Contextualizing Ubiquitous Computing:
Dourish/Bell: 2 “Contextualizing Ubiquitous Computing” in Dourish, Paul, and Genevieve Bell.
Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2011., 9-43. https://ebookcentral-proquestcom.ez.statsbiblioteket.dk:12048/lib/asb/reader.action?docID=3339242&ppg=20 (35 pages)
p. 9
 The most profound technologies are those that disappear, Weiser said in 1991
 Becoming part of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it
 Weiser's article was very influential - laid the foundations for a research program in ubicomp
o A manifesto and a progress report
 An alternative to the personal computing paraidgm
o Trends as both necessary and inevitable
 Suggesting a significant problem with the personal computing paradigm
o More about interacting with than actually using the computer to get things done
p. 10
 Poorly designed computer systems can interfere with people completing their tasks - the
motivation for HCI and user experience
 Creating spaces for cognitive scientists and social scientist to bring their expertise to
technological development (Geoff Cooper and John Bowers, 1995 in a essay on rhetorics of
HCI)
 Weiser's tactic is different - with respect to interdisciplinary engagement instead
o Firstly, the problem lies with the conception of computational devices, not just with the
interface - this will require efforts and pose many computer science challenges
o Secondly, the problem draws widely on other disciplines than HCI has traditionally
done - Ecological psychologists, philosiphers, cognitive scientists, and computer
scientists
 Weiser's ubicomp was informed by different technical impulses and sources
 A perceived failure of the pc to deliver meaningful value to users
 Wanting to reposition the environmental background of the computer and focus on humanto-human interface, not just human-computer
 Weiser and his team took solid aim at issues of HCI and focused on the human side of the
interaction
p. 11
 More focus on the detailed situational use of technology
o In the complex social framework of daily activity
 "Off the desktop" and other alternative models of HCI - where the orderliness and calm
interaction was located
 Weiser's vision from 1991 anticipated technological trends
 Small, computational devices that were embedded in the everyday world were to replace
the traditional computer, laptop etc
 A computational experience across a range of different devices with special tasks
p. 12
 The future of ubicomp as inevitable (Weiser and Xerox PARC)
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PARC strategy in the early 70s - using the technologies in their own environments
The best way to predict the future is to invent it - Time machine research
Moore's Law: A predictive model of technological development
o Intel cofounder Gordon Moore
o Engineers addressing how the next doubling in feature density might be achieved
Changes in computational power density
Weiser, in the article, sketches out a fictional scenario of how it would be to live in a
ubicomp world
13
In a workplace suffused with information technology
Ubicomp augments the environments and replaces desktop computers with new devices
Overall, Weiser's article presented a new model for HCI interaction, which offered new
challenges for design and engineering
How small devices could play a role in larger systems
Focus on the interactional consequences of design decisions
Ubicomp became a vision for computer science research areas - a new approach
Weiser wanted an approach that incorporated the traditional computer science disciplines
like mathemematical theory, networks, programming languages, graphics, and more
14
Ubicomp became a research area that expanded upon the traditional areas of computer
science research
Weiser's research program around ubicomp became very succesful
The ubicomp area also is largely connected to cultural studies and anthropology
Ubicomp after Weiser:
Died in 1999 of cancer, at 46 as a highly productive researcher
15
Ubicomp continued to be developed at PARC and elsewhere
Competing narratives were emerging at other companies:
o Ambient intelligence at Philips
o Proactive computing at Intel
They all shared an orientation to a rapid growth in technology and the growing importance
of the internet
o Their research agendas were very different though
During the late 90s and early 200s, research centered on ubicomp agendas were
commencing
Equator, UK: A multiside project across 8 univerisities - the integration of physical and digital
interaction - strong interdisciplinary approach
16
Weiser suggested that ubicomp could be inspired by and use different academic disciplines
and theoretical approaches
Research in ubicomp has not been as grounded in postmodern analysis and feminist critical
theory as he had hoped
Establishing the history of the making of ubicomp is an important practice - worth examining
further
Abowd and Mynatt, 2000 - influential paper: Focus on areas;
o
o
Natural interfaces: Facilitate a richer variety of communication capabilities between
humans and computation
Context-aware applications: Adapting behaviour based on information sensed from
the physical and computational environment
p. 17
 Everyday computing should promote informal and unstructured activities
 The work in the paper can be view as a paradigm shift
