Ubiquity: The Journal of Pervasive Media - Volume 3, Issue 1-2, 2014

By taking and sharing photographs, we are positioned within powerful communication networks that influence our personal and social identities. Over time, ownership and control is lost as our photographs gain performativity that allows them to divert from the purposes, spaces and times for which they are created. These issues are magnified by a number of technological, cultural and economic factors that accompany the evolution of ubiquitous digital media and their associated tools. Given the role that photographs play in the reconstruction of individual and collective memory and history, it is worth considering what is captured by the camera and what happens after the shutter closes.

This article reflects on Chain Reaction (2009 and 2011), a mixed performance combining ubiquitous media with performance conventions and experimental game design. It explores the ways in which ubiquitous media were used to foster participants’ creative expression and how these strategies impacted performance conventions of spectatorship and participation. By combining performance, game and ubiquitous media in public space, it is claimed that Chain Reaction enables spectators to cross conventional thresholds and experience different participatory roles during one and the same event, going from spectator, to (performative) player, to theatre actor and to documentalist. In this way, ubiquitous media are vital to developing a performance genre that seeks to empower the cultural participant.

One of the core characteristics of speculative design projects is the way they can be easily confused with reality. By maintaining a close connection with the mundane, these fictions often pose provocative questions shaped as uncanny scenarios that weave rather dystopian encounters with possible futures. However, where does one trace the line between propaganda hoaxes and critical design depictions? Using the story of alleged ‘time traveller’ John Titor – one of the most well-known Internet hoaxes so far – as a point of reference, this article will discuss the civil role and the cultural resonance of speculative design fictions, as well as the responsibility of the designer in either questioning or reaffirming society’s political, social and economic agendas.

The author reflects on the usage and development of the zoom ‘passage’ and its various forms from the early cinema of the 1920s to the expanding concept of a scaling zoom towards a Cosmic View (Boerke, 1957) and the usage of cosmic zooms in todays fulldome theatres/ planetariums. Today various zoom effects are being used at daily routine. The navigation inside geographical visualization tools is naturally embedded in our daily media experience while using mobile devices, car navigational tools and other applications. All the more a critical perspective on the impact is needed. This article compares the different techniques used in Google Maps and in Fulldome theatres and argues that the usage of digital geographical tools and their inherent zoom structures change our mind concept of local environments, earth and spatial knowledge.

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