iPhone city

Architectural Design

Volumn 79, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 90-97

  Bratton, Benjamin H ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 68349113610     PISSN: 00038504     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1002/ad.923     Document Type: Review

References (17)

1. Interview with Joan Didion in Shotgun Freeway: Drives Through Lost LA, documentary film by Morgan Neville and Harry Pallenberg, 1995.
2. The Transformers. Michael Bay. 143 min. USA release date 2 July 2007.
3. 2 ou 3 Choses que Je Sais d'Elle( Two or Three Things I Know About Her). Jean-Luc Godard. 85 min. France release date 17 March 1967.
4. Sanford Kwinter, 'Digital Pleistocene', Seminar description, SCI-Arc, Los Angeles, summer 2008. An excerpt: 'The contemporary "mediascape" has given such primacy of place to communication that it has transformed it into substance itself, the very material of which we, and our world, are made. Yet all biological substance is founded on signaling, from the first single-cell organisms nearly 3 billion years ago to the most sophisticated forms of human social life (MySpace?) today. There is no family of animal that is not defined by its capacities for signaling and no ecological niche that is not defined by the infrastructure that supports this signaling. When the human line broke off from its ape ancestors it was a result of a new capacity for communication (a new hand-eye-brain-mouth machine) and the rise of a new signaling niche in the environment to be filled (the long distance savannah).'
5. Throughout this essay, the US 'program' is used to indicate both architectural 'programme' (English spelling) as well as computational 'program'. It is precisely the promiscuous ambiguity between one and the other that the author wishes to convey. After the appearance of the computer but before the mobile phone, Reyner Banham called for a revolution in the technologisation of the environment, a complete folding of architectural and cybernetic programs/programmes. Reyner Banham, 'Architecture After 1960', Architectural Review127, No 755, April 1960, pp 253-260
6. See also Anthony Vidler, 'Toward a Theory of Architectural Program', October 106, Fall 2003, pp 59-74.
7. See Brian Massumi, 'Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible', in AD Hypersurface Architecture, August 1998, pp 16-25.
8. Peter Sloterdijk, Sphären Bde.1-3: Eine Trilogie: 3 Bände, Suhrkamp (Frankfurt), 11 November 2008.
9. See http://www.pratt.duke.edu/news/?id=753. Accessed 15 November 2008.
10. By comparison, One Laptop Per Child (Nicholas Negroponte's attempt to distribute inexpensive, highly functional laptops designed for the needs of children in the developing world) cannot possibly keep pace with the exponential multiplication of increasingly sophisticated handsets. Compare it with the reach of Nokia, the world's largest handset manufacturer and mobile software provider, selling 1.34 million devices per day. Nokia generally develops its own software for its own phones, but has a strong interest in the reality of pervasive computing as a global social platform. The work done by its researchers, such as Jan Chipchase, Younghee Jung, Adam Greenfield, Julian Bleecker and Rebecca Allen, attests to this investment. See http://research. nokia.com/research.
11. See Benjamin H Bratton and Natalie Jeremijenko, Suspicious Images, Latent Interfaces, Architectural League of New York, September 2008. This pamphlet also deals with information visualisation and ecological monitoring through these problematics. See http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/?q=node/88.
12. Perhaps a better name for the more general condition of urban cultures reconfigured around pervasive computing would draw on the figure of that great computational ontologist, Alan Turing.
13. A program of illumination can come from a window (architecture) or a lamp (furniture), sitting from a chair or a fold in the wall, cooling from a walk-in freezer or a refrigerator, and so on. The designation of which programs are fixed and which are unfixed, architecture or furniture, is always very open even if not normally appreciated as such.
14. Otto E Rossler and Peter Weibel, 'Endophysics of Our Rainbow World' in Karl Gerbel and Peter Weibel (eds), The World from Within - ENDO & NANO, Veritas-Verlag (Linz), 1992, pp 13-21.
15. Also republished in Peter Weibel (ed), Olafur Eliasson: Surroundings Surrounded - Essays on Space and Science, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 2001, p 504.
16. The Mumbai terror attacks of November 2008 occurred four days after completion of the first draft of this essay, and the writing of these horrifically verified concluding remarks. In the days just following, we learned about the array of powerful but off-the-shelf navigation and communications software and hardware used by the attackers to coordinate their movements throughout multiple locations at once: satellite phones, handheld GPS, anonymised email, Google Earth, voice-to-text software, and so on. On 16 October 2008 the US army published a report considering scenarios in which terrorists would coordinate urban mobilisation using Twitter. See http://www.fas.org/irp/ eprint/mobile.pdf.
17. In Mumbai, Twitter was used by hostages and others to report and share information on the events in real time. The #Mumbai hash tag generated hundreds of pages of texts. See http://twitter.com/Mumbai.