o Ubicomp is a radical departure from the computational status quo
 Visions of technology reflect the time and place where they originate
 Suchman, in a 2002 paper, builds on work in feminist epistemology + connects it to
technological design practices
o Outlines three positions that frame the working relations of design
o The view from nowhere
o Detached intimacy
o Located accountabilities
p. 18
 The importance of contexts where the design engagements take place
 The importance of the power relations between technology providers and potential
consumers
o Designers work within a range of relations
 The focus in ubicomp is often on office/work environments as opposed to domestic spaces
 The focus of professionals is mostly focused on the areas where they are experts themselves
o Though social sciences and humanities are mostly abscent (even though they can
highlight the context of natural interface and capture human experience)
 Social sciences is much more involved in a 2006 article by Yvonne Rogers, about that state
and prospects of ubicomp research
p. 19
 Shows an interest in the arenas of human experience beyond the office and workday world more recent trends in HCI
 Issues of engagement, promoting human participation in new domains
 Rogers envisions an emancipatory and democratic information technology + drawing on
research from social sciences
 Going beyond Weiser's original outline and beyond the working srttings
 The goal is not to make the computing physically invisible, but make it place a role in
agendas that originate elsewhere
p. 20
 Envisioning the Future:
 Proximate future: Ubicomp is characterised mainly by a concern with potential future
computational worlds
 Tje Computer for the 21st Century - 1991 article by Weiser
 Future envisonment is a feature of ubicomp discourse and has always been
 Anticipating future trends and meeting future needs
 Weiser's article set a rhetorical tone that many have adopted
o A concern with technological futures
 Technological advances are motivated and measured
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Ubicomp is basically defined by its visions of a technological future
Focus on the relationship between ubicomp research and technological practice
21
Visions of the future show how the problems of today are understood
What was once research imaginary in ubicomp is now commonplace and not as remarkable
The interplay between research and practice
o Succesful fields can become irrelevant
Weiser's vision of the future is now an old one and a very North American one
o The role of technology is also different than what it was in the late 80s
o Furthermore, it has cultural variation
PARC pursued a policy of time-machine research, imagining the future
This framing of the ubicomp visions is still important in the discourse of ubicomp research
How do we understand the relationship between the envisioned future of ubicomp and the
present? - how does this influence ubicomp research
What explains the persistence and centrality of Weiser's vision?
22
The centrality of ubicomp's future often places its achievements out of reach + binds us to
current practice
Ubicomp renders contemporary practice irrelevant by concentrating on the future
o Ubicomp is here but has taken a different form than imagined
The problems of ubicomp are framed as issues that are basically someone else's problem
o Researchers and technologists are then absolved from the responsibilities of the
present
The future framing allows us to assume that some problems will disappear - regulation,
resistance, usability, backlash, and more are then erased
The world of future scenarios is a misleading visions - can be dangerous
The practice is inevitably messier than the future vision
o The messiness of everyday life should be a central element of ubicomp's research
agenda
23
The Problem of the Proximate Future:
The proximate of the future is the dominant subject of ubicomp writing
A proximate future just around the corner
Using the recent relevant developments to determine the proximate future
Weiser's technological vision
The collective vision of future possibilities consists of how current activities are tied to the
same agenda as Weiser's in 1980
Bruno Latour, 1987: How acknowledging that one's own work depends on prior results and
writings - this builds defensible positions - aligning research with existing paradigms and
traditions
24
The ubicomp project was well under wat when the article was published in 1991 as it was a
progress report on the project
The prosecution and continued use of Weiser's vision neglects the significant difference
between then and now + the change in technosocial contexts
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When Weiser outlined his vision, the technological environment was widely different than it
is today
Taking into consideration the techological environment of today and Moore's law, it is
surprising to still use Weiser's proximate future vision
It is possible that the ubicomp vision can never come to pass - the proximate future will
always be postponed
25
Ubicomp is never about the here and now
It is also possible that ubicomp has already been here
o Just with a different form than imagined at the time
Weiser's future vision is therefore of the past - instead one should look at the computer of
