Sam Hind

lecturer in digital media and culture at the University of Manchester, UK.

sam.hind@manchester.ac.uk

  • Situated Technologies II: Urban Computing and Its Discontents

    Urban Computing and Its Discontents was the first of nine pamphlets produced by The Architectural League of New York  back in 2007, all of which are free to download here.

    Under the series title of ‘Architecture and Situated Technologies’ these nine publications were intended to contribute to a burgeoning literature on ubiquitous technology. Adam Greenfield (author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing) and Mark Shepard author this initial architectural overview.

    Wholly comprised of a conversation between the two, Urban Computing provides a fuzzy introduction to the cross-fertilizing worlds of urban computing and ‘ambient informatics’. The majority of it stretches out the rather banal aspects of the sentient city, with a heavy emphasis on advertising, marketing and consumption. Sometimes I’m hard pushed to really get into some of the grey literature on technology and urbanism, and find myself returning to geographical base, as it were. Partly that’s to do with my preconceptions on those in the field of architecture and design, and a rather site-specific and (quite honestly) short-sighted approach to urban malaise. I’ll see where pamphlet two (download here) takes me.

  • Situated Technologies I

    “Si vous réussissez, vous serez bientôt couverts de gloire”
    (“If you succeed you will bask in glory”)
    The Chappe Brothers 1791

    The Semaphore System was an early mechanical informational device to send visual messages across long distances. In it’s initial guise, the semaphore system was devised by the Chappe Brothers to send coded messages from French military forces in the late 18th century. This blog takes it’s name from The Chappe Brother’s invention (synonymously known as a ‘Semaphore Line‘) , and the quote above comes from the first message sent between two signal towers in 1791.

     As a historical example of the nexus of military needs, political and revolutionary events, and visual informational devices, the Semaphore Line acts as a grounding for thinking through the dynamics of geospatial technology, interactive media and the digital frontier. This blog will collate some of the work done at the intersection of these fields.