IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

Literacy 165
surface or at the level of an office interior in Berlin. Other media artists
have achieved just as stunning results at ground level. At a recent Venice
Biennale of Architecture, multimedia artist David Rokeby presented a work
entitled Seen that visualized the flows of people passing through and hanging
out in Piazza San Marco. Rokeby used a video camera and applied
special algorithms to each pixel to capture the trajectory of every pigeon
and pedestrian in the piazza; each track left a fading trail that defined the
direction and speed of movement. ‘‘We have a highly developed visual
system that outperforms computers at many tasks involving large correlated
fields of data,’’ says Rokeby; ‘‘the computer is capable of shifting invisible
phenomena into the range of our perception, allowing us to use
our own highly refined abilities.’’ This is especially true, Rokeby notes, of
cross-temporal phenomena that constitute flow: movement patterns that
happen too quickly or too slowly for us to properly register with our eyes. 10
We might feed into a T-Vision interface data from sensors spread over the
landscape. John Gage of Sun Microsystems talks about sprinkling ‘‘smart
dust’’ over the world—millions of tiny sensors that would monitor the
physical world remotely. Wireless sensors could be dispersed anywhere:
Tiny thermometers, miniature microphones, electronic noses, location
detectors, or motion sensors could provide information about the condition
of the physical world and convert analog data about anything
physical—pressure, light, gas, genes—into bits and bytes that they communicate
wirelessly to a network. 11
A lot of research into remote sensing is funded by the military. True,
many of the military’s applications of this technology involve sensing
things in order to kill them, but it would not take much to repurpose these
tools for civilian applications. The advertising for a once-classified product
called GammaMaster proclaims, ‘‘Where Is Your Radiation Detector When
You Really Need It?—On Your Wrist!’’ A precision timepiece with a built-in
Geiger counter, the GammaMaster bills itself as ‘‘ideal for emergency personnel
who may have to respond to accidents, incidents or terrorist attacks,
which could involve radioactive material.’’ 12 I’m also taken by the HazMat
Smart Strip, a baseball-card-sized device that changes color when exposed
to nerve agents, cyanide, chlorine, fluoride, arsenic—in liquid or aerosol
form—and other substances that are toxic in small quantities. A change in
color in any of eight categories alerts users to ‘‘get additional gear, decontaminate,
or evacuate.’’ ‘‘It’s not cool to use your nose to detect chemical