now, and not of the 80s
Ubicomp Is Really about Messiness:
Calm computing and calm technology was explored by Weiser and his colleague Brown
These concepts do not have the same enduring legacy as ubicomp
Calm computing as clean infrastrure with well understood services
Practically, infrastructures are continually visible and must be attented to with routine
encounters
26
Infrastructures will remain messy
The assembling of technologies to achieve individual and collective effects will almost always
be messy
Susan Leigh Star, 1999: Using infrastructure as an analytical lense to consider the
relationship between human action and infrastructure
o An infrastructure is only an infrastructure from the perspective of certain people and
technologies
Infrastructure is not stable or inactive
o Must be maintained and negotiated
Infrastructures are always messy - messiness is a property
A semaless and uniform infrastructure is therefore unrealistic
27
Ubicomp is already here - but messy as it would not be in the sense of Weiser's vision of it
An infrastructure cannot be seamless as the messiness cannot be ignored
28
A big infrastructure issue for ubicomp endeavors is the problem of power - the electric
supply
Infrastructure is unevenly distributed and unevenly available
It is a relational property - relationship between technology, people, and practice
29
A stable and seamless infrastructure is a dream of a world that cannot be realised
Alternate Visions of Ubicomp:
Studies of computing in daily life beyond the test environments of the US and Europe are
quite rare in ubicomp research
There is not a growing range of examples of ubicomp despite the increase in wireless and
embedded technologies
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The problem is possibly that technology is not recognised as ubicomp
o The imagined context of ubicomp is maybe unfamiliar and therefore not regonised
Ubicomp has also been presented as a vivid and emotionally satisfying future - digital life
scenarios in the the home
30
The vision of ubicomp now is not exactly as Weiser envisioned it
o With embedded computation devices, smart and proactive networks, sensors, and realtime feedback
It can be useful to look beyond standard vision of digital future - other ideas can come in to
focus with ubicomp
31
Involving infrastructure more - like government control, traffic monitoring etc.
Acknowledging the diversity in the settings of ubicomp can help us avoid misguided visions
of ubicomp
Ubicomp is developed rather than being as it was imagined
The ubicomp agenda is related to important issues like multigenerational living and highdensity housing, public transit etc.
o The messiness of everyday practice
Everyday Ubicomp: Singapore:
Singapore is an example of ubicomp out of the lab - one of the most wired countries in the
world, most homes are connected to high-speed internet
o Technology is a naturalised part of the cultural landscape
32
Creating intelligent infrastructure in singapore - intelligent island
o High speed data network test across the island (1996)
The intelligent island vision has been realised today
High levels of broadband connectivity, more phones than computers in Singapore
33
Singapore has many types of ubiquitous technologies
o They represent a ubicomp environment
When considering ubicomp environments, it is important to think about what happens on
and around the infrastructures
Almost everyone in Singapore has a cellphone - this creates new opportunities for locationbased services
34
The train system utilised smart card ticketing and advanced CCTV
A manifestation of ubicomp in the domain of public transportation
However, the ubicomp environment has raised questions about content, surveillance, and
control
Regulation of ubicomp spaces is not often well-documented
35
The government planned to filter internet use through government proxies - regulating
access to political, religious, and pornographic content
Blocking access to certain sites
o Censorship
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The censorship regime has relative transparency and clearly articulated principles
Technology is undestood as operating within a cultural context
36
Concern with children's safety on the internet
Cyberwellness
o Using the internet for inspiring others and contributing to the community
o A sense of personal responsibility
Everyday Ubicomp: Korea
Korea is an example of infrastructural ubiquity and using the public/private sector
cooperation to achieve it
Korea has an explicit government mandate to create a ubicomp society
o One of the most connected countries in the world
37
The internet is an ubiquitous technology in Korea - almost everyone has a computer and uses
the internet
The leading broadband market in the world
o A digital environment that is consumptive and participatory
The nature of Kore's urban landspace contributes largely to the high level of connectivity
The Korea government also holds internet service providers financially responsible for spam
and viruses on their networks
One of the fastest-growing markets for PC band or cyberarcades
38
High consumption of mobile internet experiences
2004: A technology plan to transform Korea into an ubiquitous society
o U-Korea
39
Raising the GDP is the goals - and of the households
