Malcolm McCullough

Dense Notation, In Context

Must media mean remoteness? When carried, worn or embedded into the sites and situations of everyday life, technology becomes embodied not virtual, participatory not passive, and situated not universal. Dense continuous notation, which is arguably the key aspect of media arts, now seems ambient, or at least mapped onto the spaces of the city. But as recent work in locative media suggest, ambient need not be uniform, and notation need not occur in the foreground. This closing keynote challenges assumptions in mobile usability, identifies prospects in urban computing, and responds to the conference about the increasing role of context.

Bio

Malcolm McCullough is the author of Digital Ground-Architecture Pervasive Computing and Environmental Knowing (2004) and Abstracting Craft (1996), which has been hailed as an aesthetic computing classic. He is an associate professor of architecture in the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan and has previously served on the design faculty at Carnegie Mellon and at Harvard He has lectured in many countries on the urbanism of pervasive computing. Currently he is writing a book on environmental histories of locative media.