Ambient Commons

On rediscovering surroundings when information goes everywhere. The world is filling with ever more kinds of media, in ever more contexts and formats. Glowing rectangles have become part of the scene; screens, large and small, appear everywhere. Physical locations are increasingly tagged and digitally augmented. Amid this flood, your attention practices matter more than ever. You might not be able to tune this world out. So it is worth remembering that underneath all these augmentations and data flows, fixed forms persist, and that to notice them can improve other sensibilities. In Ambient Commons, Malcolm McCullough explores the workings of attention through a rediscovery of surroundings. McCullough describes what he calls the Ambient: an increasing tendency to perceive information superabundance whole, where individual signals matter less and at least some mediation assumes inhabitable form. He explores how the fixed forms of architecture and the city play a cognitive role in the flow of ambient information. As a persistently inhabited world, can the Ambient be understood as a shared cultural resource, to be socially curated, voluntarily limited, and self-governed as if a commons? Ambient Commons invites you to look past current obsessions with smart phones to rethink attention itself, to care for more situated, often inescapable forms of information.

In this volume, critical scholars and educational activists explore the intricate dynamics between the enclosure of global commons and radical visions of a common social future that breaks through the logics of privatization, ecological degradation, and dehumanizing social hierarchies in education. In its institutional and informal configurations alike, education has been identified as perhaps the key stake in this struggle. Insisting on the urgency of an education that breaks free of the bonds of enclosure, the essays included in this volume weave together bright threads of radical thought into a vivid tapestry illustrating a critical framework for enacting a global educational commons.

In recent years, the presence of ubiquitous computing has increasingly integrated into the lives of people in modern society. As these technologies become more pervasive, new opportunities open for making citizens’ environments more comfortable, convenient, and efficient. Enriching Urban Spaces with Ambient Computing, the Internet of Things, and Smart City Design is a pivotal reference source for the latest scholarly material on the interaction between people and computing systems in contemporary society, showcasing how ubiquitous computing influences and shapes urban environments. Highlighting the impacts of these emerging technologies from an interdisciplinary perspective, this book is ideally designed for professionals, researchers, academicians, and practitioners interested in the influential state of pervasive computing within urban contexts.

This book considers how a combination of place-based writing and location responsive technologies produce new kinds of literary experiences. Building on the work done in the Ambient Literature Project (2016–2018), this books argues that these encounters constitute new literary forms, in which the authored text lies at the heart of an embodied and mediated experience. The visual, sonic, social and historic resources of place become the elements of a live and emergent mise-en-scène. Specific techniques of narration, including hallucination, memory, history, place based writing, and drama, as well as reworking of traditional storytelling forms combine with the work of app and user experience design, interaction, software authoring, and GIS (geographical information systems) to produce ambient experiences where the user reads a textual and sonic literary space. These experiences are temporary, ambiguous, and unpredictable in their meaning but unlike the theatre, the gallery, or the cinema they take place in the everyday shared world. The book explores the potentiality of a new literary form produced by the exchange between location-aware cultural objects, writers and readers. This book, and the work it explores, lays the ground for a new poetics of situated writing and reading practices.

Building on the work of Elinor Ostrom (Governing the Commons) the author examines how the different shared goods of a democratic society are shaped by technology and demonstrates how club goods, common pool resources, and public goods are supported, enhanced, and disrupted by technology. He further argues that as the common good is undermined by different interests, it should be possible to reclaim technology, if the members of the society conclude that they have something in common.

Background Noise follows the development of sound as an artistic medium and illustrates how sound is put to use within modes of composition, installation, and performance. While chronological in its structure, Brandon LaBelle's book is informed by spatial thinking - weaving architecture, environments, and the specifics of location into the work of sound, with the aim of formulating an expansive history and understanding of sound art. At its center the book presupposes an intrinsic relation between sound and its location, galvanizing acoustics, sound phenomena, and the environmental with the tensions inherent in what LaBelle identifies as sound's relational dynamic. For the author, this is embedded within sound's tendency to become public expressed in its ability to travel distances, foster cultural expression, and define spaces while being radically flexible. This second expanded edition includes a new chapter on the non-human and subnatural tendencies in sound art, revisions to the text as well as a new preface by the author. Intersecting material analysis with theoretical frameworks spanning art and architectural theory, performance studies and media theory, Background Noise makes the case that sound and sound art are central to understandings of contemporary culture.

This book explores in theory and practice how artificial intelligence (AI) intersects with and alters the city. Drawing upon a range of urban disciplines and case studies, the chapters reveal the multitude of repercussions that AI is having on urban society, urban infrastructure, urban governance, urban planning and urban sustainability. Contributors also examine how the city, far from being a passive recipient of new technologies, is influencing and reframing AI through subtle processes of co-constitution. The book advances three main contributions and arguments: First, it provides empirical evidence of the emergence of a post-smart trajectory for cities in which new material and decision-making capabilities are being assembled through multiple AIs. Second, it stresses the importance of understanding the mutually constitutive relations between the new experiences enabled by AI technology and the urban context. Third, it engages with the concepts required to clarify the opaque relations that exist between AI and the city, as well as how to make sense of these relations from a theoretical perspective. Artificial Intelligence and the City offers a state-of-the-art analysis and review of AI urbanism, from its roots to its global emergence. It cuts across several disciplines and will be a useful resource for undergraduates and postgraduates in the fields of urban studies, urban planning, geography, architecture, urban design, science and technology studies, sociology and politics.

Modern day and technology-rich environments require a reconceptualization of how the nature of technology influences urban areas. Rethinking the way we apply these technologies will not only alter the way people communicate and interact, but it will also alter how individuals learn and explore the world around them. Ambient Urbanities as the Intersection Between the IoT and the IoP in Smart Cities offers insights about the ambient in 21st century smart cities, learning cities, responsive cities, and future cities, and highlights the importance of people as critical to the urban fabric of smart cities that are increasingly embedded with pervasive and often invisible technologies. The book, based on an urban research study, explores urbanity from multiple perspectives ranging from the cultural to the geographic. While highlighting topics including digital literacies, smarter governance, and information architectures, this book is ideally designed for students, educators, researchers, the business community, city government staff and officials, urban practitioners, and those concerned with contemporary and emerging complex urban challenges and opportunities.