The Spychip Under Your Skin (was: Re: [iDC] Toward a
Post-Post-Critical Future
Armin Medosch
armin at easynet.co.uk
Thu Sep 28 02:58:18 EDT 2006
Hi Trebor,
you start to sound increasingly like me;-) No, seriously, some opf
those issues, specifically participation in shaping the direction of the
technoscientific inquiry, I have also tried to address in an
unpublished 2004 pamphlet The Gale Force Wind of Change. More
recently I have written something about RFID, which is a
commissioned text for an arts organisation. I always feel bad about
posting a sort fo finished text on a discussion text but I think it fits to
the topics discussed here so I post it nevertheless. I would also like
to point out that I am unhappy with one or the other paragraph where
I could be misunderstood to be endorsing Bruce Sterling's position in
Shaping Things. The most important critique is not in the main text
but hidden in a footnote. Such things happen when one acts as hired
contract writer, with deadlines set externally and critical facilities
partially numbed by the expectati0on of the paycheque.
regards
Armin
[Commissioned by Space Media Arts for the TAGGED
exhibition, http://www.spacemedia.org.uk/writing]
The Spychip Under Your Skin
RFID and the Tagged exhibition by Space Media
Arts.
Introduction
What Is RFID? Depending on whom you speak to, it
can be a rather mundane thing. RFID tags are
used in warehouse logistics management, where
they are integral to a new system for identifying
objects and replace the scannable bar code which
has performed this task for the past several
decades. RFID is also the key technology which
enables an 'internet of things' within a
framework of 'ubiquitous computing' (Ubicomp).
Minimally, RFID tags link the physical world with
the informational world. The process consists of
attaching machine-readable information to
objects. Maximally, this, some would say, is a
new step in the co-evolution of the technological
with the social. Its implications seem to mandate
a serious engagement with the motives behind
these latest developments.
The potential of this move to a next layer of the
informationalisation of the world does raise
concerns about privacy or the notion of an all-
encompassing society of control. Concomitantly,
it facilitates new paths of exploration for
artists in a range of areas, from commercial
interactive product design to art movements such
as locative media and new types of performative
and interactive-narrative work. According to
science-fiction writer and media theorist Bruce
Sterling, the spread of RFID technology gives
rise to a new type of object, the SPIME. The word
is a neologism invented by Bruce Sterling,
describing objects which can be tracked in SPACE
and TIME. Sterling predicts that a society
relying on an infrastructure of SPIMES would have
achieved a fundamental change in the relationship
of the forces of production. I will expand on
this subject later, but only so much here:
additional awareness about an object's full life-
cycle prompted by use of RFIDs would enable
environmental and sustainability considerations
to play a greater part in the resource allocation
decisions of societies.
Space Media Arts have decided to devote their
Tagged series of events to the complex of issues
surrounding RFID. Following an open call and a
jury-led selection process, Space Media Arts have
selected four artists/projects and one sound
performance to be presented at the Triangle
exhibition space and in public spaces in the
locality. In this text I will first introduce the
technology and its context. I will also briefly
introduce Bruce Sterling's ideas about 'shaping
things'1 and add to this some of my own
reflections about the contentious notion of
techno-social 'progress'. Based on this
contextual analysis I will formulate some of the
challenges and possibilities for artists who work
with technology in general and the routes chosen
by the selected artists.
Gloves, Dr.Watson
Radio Frequency IDentification, RFID for short,
relies on RFID tags to identify objects digitally
and a support infrastructure necessary to read
and process the information. An RFID tag consists
of an antenna and a chip. Passive tags are made
of a small coil and an even tinier chip both
wrapped by some adhesive material like paper or
film which gets attached to cartons or pallets.
When a reader device is in close proximity2, the
antenna is activated by the frequency it
transmits and the chip sends a message. Usually
this message would consist of the Electronic
Product Code (EPC), "a unique numbering scheme
for every object in the world".3 RFID tags of
this type have been falling in prices and are
said to now cost as little as 3 pence a piece
when ordered in large volumes. More complex RFID
tags are capable of storing more information and
some have their own power supplies. Those semi-
active and active RFID tags are used for access
control schemes and car keys, but also the
tagging of animals, machines and humans.4
Some histories of RFID technology trace it back
to the invention of radar. 'Real' RFID, in the
way we know it now, however, was first introduced
on a relatively narrow scale with the tagging of
cattle in the 1980s. It was only considered for
more widespread use in the 1990s and its roll-out
has begun in the last few years. As with most
available technologies, the development of RFID
is fuelled by both military and commercial
interest in its applications. Despite the
centrality of the United States Department of
Defence (USDoD) to RFID R&D, the growth potential
for commercial supply chain management may in the
long term be more influential in global
infrastructural change.
The main beneficiaries of RFID are going to be
very big organisations which orchestrate the
production and consumption of large quantities of
goods, such as supermarkets - Wal-Mart has been
another driving force behind the introduction of
RFID besides the US Department of Defence. For
the customer, the benefits are said to arrive in
the form of the reduction of already cheap prices
because the whole process can be managed more
efficiently. This emphasis on economic expediency
cloaks less publicity-friendly consequences for
both labour and consumers, a traditional ruse of
big corporations and governments seeking to evade
the social cost of restructuring or the
introduction of new technology. When people are
in a generally disempowered state, they have no
choice but to vote with their wallet. However,
such 'trickle-down effects'5 have more often than
not favoured the corporation at the expense of
the worker and consumer.
Open Doors And Open Wallets With RFID
RFID has raised concerns about the protection of
privacy from the very beginning. However, many of
the discussions around privacy foreground a
limited notion of the protection of privacy of
individuals and tend to ignore the larger
political economy within which it is embedded. In
internet forums about RFID and privacy you can
encounter stories such as the one that Wal-Mart
might spy on you once you have accidentally
swallowed the RFID on your breakfast cereal
packaging. This type of criticism is just too
easily dismissed. Wal-Mart have no intrinsic
interest in their customers. Indeed, even CEOs of
RFID supplier companies can shrug off similar
suggestions with a laugh.6
If we proceed on the premise that sooner or later
everything that exists will have a virtual badge
attached to itself with information that can be
machine-read, this raises much larger questions
than the fear of private individuals being spied
upon. It could be noted in passing that
increasing automated information storage and
retrieval can lead to increasing centralization
of power, money and control in the hands of very
few with an interest in upholding the political
status quo - more on this below. Despite those
larger issues, let's have a look at RFID's
implications for personal information security.
