Call for Abstracts (Deadline: September 15, 2024)
En/Countering Tracking. Resisting spatiotemporal media operations in computational culture
A special issue of Computational Culture, a Journal of Software Studies
Edited by Kathrin Friedrich and Sebastian Randerath
Tracking takes place ubiquitously and at different scales – from satellite-based wildlife tracking (Benson 2010) to automated monitoring of supply chain workers through radio-frequency identification (RFID) (Hayles 2009; Kanngieser 2013) and to ubiquitous self-surveillance through self-tracking apps (Lupton 2021). With the expansion of sensor-based geomedia as well as embodied computing, tracking also becomes a key media operation for environmental sensing or virtual reality experiences (Egliston and Carter 2022; Gabrys 2019).
Tracking as a spacetime-critical media operation is engendered by complex media infrastructures, which automatically capture objects or processes, sustain software-based data collection and storage, and provide different kinds of interfaces of (non-)human interaction (Friedrich 2021). Tracking is deeply related to critical issues of today’s computational culture, such as automation, (non-)human agency and capitalist politics. Software studies approaches have provided important cues for critically analyzing the computational logics of tracking, especially in regard to the socio-material impacts on the co-constitutions of software and the work it performs in relation to (non-)human actors in time and space (Kitchin and Dodge 2011). Critiquing tracking is strongly connected to different scholarly discourses on software studies. These approaches have also provided important critical impulses in regard to the capitalization (Rossiter 2016), more-than-human interactions (Gabrys 2012) and racializing dynamics (Chun 2018) of spatiotemporal software technologies and tracking (Chun 2018; Sansone Ruiz 2023).
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