“‘Things’ are controversial assemblages of entangled issues, and not simply objects sitting apart from our political passions. The entanglements of things and politics engage activists, artists, politicians, and intellectuals. To assemble this parliament, rhetoric is not enough and nor is eloquence; it requires the use of all the technologies—especially information technology—and the possibility for the arts to re-present anew what are the common stakes.”
-Bruno Latour
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Robert van Kranenburg on the i3 Annual Conference, which examined the emergence of The Internet of Things in 2000:
'The i3 Conference, (pronounced eye-cubed) stood for Intelligent Information Interfaces, and aimed at developing new human-centered interfaces. The work was notable, not least, because it saw people as active participants, rather than passive recipients of information. Among the list of 20-odd projects was one entitled the Disappearing Computer (DC) which explored how you can support everyday life through ‘interacting artifacts’. The idea at that time was that these artifacts would form ‘new people-friendly environments’ in which the computer-as-we-know-it has no
role.
In the philosophy of Socrates there were three domains of knowledge with three corresponding states of knowing that were deigned equally important; Theoria, Techné and Praxis... In Techné with its domain of knowledge poèsis we can retrieve the concepts technology and poetry - related, for example, as follows: the poetics of Socrates can be seen as a catalogue of literary techniques. The original meaning of the word ‘technology’ is about daily know-how or method. It wasn’t until the Great Exhibition of 1851 that technology became associated with machines. It is therefore all the more interesting that the domain of knowledge which belonged to Praxis: Phronesis, has dropped out completely, not only in our language but also in our thought and ways of thinking. Phronesis, that knowledge that any one of us uses daily in the practice of living an everyday existence, is no longer recognised as an important domain of knowledge with a modern linguistic equivalent.
For me this was one of the most important re-articulations that i3 promised, the attempt to recast - at another conceptual level - the three old Greek ways of knowing: an embodied knowing embedded in life and in ‘virtual’ life.
...The research in intelligent information interfaces was, in the words of Dr. Norbert A. Streitz (PhD in physics, PhD in psychology), spearheading the metaphors and ways of thinking that we can focus on in laboratory research. One of his creations is i-LAND, a test bed for exploring how the world of everyday objects and places will be augmented with information processing, while at the same time exploiting the affordances of real objects in the real world. The disappearing computer would, according to Streitz, amounts to, or rather provides, (no not really even provides), but could to thought of as genius loci, - the spirit of the place.
...I was dozing off in the big Conference Hall, thinking about all these new beginnings, this longing for new space to occupy as if it was the wild, Wild West. What worried me most were some rather satisfied minds. I too could visualise a setting in which people resonate with media through simulating processes. Simulating processes that are actual processes, for in a digitised real, any process might become experiential, might resonate. Then a speaker, I believe it was Streitz, came on stage. He spoke of a Bluetooth ring that whenever I walked in the woods could – if I so liked – enhance this walk for me (I wondered who needs to enhance a wood?) by activating a mechanism that would either reveal a screen near the tree or send information on a handheld computer. And on that screen I could read some more about that tree.
I was wide awake and I felt very strange. I looked around me, searching for any human presence in that lecture room; to wink at me, tell me it was all a big sick joke. I recalled my sword and King Arthur and my talking trees. No screens there. That was when I realized. I asked myself could some of what these people be talking about actually be dangerous? And the best thing I can do is stay close to them, track what they are interested in and either hack it or try to confuse the spaces in which they operate."
-Robert Van Kranenburg, The Internet of Things
