Rob van Kranenburg
*My trajectory to Ambient Experience Design (neighbourly words are Locative Media, Pervasive Computing) started in 2000 when I visited the Intelligent Information Interfaces (i3) Conference in Jönschoping, Sweden for the Balie Media education Program. I3 is now embedded in the EU Disappearing Computer Program. I was taken aback by the possibilities of mixing analog and digital connectivity, saw intriguingly culturally and socially sound projects (such as LIME, Living Memory) and the lack of a conceptual and philosophical framework. When a few years - in 2002- later in Göteborg at Ubicomp 2 - scouting as editor for Doors of Perception 7, Flow, the Design challenge of Pervasive Computing- I raised the notion of animism as an important feature of our new architectures, as in things having a unique digital connectivity, I was booed out of the room. Now it is taking off in the work of Julian Bleecker and Adam Greenfield. Doors 7 and the E-Culture Fair organized by the Virtual Platform (where I work one day a week) laid the foundation for a lot of conceptual thinking on pervasive computing (Bruce Sterling, Malcolm McCullough, Neil Gershenfeld, Derrick de Kerckhove ) and locative critical practice ( Natalie Jeremijenko, Jussi Angesleva, Esther Polak, Casey Reas, Shona Kitchen & Ben Hooker, Franziska Nori (digitalcraft.org) and Usman Haque). Intrigued by the potentialities of the interplay between various literacies, I began mentoring a postgraduate in Antwerp with dancers, choreographers and performers at APT, Arts, Performance, Theatricality, which set me on the path of corporal literacy ( a term I coined with Maaike Bleeker, University of Amsterdam). In a larger text Mapping Territory, I tried to make sense of what was clearly a territory in which no one yet knew what was data and what not. The most curious technical terrain is occupied by RFID. When I first noticed it I realized its potential as the DNA of this new Digital Territory and set up workshops in London (with Plot) and Amsterdam (with Mediamatic) to get as many different skills and sets of expertise to debate future bright and dark scenarios. A report with Matt Ward and Gaynor Backhouse for JISC on RFID, Frequency, standards, adoption and innovation, has recently been published. RFID is also seen as the glue of the wireless scenarios we envisage in a EU study on Cybersecurity and Digital Territory, in which we focus on productive notions of privacy in an always on world.