A society with a state-of-the-art IT at anywhere and anytime
The vision of a technology future is then manifested at a collective cultural and societal level
Designing Ubicomp:
Ubicomp research and design are often tighlty coupled, not always separated
The research, like experimentation, is in ubicomp frequently carried out with design
practices
Design is often the means for research activities
PARC motto: Build what you use, use what you build
40
Design activities play a crucial role in ubicomp
o Design is also the end goal of much of the ubicomp research
Important to distinguish between ubicomp as a research agenda and the visions of ubicomp
embedded in specific design
Describing ubicomp as messy to understand the limits of and considerations of design - with
design artifacts and infrastructures
Toward a Ubicomp of the Present:
41
An alternative domain of ubicomp research - not one of the future, but one of the present
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The future is here, just not evenly distributed - William Gibson
As an alternative research agenda for ubicomp
The future is here, as Weiser had envisioned - where computation is embedded into daily
life, both physically and socially and prcedurally
 Using computational devices without thinking of them as computational in any way
 The use of ubicomp is perhaps what would surprise Weiser
 Possibilities of deomestic and other nonwork settings instead
 Weiser was right that the purposes of new computational devices would reflect existing
social and cultural practices, not radically new ones
p. 42
 We need a deeper understanding of how social and cultural practice is carried out in and
around information technologies
 A focus on technology as a site of social and cultural production
 The idea of the future as not evenly distributed (traditionally)
o The concentration of advanced technological infrastructures within research labs
o The digital divide
o Differential access to technologies
 The idea of it now:
o How power relations are embedded in access to infrastructure
o The different patterns of technology adoption and use in different cultures
o How inherently messy and ueven infrastructures are encountered and navigated
 Need to consider the ways in which technologies exploit and reproduce a range of power
concentrations and relationships
o When thinking about ubicomp technologies and infrastructures
p. 43
 Seeing ubicomp as an inherently heterogeneous phenomenon when seeing it of the present
rather than of the future
o Heterogeneous: something that is unlike as oil and water
 Standardisation and consistency is not easily achievable
 In ubicomp research, a large aspect focuses on how the heterogeneity is manifested and
managed
The Urban Metainterface:
Andersen & Pold: “The Urban Metainterface” (kap. 3 fra The Metainterface. The Art of Platforms,
Cities and Clouds, MIT-Press 2018) (PDF pages 91-130) (40 pages)
p. 81
 Spoken Streets:
 Spoken Streets is an app where the user is offered a random map and walking path around
their location
o Functions like an audio guide, though the narrative can appear fragmented
 The routline planning includes Google searches related to the location
o A user movement generates a search and is answered by reading from the WWW
 Something the relation is directly linked to the user's location and sometimes more abstract

Shows a relation between sense/nonsense, between potential narrative/raving incoherent
jabber
o Can appear absurd and functions like a joke or a parody
 How a city can be defined as a semiotisation of space
 …
p. 83
 How language is a part of the de- and reterritorialisation process in a city
 The changed production system of writing and reading presents a new form of control that
affects the common language activities of everyday life
 How the semiotisation of space is affected by a new metainterface industry - how this
disrupts everyday practices of urban life
 Examples of everyday urban experiences with metainterfaces: TripAdvisoer, Airbnb, Uber,
Pokemon Go
 Anything can potentially signify anything
o You just need to decode and access the city with the right interface
 The city is an interface (Martijn de Waal)
 The city as interface consists of physical design and of stories
 Social media, smartphone apps etc. Play an important role in the distribution of meaning
today
 The pirate net culture is based on an understanding of cultural creativity as a process of
exchange, sharing, and reinterpretation
o The disruption of urban space caused by location-based services correponds with this
 Opening up the city to diverse use and the sharing of resources alters the use and meaning
of them - an invetiable consequences of network culture
o Challenes the conventional meanings of place tied to its function or history
p. 84
 According to Jane Jacobs, cities should be designed for openess to the chance encounter of a
person or place, diverse use, and the personal narrative
o Urban interfaces like Airbnb, Uber, or TripAdvisor seem to appear to deliver this
 Spoken Streets support these openings of the city and its resources
o Experiencing how signification in an urban context is ambiguous
o How the means behind it are sealed off and difficult to access - hard to get a clear
overview of the relations between urban space and Facebook, Twitter feeds etc.
