Narratives of Ambient Play: Camera Phone Practices in Urban Cartographies

Abstract

This chapter explores the unofficial role of camera phone practices in visualising everyday forms of ambient play. I argue that camera phone practices—especially in an age of geo-tagging—are creating their own cartographies of place that overlay the visual with the ambient, social with the geographic, and emotional with the electronic. In other words, camera phone practices evoke the ongoing importance of ambient play and co-presence in mapping a sense of place. Having outlined the notion of performative cartography as part of what has been defined as ‘critical cartography’, I consider how camera phone practices can be understood through ambient, co-present play. I turn to a site-specific mobile game that deploys Instagram to explore the ways in which cartography can be performed and how that performativity creates new ways for engaging with an everyday place. The game, keitai mizu [mobile water]), was made for a Tokyo post-3/11 tsunami and Fukushima disaster context. Keitai mizu renders players into investigators by using the camera phone and Twitter as part of the discovery process in uncovering the natural water streams under the urban cartographies.