood in terms of space or locationing, are magnified in comprehensive ideals of SDIs that often traffic as participatory and inclusive while pursuing proprietary aims, infused with the potential to protect, inform and violate. The particular densities of megacities allow large-scale and multi-scaled accumulations of data-enhanced actors that are unavailable elsewhere, with extremely complex and multi-leveled modes of proximity and interoperable relationality that may not involve any conventional spatial or geospatial orientations or understandings of movement, and which, through their incorporation of qualities as well as quantities, traverse the limits of the calculative paradigm. As tracking becomes elevated into a condition, dissolving into behavior, sensation and all manner of embodied social practices in the data-intensive, analytics-driven spaces of megacities, the sense of continual access to information that arises out of the connectivity and interoperability among all kinds of data-enhanced actors (Thrift, 2008: 92^9) is not necessarily grounded in a direct access. It is not simply a matter of whether one has a direct connection to this data-intensive surround, since it increasingly constitutes a dening horizon against which the

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phenomena of the megacity are understood ^ a calculative ambience that imposes its distinctions, categories and ways of being onto all facets of urban life ^ as it acts as a cognitive, ontological, and experiential supplement for the simplest forms of ordinary routine. Questions of a sense of access to this data-intensive surround must become political, but this sense of access cannot solely be regarded in conventional political terms, because it is also a sense rooted in all manner of psychic, somatic and social practices, activated not just by individuals but by complex affiliations of agency that span familiar designations and ontological distinctions, while connecting deep into the realms of the sensorial and the imaginary. As Thrift suggests, space is outfitted with new kinds of 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 affinity and violence, to the extent that this constitutes an urban unconscious ^ and perhaps more comprehensively, what Hayles (2008: 139), in order to avoid the prioritization of human psychology and further integrate the artifactual environment, refers to as a technological nonconscious Following . Bersani (2004: 169), such a political orientation must be thought in im-personal terms where subjectivity, no longer based in the unique personality central to modern notions of individualism and aware of its inescapable connectedness, is disseminated into new formal and aective alliances or anities ^ a reservoir of correspondences of phenomena ready to be activated. We are challenged to look to relational modes whose foundational structures resituate the balance between sameness and dierence, in ways that are not repressive or reductive. A politics of the event involves the amplification of its programic potential, while at the same time a critical engagement of its acquiescence to the particular modality of program engendered within the calculative paradigm of tracking. The terms of this engagement are less oppositional than compositional: they necessitate the development of extensive or excessive approaches that involve stepping out of the skeptical of the known into an inadequate confrontation with what exceeds it and oneself (Moten and Harney, cited in Clough, 2007: 28). Such a course of action involves the transformation of the event itself into a practice. A politics of program is a politics of the everyday: a Foucauldian ethical arts of existence whose transformative intensications are not just about the self but about a larger eld of actors becoming cooperatively and dynamically co-present. Is it possible, within the analytical orientations, structural inclinations and motivational propensities of tracking, to cultivate an ethic of dynamical co-presencing in the megacity? In tracking, actors and events are constituted in anticipation, their ontological excess weighted forward as if conjured out of trackings strategic and tactical aims: its procedures of calculative maneuvering that, while seeking a real-time perceptual agency, always aim to transcend the limitations of the real. For Bataille (1991: 218, 222), since one is always in a state of anticipation, one is always more or less in a state of

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anguish, for one must apprehend oneself in the future, through the projected results of ones action. Embroiled in calculative, mobilizing agitations, the populations of the megacity, perhaps more than anywhere, sweat from the anguish provoked by tendencies.
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Jordan Crandall is a media artist and theorist based in Los Angeles. He is Associate Professor in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego. His video installations have been presented in numerous exhibitions worldwide; currently, in group exhibitions at the Tate Modern, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Walker Art Center. His most recent video installation Hotel (2009) probes into the realms of extreme intimacy, where techniques of control combine with techniques of the self and paranoia combines with pleasure. Crandall is currently developing a new philosophy of the event entitled Gatherings, which works across the life sciences, the social sciences, the digital humanities, urban design and architecture. Crandall writes and lectures widely. He is the founding editor of the new journal Version (http://version.org). [email: jcrandall@ucsd.edu; (http://jordancrandall.com)]