Many RFID schemes have very leaky security. They
transmit information unencrypted via radio
frequencies.7 The information can not only be
received by those devices which are meant to read
them but also by 'rogue readers' operated by
organised criminals or spooks. Public discussion
about RFID mainly focuses on supply chain
management. However, at the time of writing, the
use of RFID is more common in keys, ID-cards and
schemes such as the Oyster Card, where London
commuters receive a smart card with RFID which
gives them access to cheaper fares. Most Oyster
Cards are registered with a central database run
by Transport for London (TfL). This means that
TfL has a record of journeys by individuals. On
top of that the smart card chip inside the Oyster
Card also records journeys. The cards themselves
as well as the database infrastructure are
potential points of abuse.
Privacy geeks are already putting aluminium foil
around their London Oyster Card.8 A similar
scheme, the Octopus Card, introduced in Hong Kong
10 years earlier has been extended towards a
digital purse which could be used in grocery
stores. It is no accident that such a scheme
could be tested first in an 'efficient regime' as
the whole world intends to become one.9 If
newspaper reports are to be believed, the
information trail left by Oyster Cards is already
playing a role in divorce cases. Police are
increasingly asking for Oyster Card records from
TfL in criminal inquiries.10 In the UK, it seems,
there is widespread agreement that the dangers of
introducing a surveillance infrastructure such as
CCTV are outweighed by the benefits of those
systems.
The problem with relying on those systems is that
they give a false sense of security. The number
of web-pages about RFID hacks is myriad. There
are open source tools working with conventional
reader hardware such as RF Dump (http://www.rf-
dump.org/) and RFIDIOt (http://rfidiot.org/).
There are manuals about how to turn your mobile
phone into a 'skimmer', a device to read magnetic
stripe cards.11 There are academic papers about
how to break very widely used RFID schemes
(http://www.rfidanalysis.org/). The only reason
why we don't hear more about RFID crime is that
for criminals there is still much fertile ground
in the exploitation of older and still more
widespread technologies such as cheque accounts
and credit cards.
Identity theft has already been described as the
crime with the biggest growth potential.
Supposedly 'secure' concepts for passports and ID
cards include RFID capability which exposes
unencrypted data contained on your passport or ID
card, making these forms of identification
readable from a distance. The new British
biometric passport has already been hacked.12 The
white hat hacker13 who exposed the flaw claims to
have used equipment which cost no more than 200
dollars. A bit of Do-It-Yourself and you can copy
the content of an Oyster Card or the biometric
information on a new passport. While the
authorities are busy telling us that these
biometric technologies promote our safety, all
the evidence is that it is the committed
fraudster or terrorist who will travel with
greater safety - while millions of ordinary
people will be in line for more harassment,
inconvenience and identity fraud.
Electronic Borders
Some people can enjoy their alienation more than
others: there is a website for RFID freaks who
get their tags implanted.14 Prof Kevin Warwick at
Reading University had got his subliminal RFID
tag already in 1998, an amazing scientific stunt
I had the mixed pleasure of personally attending
along with many other dumbstruck representatives
of world media. It demonstrated the benefits of
being greeted with 'good morning Prof Warwick' by
a computer-generated voice on entering the
building. This was not only another proof of the
overheated attention economy in science but
demonstrated the slim appeal of most Ubicomp
propositions. I mean, who would really want to
live in Mr. Gates' house? And of course there are
other issues with RFID implants, besides their
propensity to wander around under your skin. The
infamous Mafia fraud attack15 on biometric
identification implies the use of dismembered
limbs and organs to hack secure systems,
completely changing the meaning of the term
'brute force attack'16 in debates about security.
However, the real danger is the two-faced nature
of the technology. RFID gives the holder of a key
access to an area, but it also makes the presence
of a person in that restricted area subject to
monitoring. Thus, RFID can be used to control
bodies in space. Companies and public
institutions do it by issuing RFID keys. The
technology is being applied already in prisoner
probation schemes with a view to extending RFID
tagging to asylum seekers. Whereas those RFID
schemes are mandatory for the 'user', other
schemes introduce the very same technologies with
a promise of more convenience.17 As internet
users know only too well, password management
increasingly becomes a burden. Add to this bank
cards, an NHS card, PIN numbers, etc., and the
authentication quagmire expands. Now, the IT
industry is about to gift us with a new product,
called 'identity services'. For large
corporations authentication and authorisation
concerns increase exponentially regarding
security issues both in real space (access to
buildings) and computer systems. It becomes
praxis to outsource the management of identity
and access codes within their institution to a
security IT company.
For privileged individuals this means getting
through the security gates of airports more
quickly and moving through a 'seamless'
environment of managed 'secure' identity. The
same technology could also be used to monitor
people who are lined up for deportation.
Ironically, the frequent business flyer and the
would-be 'immigrant' are both part of the 'avant-
garde' of RFID deployment. Willingly or not, they
are subjected to a new regime where the
electronic world holds significant sway over the
real world. As spaces are structured by
informational layers, access codes increasingly
regulate our ability to move or to obtain goods
and services. The ordinary individual has a
weakening position in this technological armament
race. Those who feel this most strongly are
immigrants or generally people 'sans papiers',
whose mobility and security is suspended by lack
of official documentation. In other words,
without some plastic with biometric information
stored and checked via RFID, a person soon will
not really exist. Rather than only being an
encroachment on one's privacy, RFID can become an
issue of simple biopolitics - meaning survival.
Avoiding Totalizing Vision18
However, when it comes to topics such as
surveillance regimes a writer's imagination is
often inclined to jump ahead of developments on
the ground. Interestingly, proponents and
opponents of this or that new technology will
often make the same mistake of buying too much
into the propaganda about the technology. How
many times have we heard praises of the benefits
inherent to a technology which is in fact still
very experimental? Some of the scenarios to sell
new technologies to the public are so overused
that they expose themselves as past futures.19 In
a similar way, the critique of the control
society is based on assumptions about
totalitarian tendencies immanent to a technology
leaping far ahead of the actual state of
deployment.20 In fact, those things rarely ever
work as well as advertised.21 If the vision is
too totalizing, critique fails to hit the spot
where it could actually have any impact.
In order to prevent this type of shadow boxing I
would like to expand the scope of this article.
Let's briefly look at the history of technology
and its social critique. How and why do new
technologies come into existence? What are the
reasons for their being and what are the
unintended consequences? Can we find certain
structures in the relationship between society
and technology? When it comes to those
'structures', language is a minefield22 that
needs clearing. But the best effort of
purification will run into recursive loops.
