Bakhtin’s becoming - locative media ‘turned inside out’

In what seems to be oppositional to everyday life, Bakhtin presents us with an image of the ‘carnivalesque’; through the carnival Bakhtin unifies ‘the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid’ (Bakhtin, 1984: 123).

The carnival represents ‘life turned inside out’: ‘incompleteness, becoming, ambiguity, indefinability, non-canonicalism – indeed, all that jolts us out of our normal expectations and epistemological complacency’ (Clark and Holquist 1984: 312, from Gardiner 2000: 65)

Will locative media act to police everyday action? – Securing people to their routines – some hope that the recording and collection of everyday action can act to change human possibilities. I worry that locative media could strengthen these constraints – disallowing the transgression of the rules that govern the everyday.