Ulrik Ekman

Ubiquitous Computing, Complexity and Culture

The ubiquitous nature of mobile and pervasive computing has begun to reshape and complicate our notions of space, time, and identity. In this collection, over thirty internationally recognized contributors reflect on ubiquitous computings implications for the ways in which we interact with our environments, experience time, and develop identities individually and socially. Interviews with working media artists lend further perspectives on these cultural transformations. Drawing on cultural theory, new media art studies, human-computer interaction theory, and software studies, this cutting-edge book critically unpacks the complex ubiquity-effects confronting us every day. The companion website can be found here: http://ubiquity.dk

Introduction to Mobile ubiquity in public and private spaces

It has been more than fifteen years since Mark Weiser’s and his Xerox Parc colleagues’ seminal and trans-disciplinary work on a vision for a ‘calm’ and human-centred kind of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) for the twenty-first century. Although its ongoing realisation is in a number of respects quite different from the original vision, that vision is now considerably more of an actual fact. Its very realisation, as well as the differences, are due in part to interim economic and technical advances, such as affordable, multifaceted microscale sensors and actuators and an expansion of decentralised networking capacities via new Internet protocol practices for the billions of computational entities worldwide, thus paving the way for an adequate ubicomp infrastructure and an actual Internet of Things. Partly, ubicomp has become real in new and different ways because a miniaturisation of components and a global cultural acceptance in practice have permitted mobile wireless devices (such as mobile phones, iPods and other MP3 players (Bull 2007), PDAs and Blackberrys, iPads, notebooks) to achieve an unprecedented distributed pervasiveness—outnumbering humans globally, perhaps only superseded technically by embedded computational units. Ubicomp infrastructures, stationary units and mobile devices continue to form new hybrid platforms, converging in ever-extending cultures of connective systems available through wireless networks as well as landline broadband networks—as in current cloud computing initiatives. In its cultural practices the resulting third wave of computing continues to permeate and break down traditional modern boundaries of space and time, not least any clear-cut distinctions of the near and the far, the now and the past, the private and the public sense of space and time (Augé 1995, Bogard 2007, Colebrook 2004, Crang and Thrift 2000, De Landa 2007, Dourish 2006, Featherstone 2008, Habermas et al. 2004, Lefebvre 2004, Lefebvre and Goonewardena 2008, Manovich 2006, Massumi 1995, Thrift 2008, Willams et al. 2005). Insofar as ubicomp leads to a growing inherence or an immanence of our life form, its technological platforms sink deeper into the skin of human agency—often, if not always, receding from conscious perception and sensation into a peripheral background . . . Since its early inception as part of the technologies being deployed through digital media, ubicomp has led to remarkable alterations of our ways of being in the world (Morley 2004). Combining with social and personalised mobile media, as well as with physical tangible interfaces, ubicomp, pervasive computing or ambient intelligence has generated a flow of innovative technocultural developments saturating even the most innocuous activities of our everyday life: the time keeping of daily routines; our communications with family, friends, and colleagues; our performance in work-related Digital Creativity 2011, Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 127–133

Of Transductive Speed – Stiegler

Entering into a dialogue with Bernard Stiegler’s work on technics and time, the reader will, sooner or later, experience a certain difficulty as regards the delimitation of speed, as if Stiegler on speed is at once a question of an exorbitant acceleration and a torturous deceleration approaching a veritable stasis. This experience may come very early and swiftly – or it can take place with multiple and complex delays and displacements. However, most readers will probably at some point find themselves sharing an articulation of a question concerning the delimitation of speed. We find ourselves confronted with a written oeuvre which on the one hand gives so much complexity, as to demand an almost infinite patience, while on the other hand remaining directed by a thematization of speed qua acceleration (notably the speed of technics), so as to urge us (notably humans) to become or at least go faster.