Therefore my methodological-ideological
disclaimer: there is no objectivity, we always
need to consider the multiplied contingencies of
the subject of inquiry and of ourselves as
people, as subjects of history. This radical
relativity is not to be mixed up with dis-engaged
Relativism. The forces that shape the evolution
of society and technology are observable and
concrete.
Technology and Social Relationships
Since Marx we know that new technologies are not
neutral but expressions of social relationships.
The factory owner leverages new machinery against
the human workforce. Scientific management and
Fordism have brought this to perfection, shaping
a society which consists of workers, who perform
very simple repetitive tasks dictated by a
machine, the capitalist owner class and a new
intermediate class of scientists, engineers and
other types of specialist labour necessary to
invent, implement and maintain the new systems of
production. Fordism was and still is the leading
industrial paradigm. Technology embodies social
relationships. The particular types of technology
we have are the legacy of 250 years of capitalism
and industrialism. A key aspect of this
development of technology is a quantitative one:
it is driven by an insatiable hunger for numbers.
As price dictates measure, the 'need' for
quantification is always growing and we have
become very efficient in making things more
measurable.
This obsession with numbers made the invention of
the computer almost a necessity. WWII-era
increases in funding for scientific, military and
industrial purposes accelerated the process of
computational development, driven by the need for
automated information key to all these areas.
Managing large top-down bureaucratic
organisations through central IT infrastructures
such as data bases - the principles of Fordism
transferred into a machine - is a legacy still
at work today, for example in systems such as MS
Office. The second world war created a climate
that 'inspired' the rapid prototyping of new
technologies. A 'science' probably most
influential in this regard is operational
analysis: statistical methods of evaluating the
effect of bombing campaigns or artillery
barrages. Operational analysis became an
important part of management theory after the
war. Such organisational technologies gave an
operational and material boost to digital
rationalisation.
The second world war engaged a quantitatively
more intense movement of people, goods and
weapons than ever previously in the industrial
era. There were lessons to be learned from this
by the inter-disciplinary teams of scientists,
engineers, military planners and commanders in
the United States, the most advanced industrial
society of the time. The links between people and
equipment tied together through an electronic
communication infrastructure inspired cybernetic
theory which imagined society as systems of
command and control. It was recognized that the
rapid progress in many scientific areas during
the war was achieved as a result of research
spend and restructuring in techno-scientific
workplaces. With the Cold War as a pretext,
government funded research budgets remained high.
Techno-scientific invention became organised as a
methodically structured venture funded by the
state and carried out in sometimes private
research labs, sometimes public universities - a
system which by the 1950s led to the critique of
the military-industrial complex with its secrecy
and institutional paranoia. Key elements of
today's ICT infrastructure were invented or
initiated in the period of the early to late
1960s, from the operating system Unix to the
internet. The system of co-ordinated research
involving government and big business was copied
by many countries and led to the emergence of Big
Science or technoscience.
Augmented Reality or Embodied Virtuality
Practically from the start the computer acquired
an imaginary symbolic significance that owed
little to the actual status of the technology.
Alan Turing thought that computers could
successfully pass an intelligent test which
relied on the successful simulation of a human
being in written communication. Von Neumann
thought about self-replicating machines which, at
long last, would produce a connectionist
understanding of the brain and evolve new
disciplines such as Artificial Life. Vannevar
Bush and J.C.R. Licklider saw possibilities of
using computers as universal libraries.23 The
models of information and cybernetic theory
enabled information to be conceived as a context-
free entity existing independently of its
material carrier. In the long run, this led to a
technoscientific re-evaluation of what it means
to be human, what it means to be alive. The
computer was fetishised as an artificial
intelligence, a vision soon to be ridiculed but
nevertheless supported with billions of research
dollars over decades. During the 1980s, Reagan's
Star Wars project prompted another technology
boost, while 'personal computing' started to
happen. Now things which had existed on paper
only, such as neural networks, could be simulated
on home PCs. All those developments together led
to a confusion or mixing up of image and reality.
Sherry Turkle speaks of a 'walk through the
looking glass'. Technoscience did no longer
create 'models' or 'images' of reality but took
its models as reality or life itself. For
technoscience, life is essentially information
replicating itself, consciousness a distributed
computer system and the universe an immensely
complex parallel computer. This is not the stuff
of science fiction but the working assumption for
research centres such as MIT's centre for bits
and atoms (http://cba.mit.edu/) where Ubicomp and
RFID are being pushed forward.
The new paradigm of 'bottom-up' thinking in a
networked world began to raise its many heads in
the 1980s. In this era the concept of 'ubiquitous
computing', Ubicomp for short, was proposed by
Mark Weiser at Xerox Parc. His idea is a sort of
reversed version of immersive virtual reality,
where people can experience a 3D world simulated
by a computer. Instead, computers should become
part of the world, so that reality is 'augmented'
by an informational layer. Computers, rather than
being highly visible 'objects', should become
embedded in the environment, which people would
only consciously use as needed but otherwise
could ignore. There is a certain humanism to
these ideas. Weiser wanted to use those
possibilities to create a 'calm technology' that
worked in the background without dominating our
lives.
Ubicomp has landed
Unfortunately, maybe, we are not getting this
type of Ubicomp. Maybe there was a point in time
when Ubicomp could be imagined as one coherent
technology. However, today we see Ubicomp coming
from all directions and in all shapes. Chips have
already pervaded our life-world in cars, mobiles,
keys and cards. All sorts of objects have already
become virtualized for various reasons. What
saves us from the embrace of the complete
surveillance society is that those systems have
not yet grown together for various reasons, be
they ones of technical implementation or public
concern. The ruling paradigm, however, demands
economic growth at any cost, which makes Ubicomp
feel like an alien invasion pushed down the
consumer's throat by a blue-faced Intel Men. The
main forces behind technological progress remain
steadfastly in place - the military, the needs of
capital for increased efficiency, rationalisation
and quantifiability of everything. This variant
of progress has also generated a huge leap in
'data trash', i.e. the entropy of the
surveillance trail of data kept about everything
and everyone, fed by the 'natural' growth in
surveillance and control techniques.
However, there have also been some substantial
changes made possible through the
individualisation of ownership of the forces of
production and new ways of working
collaboratively and managing 'intellectual
property' in a commons. That means that the
threat of more commodity fetishism and
reification is countered, to some degree, by the
democratisation of access to means of
communication.
