- Keller Easterling ’ s work is paramount in tracking how the logistical aesthetic works itself out through corporate and academic architecture. See Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (London: Verso, 2014).
- “ Switches ” in this case would include the aggregate number of transistors on all the networked and embedded processors (a kind of cumulative and total Moore ’ s Law of interfacial capacity) but also non-computational interfacial gateways that contribute to the overall flux and flow, and ranging from object-scale to urban-scale to transcontinental-scale.
- Articulating this insight in every way possible seemed to define fin-de-millennium social theory in relation to the network society, the global city, the information bomb, sociology against society, supermodernism, and so on. See Manuel Castells and Gustavo Cardoso, The Network Society: From Knowledge to Policy (Washington, DC: Center for Transatlantic Relations, Johns Hopkins University, 2006); Saskia Sassen, “ The Global City: Introducing a Concept, ” Brown Journal of World Affairs 11, no. 2 (2005): 27 – 43, http://www.saskiasassen.com/pdfs/publications/theglobal-city-brown.pdf; Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb (London: Verso, 1999); John Urry, Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge, 2000); and Hans Ibelings, Supermodernism: Architecture in the Age of Globalization (Rotterdam: NAi, 1998).
- “ Binding collective representation ” is meant in the sense central to the grand unifying social theories of both Emile Durkheim and Niklas Luhmman.
- On “ punctualization, ” see Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
- A result examined with nuance by Alexander R. Galloway in his essay “ The Unworkable Interface, ” in his book The Interface Effect (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 25 – 53.
- For example, the recent editorial work by Manuel Lima and visualization work by Laura Kurgan.
- There is resonance with Fredric Jameson ’ s discussion of images of totality as an active response to systemic complexity in ways that would contradict the notions that information visualization brings an eclipse of active and prejudiced interpretation (Manovich) and undermines any need for macroscopic and global theories of the social (Latour).
- The term utopian imaginary is used more or less in Jameson ’ s sense of a progressive (if frustrated and sublimated) desire for the comprehension and reform of social totality, especially as seen through speculative science and technological fictions, across all media. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005).
- The design problems related to nonvisual (or least nongraphical) interfaces, such as those conceived for our many ubiquitous computing environments, are less clearly outlined before us now, especially when these interfaces are employed for the benefit of nonhuman Users. When software is embedded within a User’ s physical environment, it becomes part of his habitat and contributes to how he is embodied by and within that habitat. In sociological theory, the term habitus has been used, by Pierre Bourdieu and Henri Lefebvre in particular, to name the productive circuit between a contextually rich habitat and a disposition of bodily and cognitive habits. In Lefebvre ’ s connotation, habitus speaks to how the production of social space is a kind of mimetic extension of bodily movement, a habitual wearing of grooves into the surfaces of the world, which by its material repetition produces the artifacts of habitat. In the plural, such spatial practice results in the channels, monuments, and activities of the city, a collective artifact of spatial life. Among the most important of such collective spatial productions is the border and boundary of the city, the edge system of membranes that governs internalization and externalization. For the individual, habitus can also refer to how embodied dispositions become codified into the organization of place and how this comes to reconfigure how they are occupied and programmed in their reflective image. The repetition of habit produces an inscription, a “ groove, ” in the figural contours of the built environment, and in fact it builds the environment precisely through such repetitions, while habitats in turn produce and enunciate themselves though bodies, manifested as habits. Spaces contain and constrain, and are configured by the bodies they constrain. Spaces are not just expressions of embodiment; they also express themselves as and through bodily form (prisoner, worker, individual, mass). Habitats (cage, desk, car, savannah, bed, corridor) condition and are the condition of the production of bodily habits and of the collective representation of those habits fixing themselves as material culture.
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