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In this chapter we build on a relational perspective to sound art, drawing on theories of mobilities research and agential realism to explore the nature and texture of relations that are not only human but material, temporal, spatial and mobile. Informed by our work about a World War I memorial Homing (2016), we describe sound production as the composition of fragmented relations. These various aspects of fragmentation do not, however, make the work fall apart. Instead, within the building of a locative sound work, fragmentation becomes central to composition. Fragments are tied together, not into a smooth flow, but into a textured experience, as sound is used as a kind of connective tissue bringing disparate elements into relationships. We therefore suggest that by focusing on a Baradian reading of relationality in sound art, fragmented relations can be seen as both leading to composition and simultaneously being produced by its situated nature.

In May 2019, the Wellcome Centre for Anti-Infectives Research (; W; CAIR) at the University of Dundee, UK, held an international conference with the aim of discussing some key questions around discovering new medicines for infectious diseases and a particular focus on diseases affecting Low and Middle Income Countries. There is an urgent need for new drugs to treat most infectious diseases. We were keen to see if there were lessons that we could learn across different disease areas and between the preclinical and clinical phases with the aim of exploring how we can improve and speed up the drug discovery, translational, and clinical development processes. We started with an introductory session on the current situation and then worked backward from clinical development to combination therapy, pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic (PK/PD) studies, drug discovery pathways, and new starting points and targets. This Viewpoint aims to capture some of the learnings.

What does lifespan mean for a parasite that reproduces as asexual clones and is revived after 30 years suspended in a deep frozen state? How far does the digital footprint of a parasite stretch online? This work centers on the deadly Leishmania parasite that exploits human conflict and poverty to inhabit humans and cause the disease known as Leishmaniasis. Para-site-seeing.org is a travel blogging portal for the Leishmania parasite, created by Jen Southern and Rod Dillon and co-commissioned with the Wellcome Centre for Anti-Infectives Research. Through the portal multiple narratives unfold, as parasites blog, tweet, insta and vlog their way around the world, tracing their lives in the wild, as experimental subjects in labs, transforming themselves on board sandflies as vehicles for multi-species encounters. Follow para-site-seeing from the parasites first out-of-body experience in the 1960’s and witness its first moments emerging from cryopreservation.

Science-fiction prototyping is often used to explore the social implications of science and technology and to provide inspiration for innovation. The future that is being imagined however often exhibits a form of techno-optimism. This paper critiques that optimism by describing the #Patchworks project in which science fiction prototypes were used to explore the social implications of who does the imagining. Through our vignette we explore how the promissory nature of science fiction prototyping folds back into the present to change current understandings of real life situations. We suggest that the power to imagine and invent futures is often not extended to vulnerable communities, nor does it take into account the differing authority and agency depending on who is telling and who feels able to tell stories. The collision between these different stories and backgrounds in #Patchworks, the co-design project informing this paper, has produced contradictions and negotiations between the speculative practice of ‘tinkering’ used by DIY hackers that act as ‘openings’, an academic focus on innovation and the ‘anchoring’ inherent in the need to produce practical prototypes that solve urgent problems.

Mobile phones are becoming increasingly location-aware: they use and share positioning data through networks, across space, and between friends. This paper introduces the term “comobility” to describe an emerging feature of mobile and located communication, and asks how increasingly popular locative applications are changing social and mobile experiences of place and proximity. This new sense of comobility, of being mobile with others at a distance, was produced and made visible in the collaborative creation-research of the author, in which art practice and social research co-exist in a mobile research methodology. Workshops and a performative walk are analyzed in relation to theories of proximate interaction, to reveal how aspects of face-to-face communication are extended through locative technologies. RESUME Les utilisateurs de telephones mobiles deviennent de plus en plus conscients de leur propre emplacement geographique; en effet, ils utilisent et partagent des donnees sur leur positionnement dans des reseaux, a travers l’espace et entre amis. Dans ce contexte, l’auteure propose le mot « co-mobilite » pour decrire une nouvelle caracteristique de la communication mobile et localisee, et evalue comment les applications de positionnement de plus en plus populaires sont en train de transformer l’experience sociale et mobile de l’emplacement et de la proximite. La creation-recherche de l’auteure, ou la pratique de l’art et la recherche sociale coexistent dans le cadre d’une methode de recherche mobile, a produit et rendu visible ce nouveau sens de co-mobilite, a savoir le fait d’etre mobile en meme temps que ses interlocuteurs situes a distance. L’auteure a recours a des theories sur les interactions de proximite pour analyser certains ateliers ainsi qu’une promenade performative, revelant ainsi comment les technologies localisees sont le prolongement de plusieurs aspects de la communication face a face.