Socializing Technologies
As Bruce Sterling proposes in his pamphlet
Shaping Things, such a democratisation of the
shaping of our techno-social future is already
under way. The internet has unleashed the
collective mind power of the multitude. In the
future the whole world might act in ways similar
to communities such as slashdot.org.24 The
character of 'things' or objects would
fundamentally change, Sterling claims, because
rather than leading isolated and separated
existences, things would be linked to the social
world in various ways.
"It's mentally easier to divide humans and
objects than to understand them as a
comprehensive and interdependent system: people
are alive, objects are inert, people can think,
objects just lie there. But this taxonomical
division blinds us to the ways and means by
which objects do, change, and it obscures the
areas of intervention where design can reshape
things. Effective intervention takes place not
in the human, not in the object, but in the realm
of the techno- social". (Sterling 2005, pages 8-
9)
Not completely unlike what Bruno Latour says
about the relationship between humans and non-
humans,25 Sterling is convinced that the
relationship we have with objects defines the
phase of techno-culture we are going through. As
Fordism made products for consumers, we are now
in the era of gizmos owned by end-users, which
prepares us for the next step, the era of SPIMES.
"SPIMES are manufactured objects whose
informational support is so overwhelmingly
extensive and rich that they are regarded as
material instantiations of an immaterial system.
SPIMES begin and end as data. [...] Eminently
data-mineable, SPIMES are the protagonists of a
historical process".26 (Sterling 2005, 11)
According to Sterling the era of SPIMES began
with RFID, in 2004, when the USDoD demanded that
its suppliers use RFID. Only through RFID tags
can objects become represented through the trail
of information and impart better criteria for
certainty to speculation about them. The spread
of SPIMES, in this vision, would eventually save
the world by triggering a new type of production
in a post-Fordist paradigm. By tying together the
virtual and the real aspects of the same objects,
we would have to consider their whole life-span
and interaction with the social on all layers.
This would force us to recognize that the
wasteful regime which we have now cannot
continue. SPIMES, because they are "information
melded with sustainability", are "little
metahistory generators" which continually allow
the world to re-invent itself.
Besides some slippage into too much proselytising
for more efficient use of technology (for
instance when he fantasizes about 3D printers),
Sterling seems to be quite fascinated by the idea
of having an interface for everything. "We need
to invent a general-purpose cultural interface to
time" (p. 42) and "... I need an interface for
capitalism itself" (p. 94), which is, by the way,
the only time Sterling uses the 'dirty c word'.
Maybe as an American, it is difficult for him to
acknowledge that his whole way of thinking is a
modernisation of Marxism without calling it that,
with a bit of McLuhan mixed in. Like Marx,
Sterling thinks that the base and superstructure
are not separated but intricately linked - his
'techno-social' - and that the relationships of
the forces of production (and consumption, we
might add) determine history. This is not a
teleological view , as the eventual outcome
remains open, but in the sense that the dynamics
that characterizes 'progress' (or at least some
type of development, a sequence of events in
time) are over-determined by the forces of
production. His 'sequence', from artefact to
product, to Gizmo, SPIME and eventually biots is
a classically modern model of one era - defined
by its modes of production and consumption, i.e.
political economy - following another, whereby
the old does not go away but is absorbed and kept
within the new paradigm. He even has nice graphs
to make this point.27
The Wranglers
As Sterling rightly recognizes in his crypto-
Marxist theory (and as Marx did before him)28
highly industrialized societies have all produced
their own versions of a type of human being known
as geeks, nerds, anoraks, tinkerers,
experimentalists, hackers . . . and the internet
has opened the floodgates of communication
between them. On the net it is easy to find an
expert or a community of experts on everything.
This 'collective intelligence' has frightened the
platinum out of corporate PR's dentistry.
Consumers or users are analysing products, the
conduct of corporations in the countries where
they produce, the usefulness and reliability of
documentation and just about any aspect of a
'commodity' which used to be under the full
informational control of the manufacturer. As
customers became 'users', instead of complaints
they feed back valuable debugging information to
companies.
Things Wrangled
As crowds of wranglers wrangle informational
control from manufacturers, PR departments and
spin doctors, they eventually do not only exert
their influence in the informational sphere but
also change the shape of things to come. As
communities get involved, getting their hands
dirty with bending the use of manufactured goods
to their needs, the course of technological
development changes too. As 'the street' finds
its own use for things, information technologies
of military origins are turned into socialized,
pacified beings. Computers, the internet,
wireless and mobile technologies eventually all
go down that route, being wrangled away, or
liberated from capitalist control, by FLOSS
developers and WiFi community network
activists.29 Products of the complexity of a jet
engine are now produced by free-wheeling
communities of developers who reinvent the future
in their spare time. What was the exclusive
domain of large industrial conglomerates becomes
opened up to collaborative inquiry with Open
Source. While older layers largely continue as
they did, this happens at least in the
technologically most advanced sectors where a
reconfiguration of the relationship of the forces
of productions is under way. What remains to be
seen is if the principles governing open source
software development can really be successfully
transferred to other areas in society.30
Language is the Glue
An interesting observation, worthy of a short
parenthesis, is the fact that language31 plays
such an important role in the creation of the
internet of things. RFID is based on an open
standard enabling businesses to integrate their
processes.32 For the layers of the physical
object and the information sphere to grow
together, 'language' is needed. Physical Markup
Language (PML) is only one of a range of Markup
Languages aimed at describing the physical world,
products, sensory data
(http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/softw
are.html) or even financial products
(http://www.fpml.org/services/index.html). Based
on the meta-language XML, those semantic web
applications cover 'the real' with webs of
hierarchies, categories and relations. This
'logical layer'33 introduced by the computer
spreads with the help of radio waves from
computer to the world and back. From Product
Markup Language to Transducer Markup Language and
even Human Markup Language34 every thing and
every body is getting tagged.
The XML based Markup schemes make us aware that
RFID is indeed part of a bigger picture. A whole
system needs to be in place to make sense of the
remotely transmitted IDs, from tag production,
via a numbering and naming schemes that
constitute almost another internet in their
complexity, to the physical infrastructure of
readers, network connections, databases and
forklifts. The lifespan of a tag and its
readability decide which further options are open
beyond the point of sale. The object can be
tracked and identified till it ends up on an
electronic scrapheap. On one hand the 'internet
of things' (including living things such as
plants, animals, humans?) has the potential to
concentrate ever more power in the hands of the
ruling classes and technocracies. On the other
hand the history trail which the object leaves on
the worlds' data banks is increasingly opened up
to collective interrogation. For Bruce Sterling,
this is the source of a paradigm shift for a
culture that deals differently with technology.
