Urban echoes of ubiquity

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Acknowledgements

We are very grateful that the editors of the Continuum journal have made the publication of this special issue possible. In particular, we would like to thank Panizza Allmark for being so forthcoming and for finding a place in the publication timeline of a very busy journal. Moreover, we owe much to Jude Elund's editorial assistance, including no little careful and meticulous copy-editing. This special issue has emerged from the activities of the Nordic research network ‘The Culture of Ubiquitous Information’, and we owe thanks both to the NordForsk organization for funding and to the great many participants from Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Norway that have made this such a lively and productive research network during seminars and publication activities in the last 2–3 years. We are much obliged to the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at University of Copenhagen for hosting the research network institutionally. In the editorial process, we have been lucky enough to collaborate in a group with Ulrik Schmidt, Yanqing Zhang, Nina Gram and Merete Carlson, and we deeply appreciate their efforts. In addition, we would like to thank all reviewers whose very constructive and critical feedback did so much to further the development of each paper. Finally, we thank all contributing authors for their considerable patience with the processes of reviews, editing and publication, and for making this special issue such an interesting and thought-provoking collection.

Notes

^1. For more detailed and substantial treatments of the cultural implications of the developments of the third wave of computing, see Ekman (2013), McCullough (2004) and Greenfield (2006).

^2. See, for example Marceau (2008) and Sennett et al. (2002). For an interesting account of the pitfalls of having a predominant technological determinism at play on the urban developers' side, see Shin's account of the experiences gathering from the South Korean U-city initiative. The adoption in this editorial of the term ‘U-city’ is from this branch of South Korean research and development which is in certain respects an avant-garde, at least with respect to cities of this kind being developed from the ground up.

^3. In this editorial, we refer in general to the recognized definition of ‘MR’ in relation to the virtuality continuum that appeared in the work of Milgram and Kishino (1994). Several competing and quite different notions of ‘MR’ have also been discussed in more detail in the introduction to Throughout (Ekman 2013). In ‘The Poetics of Augmented Space’, Lev Manovich presents one very interesting treatment of augmentation from a media theoretical perspective, focusing in the main on AR (Manovich 2006). Jay David Bolter and his colleagues from Georgia Tech have authored a quite interesting chapter that includes treatment of AV (Bolter et al. 2013). Although MR concerns have not yet been dealt with extensively in urban studies (see Wang and Schnabel's (2008) treatment of new realities in architecture and design, however), we now do see notions of urban augmentation and the augmented city begin to appear in earnest (Aurigi and De Cindio 2008).

^4. The reference here to a ‘postmedial’ condition is conceived much along the kind of lines drawn up by Peter Weibel in 2005 when treating of a digital computational convergence that has certain universalization effects and makes mediation appear an uncircumventable ‘condition’, just as it leads to new and perhaps intensified media specificities. Likewise, the reference in this editorial to a ‘post-aesthetic’ condition is thought of either as the kind of increasingly thorough aestheticization of our entire everyday life accounted for by German sociologist Gerhard Schulze in his work on a contemporary Erlebnisgesellschaft and its hermeneutics of style, or as that state of things after conceptual art accounted for very recently by the philosopher and art historian Peter Osborne in his work on art beyond aesthetics, mediations after mediums. In both cases, one might say that ‘post’ denotes the atmosphere that appears to come with, around and after almost everything.

^5. The technical literature concerning ‘context-awareness’ is by now fairly comprehensive, although the notion is still subject to polysemia. Further treatment of this notion and the relevant literature can be found in the introduction to Throughout (Ekman 2013) and the editorial to a special issue concerning interaction designs for ubicomp cultures (Ekman 2011). Some of the most interesting urban explorations and concrete developments of complex context-awareness on both technical and human sides are to be found in media art projects and pervasive or MR gaming. For a good and detailed overview of parts of this, see Paul (2013) and Flanagan (2009), respectively.