ABSTRACT
Our piece starts from the key premise embraced by this book: namely, that the recently posited and widely proclaimed culture of ubiquitous computing needs to be subjected to an “unconditional critique.” However, our aim here is to do more than that: rather than just mount a challenge to the notion of ubiquity with regard to computing and so-called ambient intelligence, we also want to raise questions for the promotion of the computational paradigm as supposedly the defining aspect of our lives in the early twenty-first century. Our reasons for this approach spring from the cognitive-affective doubt we share as to whether computation is truly the best framework for understanding the structuration of the global modern world and our wayfaring through it. Indeed, is computation the most ubiquitous thing there is? Isn’t such a selection of an analytical pivot point just a retrograde reaction to the military-technocapitalist nexus, which has already decided the terms of the game and which then makes scholars and artists respond to it? Is such a choice of analytical optics not in danger of producing principally paranoid scholarship and paranoid art (even if we do know for sure now, courtesy of WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden, that they really are watching us)? If ubiquity is what is at stake here, why not focus on something truly pervasive and ubiquitous—such as, say, air? There are good reasons why we might want to shift from the metaphorical “atmosphere” or “ambience” of computational discourses to the messy complexity of actual air. To cite Polish philosopher, Monika Bakke, air is not only full of life but also,
apart from being a means of transport and communication . . . is a habitat in its own right. The zoe of air comes in abundance and we—breathing organisms—are all in this together for better and for worse, dead or alive. We have finally come to realize that air is messy, being neither an empty space nor a void, but a space where species meet. And like any other life form, as Donna Haraway emphasizes, we find ourselves “in a knot of species coshaping one another in layers of reciprocating complexity all the way down.”
(2008, 42)