But it is also the more cautious academics who
are talking about 'shifting socio-technical
arrangements'. 35 Ubicomp and RFID fit perfectly
with the priorities of certain directions in
science studies which base their epistemology on
networks of relations rather than fixed entities
and binary oppositions.36
The Praxis of Art and Technology
For a number of decades now we have seen artists
engaging with technical artefacts and systems.
Artists working in this area have responded to
rationalisation and productivism by providing
visions of utopian freedoms achieved through
using electronic media and networks.37 Other
artists have articulated a critique of the one-
dimensionality of the technocratic society and
have warned about Orwellian sides of the
technology. The encroachment of technology into
every aspect of our lives does not only raise
luddite rage and romanticised resistance to
modernity, but also the inside critique of the
mole: the parasitic and opportunistic
exploitation of holes in the system38 and
resistance in a sort of survivalist DIY spirit.
One of the first theorists of this new type of
art which engaged with 'systems', Jack Burnham,
claimed that artists' role was to make themselves
redundant as artists by intervening into those
decisions which shape our techno-social future.39
The roots of his ideas can be traced back to the
avant-garde of high-modernity and in particular
socialist writers such as Brecht, Benjamin and
later Enzensberger. Not 'everybody is an artist'
but a truly just society can only be one where
everybody potentially can be an artist and where
the people can truly express themselves and the
class structure of elite and 'the masses' is
abolished. Artists who work in this direction
engage with the social relationships embodied in
technology, instead of dealing with aesthetics
and formal innovation only. They make us aware
that things are not merely dead objects, but how
they relate to the social world, and how they
facilitate certain relationships (of dominance,
usually). They are bringing technology out of the
Cold War closet, where it was a matter for
technocrats and engineers only40 and let us have
insights into its suppressed collective
imaginary. The raising of awareness is a first
step towards creating new and more egalitarian
models of social production to be embodied in
current and future technologies.
Current artistic practice with new technologies
also shares an interesting overlap with science
studies and critical theory. As artists engage
with the techno-social, and not simply
technology, the theoretical texts of Marcuse,
Latour, Haraway, Sterling et al, are being
referenced. As I say elsewhere, artists working
with technology do science studies' dirty work.41
Latour, for instance, repeatedly stresses the
links and networks of relationships between
humans and non-humans; artists investigate and
create such links on a practical and concrete
level. Each work can be seen as an experimental
set-up designed to verify particular aspects of
such systemic relationships - perhaps to use
'verify' not in a strictly scientific sense of
experiment and evaluation but at least to
indicate a practical and concrete instantiation
of particular sets of relationships between
humans and objects in space and time. Contrary to
the designers Sterling talks to in his pamphlet,
artists in this process do not need to work
under a productivist or utilitarian agenda, but
can afford to be critical, negative, nihilistic
or ironic. In the following section I will
present some recent approaches in this regard.
The Tagged exhibition
The artists participating in the Tagged
exhibition were sent a small questionnaire which
asked them about their work and their thoughts
about RFID and the development of techno-culture.
One common thread present in their answers is
that their engagement with RFID technology is
critical, whereby only the intensity and the
flavour of the critique varies, from playful and
poetic to outspoken and more aggressively
negative.
iTag by Louis-Philippe Demers and Philippe Jean
is intended to be an "ironic statement about all
kinds of electronic 'pollution'". The project
involves creating a portable device that reads
RFID tags of products in a supermarket and
generates ambient Muzak.42 Louis-Philippe Demers
says he wants to "fight fire with fire". As the
participant in this work walks through a store
with a device reading ID tags, different Muzak
gets played back by the handheld device. The
intention is not to create an aesthetically
uplifting experience but on the contrary, the
artist would happily take into account if people
felt "a certain discomfort from the tags that are
'watching you'".
Louis-Philippe Demers is strongly critical of the
increase in surveillance technologies driven by
"neo-liberalist agendas of better and faster
product delivery". He attacks "myths spread by
security agencies" and "the propaganda of a
better technological world". He hopes to be able
to challenge people's perceptions by making them
aware of the 'electro-smog' surrounding them.
But, as Demers has found out, item level tagging
in retail stores is not (yet) as widespread as
assumed. So, for the nightmarish walk through
the shopping mall to become true, the artists
will probably have to collaborate with a
supermarket.
Origins and Lemons by Mute-Dialogue (Yasser
Rashid and Yara El-Sherbini) also engages with
objects, but with objects from the more informal
economy of markets in London's East End. In the
gallery space they will arrange objects sourced
from markets like a market stall. By passing
objects over the reader, exhibition visitors are
presented an audiovisual narration about the
history and context of the objects. Like the
previous artists, they want to create awareness
about a technology "that is seeping into everyday
life almost unnoticed." By understanding how this
technology is framed in society they hope to
wrangle some new meanings from it.
The artists try to avoid being too placative and
use a more suggestive aesthetic language
exploring "the origin, local and global, of
objects" which they hope to relate to " the
complex issues related to the tracking of
movements and people." It remains to be seen if
Origins and Lemons will be able to let us see
more than just the obvious and will, as the
artists hope, "tap into questions such as how
does the tracking of people deemed as the most
risk to society, such as asylum seekers, effect
our perception of these people."
boredomresearch are presenting a research and
development project, RealSnailMail. The
installation version of the project will be shown
in 2007/08 while at Space Media Arts the results
of the r&d process will be exhibited. (The
material will also be made available here:
http://www.RealSnailMail.net)
The artists, who in their other work engage with
Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life
metaphors and explore 'online ecologies', are
interested in using "RFID tags to superimpose a
narrative onto inanimate objects in a way that
explored our tendency to endow objects with
meaning and sentiment". Their first idea was to
suggest "the possibility of inserting implantable
RFID chips into oysters for them to be turned
into pearls." But they encountered a variety of
problems with this idea and switched to water
snails.
Taking the phrase 'snail mail' - used by Internet
people to describe old fashioned postal services -
literal, real snails are used to transport
messages. Via a 'Real Snail Mail' website users
can write an email which "travels at the speed of
light" to the server where it is entered into a
queue. Using RFID the messages are then
transmitted to snails which inhabit a little
pond. If a snail makes it to the other end of the
pond where a reader is installed it's message
gets picked up and becomes an email message
again, and will eventually be delivered. A high
number of messages can be expected to get lost -
which is called 'packet loss' in internet tech-
language. The artists present a playful critique
of what they claim is our culture's 'obsession
with immediacy'.
