Tracking and Tracing: The telemetry of relations

So important to the idea of utopia is the island that when Thomas More invented the word and the island of Utopia he also described how his island had been engineered to cut it off from the land thereby accentuating its artificiality. Utopia was then laid out according to more engineering principles; either the ideal space was to engineer the ideal society or, the ideal society was to engineer the ideal space, ideally on an island intentionally engineered to appear unliveable. The ideal form of utopia functions to make us aware of the imperfections on the one island we share, and on which we are marooned, the island called Earth. While Utopia is concerned with new islands, on the one island we share it is our relationships that should now be of concern ' having to live together in closer proximity on a more populous planet. And while this squeeze appears to be primarily concerned with space it is the temporal nature of relationships that requires attention. In this paper we are interested in the growing telemetry of relationships ' how relationships are increasingly tracked and traced as people are engineered to reproduce communications about their every move across island Earth. This paper will explore how a technology developed to track automobile parts to service the just-in-time production system can be applied to track relationships. Using a project as a case study which set out to trace and map mobile objects, the paper will focus on how these relational objects forge relation(ships) through a 'will to connect'. The paper will also discuss how relationships, which in the post-Fordist/Taylorist era of immaterial production, are now mostly service events staged on tele-visual mediums. The product of these events are increasingly vast accounts of the world-as-found that now depend on the cultivation of digital farms to sustain a virtual island engineered to archive manufactured relationships.