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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…
FCJ-135 Feral Computing: From Ubiquitous Calculation to Wild Interactions
Matthew Fuller and Sónia Matos Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London [Abstract] Introduction In ‘The Coming Age of Calm Technology’, Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown are clear in their assertions. What really ‘matters’ about technology is not technology in itself but rather its capacity to continuously recreate our relationship with the world at large (Brown and Weiser, 1996). Even though they promote such an idea under the banner of ‘calm technology’, what is central to their thesis is the mutational capacities brought into the world by the spillage of computation out from its customary boxes. What their work tends to occlude is that in setting the sinking of technology almost imperceptibly, but deeply into the ‘everyday’ as a target for ubiquitous computing, other possibilities are masked, for instance those of the greater hackability or interrogability of such technologies. Our contention is that making ubicomp seamless (MacColl et…
FCJ-134 Reflections on the Philosophy of Pervasive Gaming—With Special Emphasis on Rules, Gameplay, and Virtuality
Bo Kampmann Walther Centre for Media Studies, University of Southern Denmark [Abstract] Introduction Presently there are a number of gameplay definitions, ranging from Sid Meier’s famous assertion of ‘interesting choices’ to Richard Rouse’s concept in which the vibrant iterations of user input and machine output is the decisive factor (Rouse, 2005). Further, ‘gameplay’ seems to drift indefinably between psychological categories, as in the emphasis on the concept of ‘flow’, and more formal conceptualisations often derived from computer science. However, the discussion of how the realm of pervasive games necessitates both playing and gaming, play-mode and game-mode, seems to oblige a slightly different gameplay terminology. One level of gameplay is the actualisation of a specific stratification of rules, strategies, and interactions as well as the realisation of a certain amalgamation of commands, plans, and paths. A second level, which is equally or even more important since it explains the inherent fascination…
FCJ-132 Towards a Performative Aesthetics of Interactivity
Simon Penny University of California, Irvine [Abstract] Introduction As I write this, at the end of 2010, it is sobering to reflect on the fact that over a couple of decades of explosive development in new media art (or ‘digital multimedia’ as it used to be called), in screen based as well as ‘embodied’ and gesture based interaction, the aesthetics of interaction doesn’t seem to have advanced much. At the same time, interaction schemes and dynamics which were once only known in obscure corners of the world of media art research/creation have found their way into commodities from 3D TV and game platforms (Wii, Kinect) to sophisticated phones (iPhone, Android). While increasingly sophisticated theoretical analyses (from Manovich, 2002 to Chun, 2008 to Hansen, 2006, more recently Stern, 2011 and others) have brought diverse perspectives to bear, I am troubled by the fact that we appear to have advanced little in…
FCJ-131 Pervasive Computing and Prosopopoietic Modelling – Notes on computed function and creative action
Anders Michelsen Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen [Abstract] Introduction This article treats the philosophical underpinnings of the notions of ubiquity and pervasive computing from a historical perspective. The current focus on these notions reflects the ever increasing impact of new media and the underlying complexity of computed function in the broad sense of ICT that have spread vertiginiously since Mark Weiser coined the term ‘pervasive’, e.g., digitalised sensoring, monitoring, effectuation, intelligence, and display. Whereas Weiser’s original perspective may seem fulfilled since computing is everywhere, in his and Seely Brown’s (1997) terms, ‘invisible’, on the horizon, ’calm’, it also points to a much more important and slightly different perspective: that of creative action upon novel forms of artifice. Most importantly for this article, ubiquity and pervasive computing is seen to point to the continuous existence throughout the computational heritage since the mid-20th century of a paradoxical distinction/complicity…
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