"As artists we are more interested in time. We
make things that occupy time, that compute in
time, that change over time. To experience these
things you have to sacrifice time. Time that
could have been spent achieving, pursuing or
succeeding in some other preoccupation."
While most people will be mystified about RFID
technology anyway, boredomresearch use this
element of mystification in such a way that false
but imaginative beliefs are encouraged.
Technology's promise of increased efficiency and
acceleration is turned up-side down with the
RealSnailMail project.
Arphield recordings by Paula Roush
(http://odeo.com/channel/85358/view) is a
reminder that sound art projects have a very
positive track record in often being the first to
realize the suppressed social imaginary of new
technologies. Asking people to come to a certain
tube station at a certain time and scanning their
Oyster cards for 30 seconds each as well as
playing back recorded Oyster card beeps, she aims
at creating an "endless symphony of sound
surveillance and compliance".
Roush refers to the practice of "sousveillance
and a more general understanding of the arphid
surveillance/equiveillance of public space and
transport." To explain what she means by
'sousveillance' she refers to the work of Steve
Mann who has been walking around wearing a live
CCTV camera for years.43 In her opinion "the
emerging field of personal sousveillance - the
capture, processing, storage, retrieval, and
transmission of an activity from the perspective
of a participant in the activity" has been too
strongly focused on the visual. At the Tagged
exhibition she will present arphield sound
recordings and invite people to join her for a
performance at a nearby tube station, probably
Bethnal Green tube.
Having 'performed' the project already a few
times, Roush discovered that "people were already
engaging in impromptu sound performances. My
documentation led me to discern varied patterns
and even participatory scores, with mass arphid
soundscapes punctuated by silences, glitches and
cracks in the system, all warped up in a
circadian rhythm of work-rush hours".
(The project remains open to contributions for
people to download and upload their own 'arphield
recordings' by opening an account at the odeo.com
website.)
The SWAMPOId project by evoLhypergrapHyCx is a
development of the Antisystemic Library, adding
RFID functionality to the Distributed Library
Project (DLP) at a Space Media Arts Gallery node.
Also involved is the University of Openess
Library where the DLP has been developed in
Limehouse. The Distributed Library Project
(http://dlp.theps.net) is based on a website
where people can enter books which they are
willing to lend. They also enter information
about their physical location. Every borrower of
books is potentially a lender too and people can
find out about other people with similar
interests who live in their proximity. In my own
perception, the DLP implementation in the UK was
also influenced by ideas about open and
collaborative mapping and the sharing of
knowledge.44 For the Space exhibition the
Antisystemic Library will experiment with the
usage of RFID tags in their system. Unlike the
other artists, evoLhypergrapHyCx has not answered
the questions in my small questionnaire one by
one, but has written a sharp manifesto about the
Sane White Adult Male Propertied Official
Identity (SWAMPOID):
"'We' are entering a period when human
transactions are being industrialised, even the
industrialisation of identity itself. What
television did for the imagination, RFID can do
for identity." (evoLhypergrapHyCx, 2006.
SWAMPOID. The full manifesto can be found at
http://uo.dczn.net/index.php/SWAMPOID).
It seems that a strong commonality between the
artists is that they see their task in raising
awareness. As society is sleepwalking into
another technological paradigm change artists
hope to raise a discussion by engaging the public
with their RFID artworks. Some of the
participating artists hope that the technology
can also be 'reclaimed' in a certain sense, that
artists can think up uses which were not intended
by the manufacturer and thereby create new
imaginative spaces. Mute-Dialogue for instance
stress that this type of open engagement is
hardly possible in the commercial and creative
industries. According to them artists can "inform
new ways of thinking" about existing technologies
and offer "interactions and experiences that are
unique." Mute-Dialogue think that RFID - rather
than just being utilized for the tracking of
commercial products - could also be thought of
"as social networking tool" or be used for
interactive dance performances. But not all the
artists share this optimism about an 'alternative
use of technology'. Louis-Philippe Demers
challenges the notion that artists somehow
magically bring 'difference', and
evoLhypergrapHyCx openly confronted the
'aestheticisation of politics' as a 'staple of
fascist ideology' in an earlier version of the
SWAMPOID manifesto.
RFID (proposed to be pronounced 'arphid') may be
the technology, but the social practice of
'tagging' and its implications are the real theme
of the exhibition. It needs to be recognized that
there is not one coherent field of media art
today but works and approaches coming from very
different backgrounds, some being informed by
debates about art and science whereas others are
more openly politically motivated. Although the
visual field tends to be very predominant, sound
art has created its own history of engaging with
(anti)social technologies. The fact that
different approaches are brought to the theme is
in itself important and should help to highlight
what contemporary praxis in art and technology
really is about - not the technologies as such
(as ill-informed critiques of those practices
claim) but the various two-way links between the
social and the technological, between things and
humans.
As this text is written weeks before the
exhibition this would appear to impede making any
qualitative statement. Although art utilizing new
technologies often appears to be strongly concept
driven, a good exhibition still works through the
senses and creates unintended consequences in the
mind of the 'reader' of a work. In this spirit I
hope to have given some context to the works
without imposing any preconceived meanings.
Bibliography
Richard Barbrook, 2006. The Class of the New.
London: Mute Print on Demand publication.
Jack Burnham, 2005. "Systems Esthetics". (First
published in Artforum, September 1968) in Open
Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970. Donna De Salvo,
edt. London: Tate Publishing.
Paul N. Edwards, 1996. Closed Worlds, Computers
And The Politics of Discourse in Cold War
America. Boston and London: MIT Press.
Anne Galloway, 2003. Resonances and Everyday
Life: Ubiquitous Computing and the City (draft).
[online]. Available from:
http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org/mobile/cult_studi
es_draft.html, last accessed August 2006.
N. Katherine Hayles, 1999. How we became
posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,
Literature and Informatics. Chicago and London:
The University of Chicago Press.
Bruno Latour, 1999. Pandora's Hope. Essays on the
Reality of Science Studies. Boston and London:
Harvard University Press.
Armin Medosch, 2006a. 'Meshing in the Future -
the Free Configuration of Everybody and
Everything with Hive Networks' in Media Mutandis,
a Node.London Reader. Marina Vishmidt, edt..
London: Node.London.
