FCJManager
FCJ-143 Ouvert/Open: Common Utopias
Nathalie Casemajor Loustau and Heather Davis McGill University and Concordia University Introduction The geography of the city functions as a mechanism for distributed power. Power manifests in the physicality of everyday urban life, through planning, government jurisprudence and resident use. The train tracks in the Canadian city of Montréal are one site where this dialectic of power becomes visible, in the creative tactics of appropriation used by the city’s residents and the multiple layers of power and authority that created and now govern it. In this essay, we examine the commons as a creative potentiality for urban advocacy and action, as a way to rethink the tensions between private ownership, public governance and everyday resident use of city space. How can the re-emergent notion of the commons help us to think of a shared urban space and inspire action? And how does the contradiction between informal, creative tactics and formal…
FCJ-142 Spectacles and Tropes: Speculative Design and Contemporary Food Cultures
Carl DiSalvo Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta Introduction Speculative design is a practice of creating imaginative projections of alternate presents and possible futures using design representations and objects. At times critical and at other times whimsical, it is a distinctive, if loose, grouping of projects. Using the term broadly, speculative design covers a range of work across disciplines, fields, and historical and contemporary movements. For example, much of the work of the Futurists and Constructivists in the early Twentieth Century, which blended machines, politics, and everyday life, is suggestive of speculative design as it is practiced today. Collectives such as Archigram and Superstudio in the 1960s and 70s produced now iconic graphic representations of future cities, which stylistically and thematically inspired generations of architects and designers. In the late 1990s Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby coined the term ‘Critical Design’ to label product and interaction design that sought to ‘challenge…
FCJ-141 Spaces for Play – Architectures of Wisdom: Towards a Utopic Spatial Practice
Dan Frodsham University of Exeter There still exist – and there may exist in the future – spaces for play, spaces for enjoyment, architectures of wisdom or pleasure. In and by means of space the work may shine through the product, use value may gain the upper hand over exchange value: appropriation, turning the world upon its head, may (virtually) achieve dominion over domination, as the imaginary and the utopian incorporate (or are incorporated into) the real. Henri Lefebvre, 1991 The Production of Space, 348. Introduction This paper proposes a Utopic Spatial Practice that seeks to rehabilitate utopianism in a digital age. Such a Utopic Spatial Practice might utilize the practices and technologies of locative media to more fully realise utopia as a specifically spatial form. It might also harness locative media’s potential as a dynamic mechanism for radical social transformation. These technologies plot media to geographical coordinates, so that,…
FCJ-139 Sand14: Reconstructing the Future of the Mobile Telecoms Industry
Laura Watts IT University of Copenhagen Which is farther from us, farther out of reach, more silent – the dead, or the unborn? Those whose bones lie under the thistles and the dirt and the tombstones of the Past, or those who slip weightless among molecules, dwelling where a century passes in a day, among the fair folk, under the great, bell-curved Hill of Possibility? — Ursula K. Le Guin, Towards an Archaeology of the Future Prologue I was researching how the future gets imagined and made in the mobile telecoms industry, and had been since 2003. But I stood in a cloud on a remote Scottish island, rain refusing to fall, only seep through waterproof layers to my skin. Laid out before me were the foundations of a Neolithic village, five thousand years old. Its remains were marked by upright, glistening flagstones and low-turf walls; a square hearth before…
FCJ-140 Radio Feeds, Satellite Feeds, Network Feeds: Subjectivity Across the Straits of Gibraltar
Nicholas Knouf Cornell University, Ithaca, NY This essay examines a series of events that took place over a few days around the summer solstices in 2004 and 2005. These events, under the collective title of fadaiat—libertad de movimiento y libertad de concimiento (freedom of movement and freedom of knowledge) ‘took place’ within the Madiaq region of Spain and Morocco and the space of the Straits of Gibraltar in between. [1] This fixing of a temporality and a spatiality is indeed only provisional as fadaiat took ‘place’ prior to, after, within, and beyond the confines of a bounded series of days or a given physical location. The ambiguity of pinpointing final ‘locations’ in time and space of the fadaiat project reflects the ambiguity of its subject, namely the relationship of people and knowledge in border regions, with both imbricated among a digital world without ‘borders’. Borders are fixed as black lines…