The uncertainty of the uncertain image

The uncertainty of the uncertain image: that is the question! If it is correct to claim, as the body of contributions to this special issue does, that this question is a key challenge in today’s global network societies, the query posed is not least interesting because it flies in the face of a good deal of received wisdom and popular notions of images that take them to be certain objects. For the assumed certainty of the image grounds the recent so-called visual turn in research—across the humanities, the social sciences and a range of technical fields. Arguably, the image appears to be the certain hinge on which turns the broad institutionalization during this period of visual culture studies as a discipline in its own right, from the Anglo-American studies of vision and visuality in the late 1980s (Foster 1988) through the German efforts to establish a science of the image (Belting 2007; Bredekamp 2010) to contemporary postcolonial (Appadurai 1996; Bhabha 2004; Rajagopal and Rao 2016; Spivak 1999), feminist (Jones 2010; Nochlin 1999; Pollock 1988) and queer (Butler 1993; Halberstam 2005; Muñoz 1999; Sedgwick 1997) articulations of what differences that make a difference are made by various images and gazes. The image has never appeared more certain, one might say, seeing that it has found its way into an incredible spectrum of everyday sociocultural practices. The image seems so certain that it is often a taken for granted constituent of everyday culture; for instance, in screens and graphical user interface developments, and in innumerable productions, disseminations and receptions in social and mobile media. Moreover, citizens of today’s network societies are increasingly accompanied by entire ecologies of images, incessantly and wherever they go in information-intensive mixed-reality environments. Such image ecologies form the ways in which the truth of the current co-development of contemporary culture and ubiquitous or pervasive computing presents itself. Within the emerging Big Data regime of knowledge, the image is also becoming a dominant vehicle through which the rhetorical objectivity of data is construed (Gregg 2014; Halpern 2014). The image is becoming a site where the promise of certainty, predictability and intelligibility offered by Big Data is made. Not least, discursive and practical employments of images today can very often be seen as affirming and reaffirming certainty via marked returns to emphasizing high resolution, sharpness, clarity and realistic representation. Yet, whether images appear still or moving, their emergence in the visual turn, in the rise of the sociocultural use of digital images, and in the unfolding of such ecologies of images increasingly present us with the paradox of uncertainties emerging with certainties. As this special issue shows, while images do appear more certain as the information technological capacities that render them clearly visible increase, they are nevertheless also inherently circumscribed or touched by more uncertainty as their numbers, contingencies, ephemeralities and manipulabilities increase. Internal to contemporary emphases on realism, clarity, sharpness and high resolution, the uncertainty of images is continuously underscored by renewed encounters with fallibility, noise, grain, glitch, irreducible blur, unsharpness, indistinctness, vagueness and representational undecidability. To make matters more complex, it is not just the certain image that becomes an issue—it is also increasingly the case that even visuality and the

Design as Topology: U-City

This chapter discusses the issue of approaching the design of the ubiquitous city as a matter of topology. The general context here is the design of contemporary global urbanity in the form of u-cities, smart cities, or intelligent cities emerging with the second phase of network societies that increasingly develop mixed reality environments with context-aware out-of-the-box computing as well as the sociocultural and experiential horizon of a virtually and physically mobile citizenry. Design here must meet an ongoing and exceedingly complex interactivity among environmental, technical, social, and personal multiplicities of urban nodes on the move. This chapter focuses on the design of a busy traffic intersection in the South Korean u-city Songdo. Hence, the discussion whether and how Songdo may be approached via design as topology primarily considers the situation, event, and experience in which multiplicities of environmental, technical, and human interactants tend toward gathering and dispersing in a single mixed reality street transport scenario. The need for “intelligent” ad hoc connection, routing, and disconnection of multitudes of humans, technical systems, and environmental entities makes this scenario one of the more crucial design test beds. This article offers a critically comparative discussion of a variety of ontological and epistemological approaches to design as topology, including realist, nominalist, and constructivist efforts in both cultural theory and technical studies. It is demonstrated that design as topology offers significant resources with respect to traits of the u-city such as continuous material and energetic flows, its environmental landscaping of mixed realities, its ongoing virtual and physical infrastructural developments, the folding and unfolding of its architecture, its nodal dynamics, and the relational mobilities at stake. However, this chapter also questions design as topology as an approach when it comes to decisive aspects of urban finitude: citizens’ lived experiences, concretization of urban information and communication technology ICT, and sustainability.

Urban echoes of ubiquity

Perhaps you are passing through the contemporary urban environment of a south-east Asian megaregion, a regional technopole in southern China or a new industrial complex in Germany. It could be that...