Armin Medosch, 2006b. 'Waves - Introduction'. in
Electromagnetic Waves as Material and Medium for
Art. Exhibition Catalogue, Armin Medosch and Rasa
Smite, edts. Riga: RIXC.
Felix Stalder, 2006. 'On the Differences between
Open Source and Open Culture'. In: Media
Mutandis, a Node.London Reader. Marina Vishmidt,
edt.. London: Node.London.
Bruce Sterling, 2005. Shaping Things. Boston: MIT
Press.
Sherry Turkle, 1995. Life on the Screen: Identity
in the Age of the Internet. Paperback Edition
1997 London: Phoenix Paperback.
Paul Virilio, 1994. The Vision Machine.
Translated by Julie Rose. London: BFI Publishing.
1 cf. Bruce Sterling, 2005. Shaping Things.
Boston: MIT Press
2 Distances vary between a few centimeters and
10 meters and more, depending on antenna design
and which radio frequency is being used
3 RFID relies on an information infrastructure
almost like another internet; for more
information see the Automated ID webpages -
available online from:
http://xml.coverpages.org/pml-ons.html, last
accessed August 2006.
4 "Passive RFID tags have no internal power
supply. The minute electrical current induced in
the antenna by the incoming radio frequency
signal provides just enough power for the CMOS
integrated circuit (IC) in the tag to power up
and transmit a response. Most passive tags signal
by backscattering the carrier signal from the
reader". Wikipedia 2006 [online] Available from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFID last accessed
August 30 2006.
5 A neo-liberal argument which claims that
first capitalists need to create wealth so that
it can 'trickle down' to the masses.
6 "In the PR world the war is won or lost by
how things are branded. The debate over RFID is
no different. Katherine has cleverly referred to
RFID tags as spychips. Who wouldn't be opposed to
"spychips?" I prefer the term: consumer-value
tags. This is a much more accurate term, not only
because the RFID won't enable spying, but more
importantly because it enables significant
consumer value. [...] Perhaps I should mention
that I am a card-carrying consumer value tag
user. I have lots of CVT's on me. My cell phone.
My RFID key to my office building. My Metro Card
to ride on the subway. My Mobil speed pass. By
the way, if anyone has a rogue scanner, feel free
to scan me and extract any info you need". Rob
Atkinson, 2006. 'RFID: There's Nothing to Fear
Except Fear Itself': Opening Remarks at the 16th
Annual Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference
May 4, 2006, Washington, DC. Available online
from:
http://www.innovationpolicy.org/pdf/rfid.pdf,
last accessed August 2006.
7 On top of that, many schemes us the ISM band
(Industrial, Scientific and Medical) a licence
exempt part of the radio spectrum which can be
used by anyone without special permission. It is
therefore not illegal to possess hardware which
operates in that spectrum.
8 Anonymous, 2006. 'Foiling the Oyster Card'
[online] Available from
http://www.spy.org.uk/spyblog/2004/02/foiling_the_
oyster_card.html, last accessed August 2006.
9 'Efficient regimes' are here referring to non-
democratic societies exemplified by the regimes
of city states such as Hong Kong and Singapore
which endorse capitalism but not liberal
democracy.
10 The Guardian, Monday March 13, 2006, 'Oyster
Data Use Rises in Crime Clampdown'. Available
online from:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1729999
,00.html, last accessed August 2006.
11 Luis Padilla Visdómine, 2006. 'Turning Your
Mobile Into a Magnetic Stripe Reader'. [online]
Available from
http://www.gae.ucm.es/~padilla/extrawork/mobilesou
ndtrack.html, last accessed August 2006.
12 The Guardian, August 7 2006. 'Hackers crack
new biometric passports'. [online] Available
from:
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,183
8751,00.html, last accessed August 2006.
13 White hat hackers are security experts
working for companies who make it their business
to expose flaws and offer solutions, as opposed
to 'black hats' who work completely in secrecy.
14 'Just Got My Implants', from the "Tagged"
RFID implant forums. Online forum posting.
Available from
http://tagged.kaos.gen.nz/showthread.php?t=22,
last accessed August 2006.
15 Mafia Fraud Attack is a type of man-in-the-
middle attack against secure systems using
cryptography. For more information see for
instance: http://www.answers.com/topic/man-in-the-
middle-attack-1
16 In IT security a 'brute force attack' is an
attempt at breaking a password by simply
calculating all possible permutations of
characters.
17 What is really 'convenient in this regard is
that the industry sells 'solutions' for problems
which it has created itself.
18 cf Paul Virilio, 1994. The Vision Machine.
19 'Past futures' are ideas from the past about
technological futures which have not and will not
materialize but still have an influence on our
imaginations.
20 Enemies will fear consequences which are as
virtual as the technology itself. Critics in the
Foucalt-Deleuze line of critique of the society
of control are often those who buy most
wholeheartedly into a technological 'vision'
which is, fortunately, still far away from
becoming a reality.
21 Trials with CCTV and face recognition have
been running for years in Newham, east London.
Despite not identifying a single criminal the
trial has been expanded for a another period.
22 As indeed the use of the word 'structure'
implies a structuralist or post-structuralist
position, which I actually do not share. I use
the word in its everyday meaning.
23 This entire paragraph is informed by critical
readings of AI, cybernetics and information
theory by authors such as Sherry Turkle (1995)
and N.Katherine Hayles (1999), in particular the
notion that information becomes context free as a
precondition for it to become fetishized. This
enables technoscience to create an image of the
world based on its own ontological assumptions ,
i.e. the universe as a hugely complex parallel
computer. It is easy to see the 'cultural
fallacy' at work in those assumptions. Computers,
the leading technology of our times, are used to
explain the world. A couple of centuries ago the
universe was running like a 'clockwork'.
24 slashdot.org, is a community site for
computer geeks which offers extensive commenting
and rating functions. Every posting on the site
is followed by a huge trail of analysis and
comment by readers, comments which are also rated
by the community according to their accuracy or
relevancy, thereby creating a very effective
system of harnessing the expertise of a large
community.
25 According to Latour the categorical
separation between subject and object which we
have inherited from early Greek philosophy is a
deeply flawed concept. He proposes instead a
different model which is based on transitions
between things (non-humans) and the social world
(humans) thereby abolishing the subject-object
dichotomy. cf. Latour 1999.
26 Interestingly, according to this 'vision'
things, and not humans are 'the protagonists of
a historical process'. The agency which is
accorded to products is denied humans.
