Abstract

1) Sensuous works that can hear, see, feel, touch, smell, know where they are, who is in the room, where their owner is, what’s going on and what went down.
2) Reactive works that can change their skins, activate motors, laugh, cough, blow bubbles, make sounds, sing and tell jokes.
3) Communicative works that whisper, lie, conspire, kibitz, talk and gossip together. These works exchange information, knowledge, insults, truths, untruths, random thoughts and tall-tales.
4) Tacit works that are invisibly embedded in daily life, Works that become habitual and relied on, forgotten about (like riding a bicycle) or deeply integrated (like a contact lens).
5) Colonizing works that inhabit all of our daily goods, camouflaged as it were, in simple commodities and enspiriting the landscape with minor gods, clever deities and unusual ghosts.

Art in the age of Ubiquitous Computing will not be in galleries; rather, we will live within its general hubbub.

notes:
Mark Weiser: The Computer for the 21st Century, Scientific American, September 1991.
Wellner, Mackay, Gold (e&ors): CACM Special Issue on ‘Computer Augmented Environments’, July 1993.

• Rich Gold, Xerox PARC, Palo Alto, CA, USA