[ISEA2011] Paper: Luisa Paraguai – Mobility into immobility: designing networks

Abstract

Mobile communication, owing to its ubiquity, accessibility and adaptability, has permeated all domains of life. People have moved around actualizing different networks – physical maps and digital nodes, and configuring a programmed and self-configurable structure simultaneously. The diffusion of Internet, wireless communication, digital media, and a variety of tools of social software have evoked the development of communication networks that connect local and global in chosen time. The cultural dimension of that process can be defined by different protocols of accesses and communication among several networks. It means that “being on the move” concerns to operate and produce within in-between distinct space-time models of circulating.

Firstly, the text is concerned with the networks and flows of information and bodies, discussing other perceptions and movements configurations to perform our daily life and to comprehend the world. It means an embodied experience of the material and social modes of dwelling-in-motion. After, contemporaneous artefacts, as technological and cultural organizational structures, are presented to rethink personal spaces and the urban landscape. Thinking about mobile devices, we can have set other possibilities of people being temporarily “on the move”, creating gaps and holes, other dimensions and domains, and questioning the notion of metrics and scales to define territories. For example, the nine to five culture using mobile, in big cities as São Paulo, can engender interspaces and reorganize physical arrangements to transcend space and time models.

At the end, INmobility, an artwork in progress, is presented and concerns to temporary social networks and mobile technologies. Mobile and GPS technologies have been used to map the experience of moving as a collaborative platform, articulating different patterns of information and ways of distribution not coordinated. Import us the current instantaneous time involving the resynchronizations of the existent time-space paths. As November, Camacho-Hubner, and Latour (2010, p.3-4) wrote “there is no such a thing as proximity or a distance, which would not be defined by connectibility. The notion of network helps us to lift the tyranny of geographers in defining space and offers us a notion which is neither social nor ‘real’ space, but simply associations”.

  • Luisa Paraguai. Artist and researcher, studied Civil Engineering and Computing at University of São Paulo, Brazil. She got a master and doctoral degree at the Department of Multimedia, Institute of Arts, State University of Campinas, Brazil. Ad Hoc Consultant at CAPES. Leonardo Digital Reviewer. Editorial Director at ABCiber (Brazilian Association of Ciberculture Researchers). Currently, she is at M-Node, Milan, Italy, as an Advanced Research Associate, researching about mobility and bodyspace relationship.

Full text (PDF) p. 1860-1865