 The mechanisms of semiotisation that determine how the city should be read, interpreted,
and used are becoming increasingly opaque and layered with semiotic processes
 Metainterfaces are black boxes and conceal linguistic and scripted operations even if they do
open up the city
 Focus on the black box of the urban interface - how this entails a particular territoriality and
perception of space
 A usable interface depends on the ability to communicate inner algorithmic processes + on
its ability to capture the user's behaviours
 The more the urban interface opens up the city, the more it needs to monitor the users
p. 85
 The urban metainterface depends on a combination of location tracking and textual
production arounf the encounters
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The movement into the urban space therefore depends on a seamless network of sensors
embedded into devices and the environment
 The production of spatial ambiguity builds on network principles where data can flow openly
between devices and apps
o Possible to experience and inhabit urban space in new and open ways
 How the city functions as a process of semiosis structured around an unconscious way of
seeing
 What kind of gaze does the metainterface produce?
 How the city is structured like an interface - Scripted urban space
o And how it becomes increasingly layered with hidden optical and computational
process - like cameras, screens, data capture, and processing
 How the scripting of space in the metainterface becomes a new optical and computational
gaze of the city
 Media technologies have always produced certain urban gazes
o Panorama and panopticon have played active roles in the construction of the modern
urban gaaze of the late 19th century
p. 86
 The urban metainterface as a mode of production
 Open processes of signification can be employed in urban design
 The metainterface can be seen as a way to open up a city - (using the logic of open-source
software - access to the "source code")
 Openness as a way to improve societies
 The City as a Text:
 The city is a discursive site which it is why the metainterface can open of processes of
signification (Discursive = "I sociologien er diskurs en institutionelt funderet måde at tænke
på.")
 Representation and language are territorial and creates realities
 Systems of signification are inseperable from the city
o They consist of large spatial signs
 Urban language, like street or building names, are constestations of urban space - they
control territories
p. 87
 Roland Barthes was one of the first to consider the relation between cities and semiotics
o Semiology and Urbanism from 1967
o The symbolism of urban space
 Barthes sees a conflicting relationship between the functional necessities of a modern city
and its semantic charge
 There is a conflict between signification and reason
o A city is not just formed of planned elements, but also of strong and neutral elements
 A city is formed by processes of signification and the absence of meaning
 The city is like a language - highly processual and fluent
p. 88
 The challenge for an urban semiology - bringing the language of the city out of its metaphoric
stage
 The real meaning of a place is only provisional (midlertidig)
 The symbols of a city refer to an organisation of meaning at a structural level
Barthes claims that a city holds an unconscious - what is then unconscious of the urban
metainterface that produces signification
 One-way Street:
 Walter Benjamin explores an urban textuality and its relation to other forms of textualities the book One-Way Street
 Short texts organised with street signs, advertising etc. As headlines
 The relation between the headlines and texts are not clear
 The book demonstrates the writerly expressivity of the urban
p. 89
 The relations between texts in books and urban text
 Writing regains its 3D with the urban interface
 How commercialisation changes text and reading - A new kind of criticism that enters the
urban space and its scripts
 Barthes: what role changes in the production of language can mean to the symbolism of a
city
p. 90
 Benjamin: thinking of it as a critical process that enters the street
 An urban semiology is needed
 Shifting from metaphor to the description of signification
 Spoken Streets enriches the reading of the urban without enforcing functionality and
metaphor
 There are two ways of seeing the urban metainterface as a writerly and critical production
of signification
 As an urban interface: a scripting of space that relates to the experience of a city and
as a lotus of consumption
 The gaze of the metainterface: And its organising principle that can easily evade
attention and structures perceptions and understanding of the city - its unconscious
grammar
 The City as an Interface:
 The city can function as a language, whose text is an interface
 The city as an interface means significations always relate to a textual organisation and the
reader's configuration
 A scripting of space taking place at a material level of organisation, infrastructure and
architecture.