FCJ-138 This is not a Bit-Pipe: A Political Economy of the Substrate Network
Rachel O’Dwyer and Linda Doyle Trinity College Dublin Introduction In The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society is Coming Online, editor of Wired magazine Kevin Kelly (2009) argues that the collaborative cultures emerging around web 2.0 platforms cultivate a “digital socialism”, with broad political and economic implications for the producers of online culture. Kelly, alongside others, sees the digital commons as an arena for non-market collectivism that has the potential to extend influence to material circuits of production. Tracing a smooth trajectory from the publication of More’s Utopia in 1516, through to the monopoly of YouTube at the time of publication, Kelly defines the core tenets of a networked utopia. This is premised on a decentralised architecture with the potential to scale the collective production of information, knowledge and culture, where open source software replaces communal tools and the ‘desktop factory’ succeeds the collective farm as the core space of common…
Issue 20 – Networked Utopias and Speculative Futures
The future began somewhere. The impulse behind this issue of The Fibreculture Journal was a crisis of imagination with regards to how the future might look and behave. Our starting point was the notion of post-millennial tension – the idea that in the decades following the year 2000 we find ourselves living in an era that was meant to be the future, but where many of our futuristic hopes and fantasies remain unfulfilled. Worse, our historical visions of hyper-technological futures seem to have propelled us into a perilous position where humankind may not have any kind of future at all. In the space between ever-hopeful techno-futurism and the realities of a world forever changed by the pursuit of the resources required to fuel it, we asked if the age-old concept of utopia still has the strength to generate galvanising visions of the future. Utopia, we contended, was well-worn territory, explored…
The Ubiquity Issue
The Ubiquity Issue Fibreculture Journal 19 deals with ubiquitous or pervasive computing, and with the recently emerged ambience of information. The issue details practices involving pervasive computing, both everyday practices and new art or dynamic architectural forms. Alongside these more practical concerns, the issue thinks through and with ubiquity. It takes ubiquity as something that has already arrived, something of immediate and increasing power. Simply put, ubiquity, by nature, is something with which we more often have to negotiate. Ubiquity’s ambiguous powers and possible futures also become key concerns. Finally, several articles consider the way that ubiquity might lead us to reconsider not only our past relationship to computing, but perhaps the very nature of computing and the human, vis a vis each other. The issue was edited by Ulrik Ekman. Articles include; Ulrik Ekman’s comprehensive introduction to the issues and ideas that move through ubiquity; Mette Ramsgard Thomsen and…
FCJ-137 Affective Experience in Interactive Environments
Jonas Fritsch Department of Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University Introduction Digital technologies in new interactive environments are radically affecting the way we experience and make sense of the world. The advent of ubiquitous computing in particular has led to the development of advanced sensor technologies and microchips, moving the realm of computing from the desktop computer into broader contexts of interaction or interactive environments (Weiser, 1991). It seems, however, that there has been a shift from the original vision of ubiquitous computing in the light of the possibilities that a ubiquitous computational infrastructure has actually been shown to offer. Mark Weiser’s initial ideal of disappearing computers, so the technology resides in the background to let us focus on more important things, is no longer the only way of working with ubiquitous computing and technologies. Among others, Yvonne Rogers has proposed a new agenda for the design of UbiComp technologies focused…
FCJ-136 Toward Environmental Criticism
Malcolm McCullough University of Michigan [Abstract] Background The rise of the ambient brings new directions in environmental criticism. Here ‘the ambient’ means a continuum of contexts where information has been embedded locally, to facilitate being brought in and out of focal attention. How may design for that state contribute to necessary shifts of worldview? Do new relations of embodiment, touch, tagging, and display change environmental awareness, no so much of global problems as of simply being in and part of the world? This word ‘environmental’ has been badly abused; it seems to mean everything to some people and nothing in particular to others. So long as whatever this word meant was considered large and far away, absent of technology and beyond human agency, it was difficult to imagine much less act upon. So long as information technologies have been considered placeless and nonmaterial, they have hardly been part of such…
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