In a blog entry about iTACITUS Reality Filtering, a European Union – commissioned, intelligent tourism project that provides a smart-phone-based AR narrative to many of Europe ’ s key heritage sites, Sterling posts, “ Fantastic to see history made so atemporally flexible, eh? Since it ’ s necessary to get cynical ( ‘ Always Look at the Underside First ’ ) let ’ s get cynical about this technology and it ’ s trajectory. This ‘ true glimpse ’ of history won ’ t sell well, compared to Disneyfied ‘ untrue glimpses. ’ Wherever there is ‘ Intelligent Tourism, ’ brutal, vulgar and stupid tourism follows fast on its heels! Soon we ’ ll have some theme park Creationist Augmented Reality, where you can visit the Grand Canyon and see pre-Noachian people pan-frying trilobites and riding dinosaurs. ” See Sterling ’ s post, “ Augmented Reality and Atemporality, ” Wired, August 15, 2009, http://www.wired.com/2009/08/augmented-reality-and-atemporality/.
- The App has received considerable mainstream press. See Amy O ’ Leary, “ In the Beginning Was the Word; Now the Word Is on an App, ” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/ 07/27/technology/the-faithful-embrace-youversion-a-bible-app.html?hp, and Nir Eyal, “ This Mobile App Is Already on 100 Million Devices But Its Goal Isn ’ t to Make Money, ” Quartz, July 25, 2013, http://qz.com/107969/this-mobile-app-is-already-on-100-million-devices-but-its-goal-isnt -to-make-money/.
- Regardless of the computational architecture of The Stack, geoscapes do not in principle require anything like modern interfaces to organize geographical antagonisms. Surely maps are already precomputational interfaces that conceived a world image and world space striated by longitude and latitude possible for their sacred and secular imperium, and which by their notation indexed what spaces were full and which were empty, and how to get there from here. In the latent theological imperative of AR, are nothing so much as late medieval afterimages now ported to the optical technologies of artificial interfacial vision?
- This public, huddled around their transistor radios, is not so unlike the bourgeois family huddled around the radio in May Fools, Louis Malle ’ s 1990 film about May ’ 68, or the thousands of soixante-huitards in the streets of Paris listening to broadcasts from Radio Luxembourg at the beginning of May, and then to de Gaulle, once more, on television at the beginning of June. May Fools (directed by Louis Malle, Pyramide Distribution, 1990).
- In one key scene, a little boy commandeers the French army ’ s public address system to rally his beleaguered countrymen, assuming the mantle of the Voice of Fighting Algeria, as the VFA commandeered the narrative of democratic self-determination.
- Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 84 – 88.
- The modeling of “ persuasive interfaces ” has been a particularly successful form of interaction design consulting (in financial terms) promising to train Users and consumers away from undesirable actions (eating too much) and toward desirable ones (buying stuff). Far too many evangelize this research area with a startling lack of self-awareness and appropriate scope. In many cases (surely not all), the conclusions on offer may resemble, to the untrained eye, plain-old behavioralist microeconomics with all its shallow psychologisms intact, now dressed up in the millennial business jargon 2.0 of digital self-actualization.
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