 All places are scripted
p. 91
 Scripted space (Norman M. Klein):
 Script can mean different things - instructions for a computer/or a maniscrupt,
something literally written
 Klein uses scripted space to describe the experience of a space which can produce illusions
with different effects, like a shopping mall
 Compared to the experience of an interface - can seem invisible but the audience tends
to fill in the blacks
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A shopping mall can be seen as a compound space that seals off the complexity of
urban life
 The writing and reading of a city is what creates the experience
 The power belongs to whoever controls the distribution of meaning - The scripting of
absence (Klein)
 The media plays a large role in the distribution of meaning in a city
 Charles Dickens novels changed London etc.
 The media is then part of the textual organisation of the city that takes place on the material
level of organisation, infrastructure, and architecture
 The city is a mediated space
 Media technologies have added to the smoothness of mediation
p. 92
 Media technologies have been used in the organisation and perception of urban space
 Making the reading and operation of a city pleasurable
 The 19th century panorama was an urban medium that became a popular visual medium in
cities like London and Paris
 A designed and mediasaturated experinence - a 360 view of a city or historical events
 As a reaction to the loss of overview of the modern industrial city
 Panorama as a staging of the urban view as spectacle
p. 93
 Electronic billboards and other urban projections make up a different form of spectatorships
- consumer society
 Aesthetics of distraction
 Media technologies then affect the ways citites are organised and configured by their
inhabitants - not just altering the symbolism and signification
 The public space has been out-conquered by billboards, posters etc. And of tv and radio
consumed in the private home
 Today, though, the media has opened up the city as an interface
 Media consumption is increasingly occuring in public with mobile devices
p. 94
 The openness of the city as an interface takes places on two levels
 Visual opennes: Cameras and screens take part in creating the new urban public
sphere
 Scripted openness: Instructions and algorithms reconfigure the experience of the city
as a shared space
 Both the visual and scripted openness hold an unconscious layer
 A need for opening up the interface itself and the inherent production of meaning
 There are organising principles within the urban interface that appear absent and
unconscious but still distribute meaning
 A metainterface that conceals scripted processes
 The Optical Openness of the City:
 A lot of artists have drawn on experience and knowledge from network culture and new
media art to reconsider the functioning of screens realism
 Screens as visual dimensions of the urban interface
 Screens for producing new forms of public relationships

Using electronic network strategies for conveying new social relations in an urban space
p. 95
 Artistic work can use screens to redefine the urban space other than just for live sports of
billboards
 …
p. 96
 Technology can perform as an interface that develops a unique relationship with the public
while considering the meanings of interactivity
 Cities can be opened up by alternative use of technologies
 Avantprenuer: Created by Galloway and Rabinowitz in the 1980s
 Artists being alert to emerging trends in science and technology + can articulate the
unclaimed territories and their qualities
 Screens and cameras are a large part of the urban experience today
 Screens and cameras as part of a panoptic state of surveillance that is ubiquitous
 The production and consumption of urban images are part of the social media's
economy and the monitoring
 Screens and cameras hold a certain gaze as pointed out by the panoramic and panoptic
dimensions
 Artist employment of the interface in a city - exploring chance encounters, reflection of
images, or reconfiguration of a building
 How screens and cameras can capture images but also distribute meaning
 A quest for the unconscious principle of the metainterface which gives riser to other
technological pleasures and anxieties
p. 97
 Panorama-Panopticon: Faceless:
 The relation between monitoring and aesthetics if not a new concept
 The panopticon is an example of an inverse panorama
 The panorama and the panopticon are part of a society where there are two sides of media
architecture
 Organisation, control, and experience of the masses - aesthetisation of this
 The desire for an all-seeing gaze
 Necessary to understanding the gaze of the metainterface
 The desire to be part of the urban social interface is becoming a part of the process of
individuation
 People willingly let their locations and use of data be monitored

Desire to submit to surveillance
 This reflects a particular politics and production of space
 Artists have addressed the panoptic aspects of a modern cityscape
 Evolved since 9/11
 Cinematic experiment with surveillance: Faceless, a 50 minute feature film
p. 98
 The film consists of surveillance camera recordings from London
 Exploring who has the rights to the footage and data, when it is personal