Technoscientific progress phases out ordinary
people as a significant factor in shaping history
whereas it privileges a new digital elite.
Sterling shares this viewpoint with many techno-
visionaries of the late 20th and early 21st
century. Many thanks to Marina Vishmidt for
emphasising this aspect.
27 cf. The Human Engagement With Objects. Figure
2, page 51, and The Mirrored S-Curve of
Technological Adaptation. Figure 3, page 59,
design by Lorraine Wild in Sterling (2005).
28 cf. Richard Barbrook's 2006 Class of the New.
29 Even Ubicomp now is opened up to experiments
through projects such as HIVE Networks. cf
Medosch 2006a.
30 Some writers have put forward good reasons
for doubts that 'open source principles' can be
so easily transferred to other areas, one major
reason being that bits are more easily
reproducible than atoms. cf. Felix Stalder 2006
31 Language is not only the glue but also a
suitable point of intervention. Artists such as
Wilfred Hou Je Bek have playfully engaged with
marking up taxonomies or folksonomies of places.
Tagging or annotating places, and creating
community-based maps was the dernier cri of net
art app. 2003. Meanwhile annotating places and
inventing folksonomies has become a new mass
culture on the net with Google Maps, Del.ici.us
and Flickr.
32 "The Auto-ID Center's vision is to
revolutionise the way we make, buy, and sell
products by merging bits (computers) and atoms
(humans) together for optimal mutual
communication. Everything will be connected in a
dynamic, automated supply chain that joins
businesses and consumers together to benefit
global commerce and the environment. The Auto-ID
Center opened at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, USA in October 1999; a second lab
opened at Cambridge University, UK in 2000. The
Center is developing a standard system to
identify objects using RFID [Radio Frequency
Identification]. RFID tags are built into objects
like food, clothes, drugs or auto-parts, and
read' by devices in the environment, e.g., in
shelves, floors, doors... The Center has over 30
sponsors including Procter & Gamble, Gillette,
International Paper, Sun Microsystems, Philip
Morris Group, USPS, Phillips, Unilever, Wal-Mart
and Tesco...Field Testing started October 2001;
prototype hardware will be tested 2002.
Specifications and business cases could be
published 2003. Commercial availability is not
likely until 2004-5 earliest". ... Auto-ID Center
Research overview. Available from:
http://xml.coverpages.org/pml-ons.html, last
accessed August 2006
33 The tendency of the 'logical layer' to
dominate the world could easily be referenced to
the privileged concept of the 'logos' in Western
philosophy.
34 Such a project does indeed exist. However, at
the time of writing the website
http://www.humanmarkup.org was not available.
35 "Put differently, any given ubiquitous
technology may be understood to comprise its
contexts of research, development, manufacture,
sale, implementation, use and eventual disposal.
Shifting socio-technical arrangements are
negotiated in particular space-times, and it
becomes impossible to reduce Ubicomp to discrete
(stable) objects of computation". Anne Galloway,
2003. 'Resonances and Everyday Life: Ubiquitous
Computing and the City (draft)', online article.
Available from:
http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org/mobile/cult_studi
es_draft.html, last accessed August 2006.
36 "Easily envisioned as part of Latour's (1999)
'proliferation of hybrids,' ubiquitous computing
is the archetypal hybrid and mobile technology at
work within a society of control. Latour (1999:
214) claims that we live and act as a 'collective
of humans and non-humans' in which an
increasingly large number of humans are mixed
with an increasingly large number of nonhumans,
to the point that, today, the whole planet is
engaged in the making of politics, law, and soon,
I suspect, morality ... The nasty problem we now
have to deal with is that, unfortunately, we do
not have a definition of politics that can answer
the specifications of this nonmodern history".
Galloway 2003, quoting Latour, 1999.
37 I am referring to early media art, including
satellite transmissions in the 1970s, by artists
such as Nam June Paik (Global Groove, 1974) and
Douglas Davies, 1977 cf. Medosch 2006b and Media
Art Net 2006 [online] Available from
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/last-9-
minutes/ last accessed August 30 2006.
38 A good example for a 'parasitic' and highly
ironic strategy was Heath Bunting's project
'Vunerability' where he used electronic tags to
create false alarms on entering a store, not when
leaving it. cf Irational.org 1996 - 2006 [online]
Available from
http://www.irational.org/heath/pleasur/postcard.ht
ml last accessed August 30 2006. An echo of this
type of work can be found in Paula Roush's
project for the Tagged exhibition, Arphield
Recordings, where she asks people to play back
the beep from Oyster Card-reading machines on
London tube stations (see further down in this
text).
39 cf. Burnham 1968/2005.
40 This is not just a thing of the past. A
recent CNNarticle: "Scientists at the GE
complex, a landscaped, gated campus of
laboratories and offices spread out over 525
acres and home to 1,900 scientists and staff, and
others in the industry hope to use various
technologies to reduce false alarms, cut manpower
used on mundane tasks and give first-responders
better tools to assess threats. The country's
growing security needs also provide an
opportunity to boost business. [...] Since 2002,
GE has spent $4 billion buying smaller businesses
to take a bigger share of the $160 billion global
security industry, a market that includes
everything from building security to narcotics
detection. The company expects $2 billion in
revenue from its security businesses this year.
That should rise to $2.8 billion in 2009, said
Louis Parker, chief executive of GE's security
unit. [...] "Ever since the Department of
Homeland Security was put into place, our
business has gone up," said James McConnell of
Acoustech. The three-person company takes in
$500,000 in revenue a year". CNN, 2006, online
article. Available from:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/08/07/terrorism.techn
ology.ap/index.html, last accessed August 2006.
Compare also Edwards, 1996. Closed Worlds.
41 In a forthcoming text about AmbientTV.NET. In
many ways, this article is a preview of the
longer piece on AmbientTV.NET.
42 The word Muzak has become synonymous with
'easy listening' music played in shopping malls.
It is also the trading name of Muzak Holdings
LLC, a US American company, founded in 1934.
43 'Sousveillance', in the words of Steve Mann,
is inverse surveillance, whereas 'equiveillance'
describes the balance between surveillance and
sousveillance. cf Steve Mann 2006 [online]
Available from http://wearcam.org/ last accessed
August 30 2006.
44 I was never an active participant but an
early subscriber (as user) to the DLP system; my
reflections derive from that experience and may
be more or less incidental to the project. In
2003 The University of Openess held a
Cartographic Congress. At about the same time the
Locative Media concept was developed at a
workshop in Latvia.
More information about the iDC
mailing list