The Poetics of Augmenting Space

Manovich has a lot of ideas regarding augmented space, so I’ll focus on two parts in this commentary: the listed ways of augmenting space and his comment that cultural institutions usually lag behind business, military, and consumer focused institutions when it comes to adopting new forms of technology and media.

How to Augment Space

Since this article was from 2006, I found Manovich’s list of enabling technologies both entertaining and interesting. Since we’re reading it 11 years later, we can actually evaluate how many of his wishes came true! Initially, his visions seemed a little bit like 1984–focusing on pervasive surveillance recording and viewing, but his predictions after bullet point 4 are all well on their way to becoming true. Just to put these extraordinary insights into perspective, this article was published a year before the first iPhone and Amazon Kindle e-reader were even announced.

Manovich’s insights really balanced the tradeoffs between user experiences and business goals, just like the real world operates. He mentioned ubiquitous computing giving lots of data to corporations, but he also clarified that these technologies (wearable computers, smart objects, location services) can also augment users’ lives for the better. This perspective is probably the most important part of the article, as it can help us analyze the next 10 years of technological growth as well.

Why do Cultural Institutions Adopt after Everyone Else?

Towards the end of the article, Manovich states that “In a high-tech society, cultural institutions usually follow the technology industry. A new technology is developed for military, business, or consumer use, and after a while cultural institutions notice that some artists are experimenting with that technolgoy and so they start to incorporate it in their programming” (Manovich, 236). He then proceeds to question this framework, desiring a reversal in this situation.

While this is a completely valid desire, I highly question its feasibility for two main reasons. First, art galleries do a great job of connecting various ideas and thoughts in peoples’ mind, and cutting-edge technology does the opposite: forcing its way into users’ mental models of the world with newfound utility and aesthetic design. Before 2007, the form factor of an iPhone was meaningless to everyone, greatly prompting the “I can’t use a device without a keyboard” debate of 2007 and 2008. Second, developing these technologies is expensive, and research funding is really hard to acquire unless you are building something for big-money industries like consumer products, enterprise products, or military applications. While we might get some more user-centric technologies out of cultural institutions, they would be developed and adopted much slower than their corporate counterparts, in my opinion.

My first reaction on this article is to the pictures. Gallery One looks similar to an Apple store at first. Large glass panes and spread out interactive devices invite visitors into mini-narratives, creating an emotional connection between a digital medium and a human. In this commentary, I’ll focus on one of the pieces that intrigued me more.

The Collection Wall brings together many forms of art, and I would love to see how it trades off the needs of curious technologists and art enthusiasts alike. I know these aren’t completely distinct groups of people, but I’ll polarize these two labels for the sake of the commentary and assume the technologist would be much more interested in the interactive nature of the piece (being able to manipulate a 40-foot display would defnitely be fun), while the art enthusiast might not want to leave a particular piece of art until it has had a significant enough impact (or lack thereof) on their own thoughts. I particularly enjoyed the jukebox analogy since it makes the artwork seem much more alive, but it falls a bit short since its control seems to be much more distributed than a jukebox, since it is managed from a freely available app.