 The movie is about a woman who lives in a future, technological dystopis where time is
controlled by "The New Machine"
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 Big Brother system that monitors the citizens and their data
Dehumanized Readymades: Faceless:
The movie follows a Big Brother scheme - a criticism of surveillance like 1984
99
How monitoring and control have become an accepted everyday practice
 The loss of freedom happens with general consent
Criticism of the legal framwork around visual surveillance
The planning of Faceless was a constant response to the circumstances and the level of
access to footage - shows how many surveillancec operators are reluctant to give access
 Considering the visual impact of surveillance cameras
The film reflects the politics of time and space in a city that is controlled by the infrastructure
of surveillance
 The CCTV footage have a dehumanised and objective quality
100
Time is a central theme - organised into one image per second
 The use of time in the movie is a response to the character of the recordings
101
Time becomes something that can be manipulated and controlled through a machine - but is
also detached from the lived experience of the citizens but still controls their lives
The camera perspective in the film is not a subjective camera angle but a bird's eye
perspective ---> captures reality and more objective
102
The movie is an expression of realism - presents how the world is producd (through
surveillance, for example) and the politics of the production (access to the movement of
people)
Mass Ornamentation: Faceless:
The movie seizes the movement of the mass as "mass ornament"
103
The spectacle as a mass ornament can, according to critic Siegried Kracauer, be considered
an aesthetic reflection of the capitalism's production process and statistical control
Characteristics of the mass society are often abstract or invisible but can be recognised
aesthetically as a mass ornament
Individuals do their task without grasping the totality of the production process
Mass society is in this way experienced through the mass ornament
 Also, the spectacle enchants the mass society
The mass ornament exists above the individual
 The nazis, for example, took advantage of this mass ornament
The dehumanised mass perspective created by the CCTV cameras
The Optical Unconscious: Faceless:
Another element of the film is the attention to an existing superhuman construction of time
and space
Faceless expresses an artistic resistance to surveillance by making the optical unconscious
visible
104

Benjamin's notion of optical unconscious - a need for a photogrpahic analysis of the modern
urban world
 The optical unconscious of photography is about setting a place free from the massified
perception
 The concept is maked by the industrial reproduction of sameness
 Benjamin argues that photography can change the way of seeing the city through its optics
 Kraucauer's mass ornament describes the social dimensions of the society - Benjanmin's
optical unconsciousness demonstrates how it influences the way os seeing objects and urban
environments
 These concepts can be exploited as control or spectacular enchantment, though it can
also lead to critical appreciation
 "Faceless" shows how urban space has become monitored and captured in databases
p. 105
 The movie also highlights that the total panoptic view does not exist
 The movie shows the story of invisibility, the all-seeing eye, and the phenomena that
become invisible between images and perspectives
 A dehumanised perspective of surveillance keeps a society coherent
 Surveillane is integrated into the development of society as an urban metainterface culture
 Surveillance and the urban metainterfaces as new stages for performance - new elements of
urban language
 Examining the visual dimension of the urban metainterface
 The Opening of the Urban Script:
 How cities are used as an interfaces is scripted - the camera and screen have central roles in
this scripting
 How the city is perceived - spectacular, panoramic, panoptic
 Urban cameras can be used differently in the reconfiguration of the urban experience
 Make the city writerly - open it up for the signification of places
 Openness is constructed visually, but the construction points to an optical unconscious of the
new urban masses
 The scripcting of space does not only work visually
p. 106
 The urban space as a societal practice
 A city has an ideological organising principle that defines the space
 Situtionist practices - disolving the boundaries of urban zones
 There have been attempts to deconstruct urban space and spatial practices through urban
interfaces
 Serendipitor, smartphone app from 2010
 Creates a journey planner for pedestrians by reading their location
 The app draws on a history of mapping developed by the Situationists
 These strategies open up the city by guding their way of seeing, opening them up to what is
usually hidden
p. 107
 Situationism lends itself to the instrumentalisation in an app interface
 Opening up the city as an interface and experience an alternative scripting of space
 Urbanisation is both a seductive and alienating process

The use of cultural logics developed by network cultures can open up the city in new
ways
