Automatic sensation: environmental sensors in the digital city

This paper discusses the use of environmental sensors, wireless networks and mobile media as technologies of sensation in the city. While these devices enable a “digital city,” in many respects they appear to be immaterial, operating beyond sense. Further, drawing on two case studies presented by the Digital Cities project in Montreal, the paper considers how applications of environmental sensors and mobile media give rise to new conditions and questions for how we configure sense in the “digital city.” The paper ultimately finds that sensors direct us toward new sites, assemblages and practices of sensation within the urban sensorium. (Abstract)

Atmospheres of communication

Communications have often been understood as bound up with media devices. Wireless communication, however, presents distinct ways of understanding media as it exceeds the devices, interfaces, and wires through which we typically conceive of the medium of communication. Working initially with Marconi’s transmission of wireless signals between Cornwall, England, and Newfoundland, Canada, this chapter charts how that first wireless exchange, ‘dot … dot … dot’, relocates wireless media from the 19th Century ocean to the contemporary city, and multiplies towards a concentration of wireless exchanges that give rise to expanded ecologies of transmission. This chapter explores how an atmospheric mode of communication –like the ether, resonant and electric – delineates urban spaces that are characterised by emanation, presence, and surround. Originally presented in 2005 as part of the ‘Mobile Digital Commons Network’ symposium (http://www.mobilelab.ca/mdcn/index.html), this chapter develops an investigation into wireless cities through reconsidering urban communication and exchange through atmospheric topologies

Media in the dump

'Media in the Dump' examines the phenomenon of electronic waste through five locations, from sites of manufacture (Silicon Valley) to disposal (China). This essay is original in its interdisciplinary approach to the topic of electronic waste. It synthesises fieldwork and scholarship from technology to design and cultural studies. The structure for this essay is original in its surveying of five 'waste ecologies' that traverse the globe

Telepathically urban

Proposals for ubiquitous computing have taken a variety of forms, from “utility fogs” to “pervasive networks.” This chapter considers smart dust as a hypothetical and actual proposal made for pervasive computing in an urban context. Proposals for smart dust have been developed in the form of tiny wireless sensors that could be released en masse, so that countless machines are in constant relay, coordinating information about an environment. Wireless sensors, distributed and embedded in environments, move the “information city” from a zone where digital media is produced and circulated by media workers, to a space where the city itself is a site of information generation – an urban information ecology. This sensor technology is less concerned with increasing computing power and more attentive to reducing the size of hardware, a technological shift that would allow millions of tiny machines to be deployed in drifts of simultaneous communication. In order to examine further the modalities of machine-to-machine communication, this chapter engages with the notion of telepathy, or literally, “remote sensation,” which could be seen to be invisible and instant communication beyond the channels of human sense. This is a process of displaced sensation, of sensing in an extraordinary capacity, or of communicating impressions beyond the reach of usual communicative practices. Wireless sensors – particularly in the more hypothetical form of smart dust – perform this removal and rerouting of sensation. Urban ecologies are monitored, programmed, and made into transmittable information, but this sensory information transpires through relatively opaque machinic spaces – and the messages circulated may be decoded as much through conjecture as clear communication. Originally developed through the Culture of Cities project in 2004, this chapter considers urban environments as spaces of informational correspondence, and discusses early notions around the Internet migrating to environmental operations

Sensing a Planet in Crisis

Wildfires in California contributed to some of the worst air quality in the world during late 2018. The fires were considered to be among the most extreme in California's history and were attributed in part to changes in climate and land use. In the process of burning hundreds of thousands of acres of land, the fires created pollution that led to an air quality emergency. At one point, during mid-November 2018, the media widely reported that cities including San Francisco, Sacramento, and Stockton had higher levels of pollution than Delhi or Beijing (Azad 2018). While varying data sources were referenced to support these claims, the most common source reported was from the PurpleAir sensor map and platform, which produced an animation to demonstrate the elevated levels of particulate matter in California (figure 1) (Jeung 2018). With a worldwide network of around two thousand sensors and growing, PurpleAir provides air quality measurements in locations that might be remote or lacking in air quality infrastructure. What is notable about this network is that it is not the product of governmental intervention but rather is driven by individuals and community groups seeking to monitor environmental pollution

From Citizen Sensing to Collective Monitoring: Working through the Perceptive and Affective Problematics of Environmental Pollution

Citizen sensing, or the practice of monitoring environments through low-cost and do-it-yourself (DIY) digital technologies, is often structured as an individual pursuit. The very term citizen within citizen sensing suggests that the practice of sensing is the terrain of one political subject using a digital device to monitor her or his environment to take individual action. Yet in some circumstances, citizen sensing practices are reworking the sites and distributions of environmental monitoring toward other configurations that are more multiple and collective. What are the qualities and capacities of these collective modes of sensing, and how might they shift the assumed parameters—and effectiveness—of citizen sensing? We engage with Simondon’s writing to consider how a “perceptive problematic” generates collectives for feeling and responding to events (or an “affective problematic”), here through the ongoing event of air pollution. Further drawing on writing from Stengers, we discuss how the “work” of citizen sensing involves much more than developing new technologies, and instead points to the ways in which new practices, subjects, milieus, evidence, and politics are worked through as perceptive and affective commitments to making sense of and addressing the problem of pollution.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007–2013)/ERC Grant Agreement No. 313347

Air Walk: Monitoring Pollution and Experimenting with Speculative Forms of Participation

The rise of low-cost environmental monitoring technologies has shifted the subjects, sites and practices involved in detecting and experiencing air pollution. How might these new arrangements and detections of air pollution be further developed through practice-based research? This chapter discusses an ‘Air Walk’ held in the South London neighborhoods of New Cross Gate and Deptford in July 2013. The walk was a pilot event held as part of the Citizen Sense research project, which focuses on different citizen-based practices and technologies of environmental monitoring. The walk experiments with forms of participation, as an entry point for developing distinct approaches to working with monitoring technologies. In this way, the walk set out to investigate the various ways in which air pollution might be monitored, assessed and experienced, whether through digital, bodily or institutional means. Moving from descriptive approaches of participation to generative experiments with participation, the walk is a process for asking and testing how it might be possible to experiment with the experiences of air and air pollution by setting in motion the sites, participant encounters, monitoring kit, infrastructures, urban situations, and speculative practices as they come together in this context

Re-Thingifying the Internet of Things

Through the use of sensors, networks and data collection, the Internet of Things is meant to make everyday practices and infrastructures more efficient and “sustainable.” Yet these digital technologies also generate new material and environmental effects, particularly through increasing amounts of electronic waste. After first addressing emerging developments within the Internet of Things, this chapter proposes the adoption of a strategy for “re-thingifying” the Internet of Things. Re-thingification would account for the distributed material and environmental effects and relations of the Internet of Things, while attending to the possibilities of things to incite new forms of media theory and practice