“We look on Comob and think ‘where on earth is he now?!’.” Liz, Comob Net User. Global Positioning System (GPS) technologies have become an integral and often invisible part of mobile technologies. We use maps on mobile phones to navigate from A to B on a daily basis without a second thought. The capacities of GPS are, however, greater than ‘just’ navigation, and this chapter explores a speculative art project Comob, which has become a widely available mobile phone app. The Comob Net app simply shows the locations of multiple members of a group, and joins together their locations with a line. It was originally built for use in participatory workshop situations, and was used experimentally in live art, performative walks and at a number conferences in Europe and North America between 2009 and 2013. During these events we observed how it was used, and recorded discussions and conversations about collaborative and collective use of GPS. In analyzing these responses we identified an emerging sense of what we call ‘comobility’, of being mobile with others at a distance. For ease of use in early workshops we submitted the app to Apple’s App Store. Subsequently we realized that people world-wide were downloading the app and using it. For some this was just as a one-off experiment, others used Comob over several days with a group of friends, over a year with a family, or in some cases on a daily basis over many years. This chapter describes comobility and explores how one family used the app to enhance their sense of connectedness whilst at a distance, mediating absences and presences in a highly mobile familial group. While the term comobility is new, it builds upon already established social phenomena, from the ‘wish you were here’ on postcards (Kurti, 2004), the sharing of mobility in travel blogging (German-Molz, 2012) and the portable personhood of intimately mobile lives (Elliot & Urry, 2010) to a sense of mediated proximity, identified in analysis of the Japanese locative game Mogi in which players collect geographically located tokens through their mobile phones, and are able to see and communicate with other players nearby (Licoppe & Inada, 2010a). In games like Mogi or artist’s projects like Can You See Me Now? (Blast Theory, 2001; Benford et al., 2003), participants can observe that another user is getting closer and thus negotiate meetings and movements en-route (Licoppe, 2009; Licoppe & Inada, 2010b). It is this awareness of the movement of people at a distance through visualized GPS data that we refer to as comobility. This chapter introduces the term and provides a review of literature and practices that engage with the concept. The chapter also uses an interview with Liz, a member of the public who uses the iPhone app Comob Net, to offer a highly personal perspective upon living through comobility.

In 2000 the restriction of high quality global positioning system (GPS) data ended, making everyday use of GPS possible and affordable, for route planning, navigation and even to draw pictures on the Earth's surface. Since that date artists have been exploring the use of GPS as an expressive and social medium. This paper focuses upon the capacity for locative media to support the social discussion of place. Beginning with the work of established artists and researchers who use GPS, the authors highlight a tendency in the works to engage with individuals in the field, but to discuss social aspects at a distance. In attempting to allow social reflection upon a place in ‘real-time’, the authors have developed a novel technical and conceptual twist on the use of GPS data that allows them to sustain live spatial/social dialogues.

Southern, J. & Speed, C 2010 ‘Handscapes: Reflecting upon the use of Locative Media to explore Landscapes’ Digital Landscape Architecture Conference, Aschersleben, Germany, May 2010.

Location based mobile applications are becoming increasingly popular and visualisation of GPS tracks increasingly familiar in TV programs such as 'Britain from Above' (2008). Networked locative technologies, such as GPS-enabled smart phones, can bring about a sense of presence at a distance or virtual proximity (Urry 2002) and consequently life in a city is made up of a complex set of flickering attentions to proximate and distant interactions (Elliot & Urry 2010). This paper explores how the artists work Shared Distance by South and Speed makes fragile and flickering portraits of connected groups of people using GPS data.

This research presents initial work that brings together artists, designers, technologists and the community of content creators to describe the events of World War I through the voices of families and soldiers. These stories, that would have been otherwise lost, are restored and narrated in modern day, and finally distributed through new locative audio experiences. Homing is a locative-based audio navigation experience designed to encourage visitors to explore these stories by visiting the Harris Museum Roll of Honour and War Memorial. The project brings to life the museum and the Cenotaph to unite and bridge the physical gap between two artefacts to tell and disrupt a broader story.