Comobility: How Proximity and Distance Travel Together in Locative Media
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 practice-based 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.