The automatic production of space

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the changing nature of space. More and more of the spaces of everyday life come loaded up with software, lines of code that are installing a new kind of automatically reproduced background and whose nature is only now starting to become clear. This paper is an attempt to map out this background. The paper begins by considering the nature of software. Subsequently, a simple audit is undertaken of where software is chiefly to be found in the spaces of everyday life. The next part of the paper notes the way in which more and more of this software is written to mimic corporeal intelligence, so as to produce a better and more unobtrusive fit with habitation. The paper then sets out three different geographies of software and the way in which they are implicated in the reproduction of everyday life before concluding with a consideration of the degree to which we might consider the rise of software as an epochal event or something much more modest.

Conceptualising differently-mobile passengers: geographies of everyday encumbrance in the railway station

“…Whilst surveillance at most stations relies on human-operation, researchers are currently exploring the implications of new, automated surveillance regimes which rely on visible, traceable profiles that can be automatically monitored. This automatic panopticism, part of what Thrift and French (2002) call the 'automatic production of space', will be premised on visual 'identification, classification and assessment' (Gandy 1996: 135) of passengers. These systems are based on algorithmic digital recognition where passengers' faces become barcodes to be read (Agre 2001), and non-conformist behaviour can be automatically detected (Graham 2005).…”

‘Outlines of a World Coming into Existence’: Pervasive Computing and the Ethics of Forgetting

“…These automated responses, as Thrift and French (2002) note, produce particular and new socio-spatial formations.…”

Technik, Digitalität und Raum – Konzeptionelle Überlegungen zu den Geographien alltäglichen Technikgebrauchs

“…Der dritte Teil diskutiert Theorien und Modelle, welche die räumliche Dimension der technisierten Moderne in den Blick nehmen. Konzepte der "raumzeitlichen Entankerung" (Werlen, 2010, 29ff), der "Spaces of Flow" (Castells, 2000(Castells, [1996), des "coded space/code space" (Dodge und Kitchin, 2005a;2011, 16ff), und der multidimensionalen, nicht-statischen Verknüpfung von Ort und Technik (Thrift und French, 2002;Graham, 1998Graham, , 2005 Graham, 1998;Dodge und Kitchin, 2005a, b, 2011Thrift und French, 2002;Thrift, 2004;Tranos, 2013 (vgl. Castells, 2000(vgl.…”

“…Neue Geographien des Technischen bilden ein Kernthema der Debatte (stellv. Brunn et al, 2004;Brown und Laurier, 2005;Dixon und Whitehead, 2008;Graham, 1998Graham, , 2005Thrift und French, 2002;Thrift, 2004;Dodge und Kitchin, 2005a;Kwan, 2007a) -sei es die kritische Analyse von Überwa-chungstechnik (s. z.B. Adey, 2004;Graham, 2005:572f), das Phänomen der technischen Strukturierung des Handelns durch Infrastrukturen am Beispiel des Flughafens (Adey, 2007), die lebensweltliche Erfahrung des mobilen Alltags (Laurier, 2004;Bissell, 2009) oder die Allgegenwart des digitalen Code (Dodge und Kitchin, 2005b (Kwan, 2007b).…”

“…Auch wenn mit Formeln wie der "automatic production of space" (Thrift und French, 2002) und den "transductive practises" (Dodge und Kitchin, 2005a) . .…”