p. 108
 The interface as made up by different connections and compounds
 Opening up the configuration of a city relies on what appears apsent and unconscious
 The Computational Unconscious: London.pl
 There is not just an optical unconscious, but also a data unconscious - numbers and data that
speak to the machine and not the human perception
 London.pl: another way of seeing London
 The unconscious of computation and data
 A Perl poem
 Reference to Lonon by William Blake - demonstrates class opression as logical and
aesthetical
 The perception of sounds play a central role in the city and urban life
p. 109
 The Perl poem is an intertextual rewriting of Blake's poem which adds a more cynical
perspective to the poem's view on the city
 The Algorithmic Gaze: London.pl:
 The level of perception of the city is what distinguishes Hardwoods from Blake's version of
London
 The perceptual gaze is replaced with a computational algorithmic gaze
p. 110
 The term Algorithmic Gaze is not just visuals, but also points to an antisubjective endeavor of
computing to gaze
 Information aesthetics: an objectified method of evaluating aesthetic objects
 London.pl replaces the sensual and aesthetic perception with aesthetic measure
 For example, it transforms the cries of the children in Blake's poem into something
executable by the code
 The poem as conceptual and repeatable at all times
p. 111
 London.pl makes the operations of algorithms and databases sensible as well as objects of
thought
 Datafication will in general lead to a loss of context to be executable and generate results
 Is the datafication and calculation is an instrument of oppression
 For example, statistic made it possible to manage cities as complex organisms
 The urban metainterface is a form of spatial control - since the culture industry is based on
the control and capitalisation of language as a database
 The urban setting becoming objects of datafication, calculus, and production
p. 112
 …
p. 113
 The Open and Free
 The urban metainterface operates in several writerly ways - since the city can be perceived
as a text
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It addresses the optical dimension that is parallel to a calculative and computational
dimension
Screens and cameras can be used to open up the city and affect how it is perceived
 There is also a writerly dimension - of the interface
The interface holds within itself a certain optical and algorithmic gaze
 Opening up this gaze is different from the open processes of signification
The open process of signification is driven by an interest in freedom
The ideals of openness seem different than the ideals of reedom
The open and free indicate two approaches to the urban metainterface
114
The ideal of opening up the city can be seen in the light of the success of open software
development
 Openness is positive, therefore usually free from criticism
The conceptual shortcomings of openness
The perception of openness within software culture - free software development
115
The open source initiative as opposed to the free software movement
 Alings more with the neoliberal openness
Openness as market-oriented and neoliberal, free as socially aware and less focused on
capital gain
Apps like TripAdvisor and Aibnb correspond well with neoliberal thinking - thrive on open
access to the city and its resources + on the city's hidden layers of data and combining the
data to generate new uses of the city
The Metainterface is a means to access the city + distributes meaning in certain ways, can be
reflected as tendency
Designing Open Urban Metainterfaces:
The strategies of opennes often aim to provide sustainable urban innovation
116
The Hackable City - to describe a city where the use of technologies are brought about by
the cultural logic of openness and acess to data
The cultural logic of net culture is more flexible than the lab prophets that aim to educate
people
Metainterfaces in the city rely on open access to data - the free right to combine data of
users to generate services
 A partnership between entrepreneurship and open data
Apps for building new urban communities
Open design are interfaces that reconfigure the use of urban space + contain their own inner
tendencies
117
Designing Free and Critical Urban Metainterfaces:
Free software creates a public where people care about the systems
 It includes a critical public as part of the design
Design with real and political consequences need a critical public
 Free software contributes to this as the design process is not hidden
118
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The public of free software can be useful for urban interface design
Neoliberal thinking is often applied by the metainterface industry with political aims, not just
"smart" solutions
 There is a great difference between open source and open data
 According to Jane Jacobs, an open city includes diverse use of public space and ad hoc
adaptions
p. 119
 Sennett favors structures that are open to internal revision based on social moral - in terms
of open urban design
 Openness should be seen as a passage territory
 A passage territory of an urban metainterface basically replaces the open with the free
 Free to change variation - expressive rather than indicative