Interactive Displays 2009 – Free Pass!

Interactive Displays 2009 will take place April 21 – 23, 2009, in San Jose, California. The conference “will bring together the interactivity community to discover advances in technologies from multi-touch to holography, and haptics to gestures…”. The organizers are kindly offering one free pass to Magical Mirrors Blog readers:

“IntertechPira is offering the chance for one Magical Mirrors Blog reader to attend the Interactive Displays 2009 conference in San Jose, CA this April absolutely free. Simply send an email to Joan stating that you would like to be entered in the drawing for the free pass. A name will be picked April 1st and announced on this site as well as IntertechPira’s event website www.int-displays.com.”

Unfortunately, i cannot attend myself, but if one of you does, you are welcome to post / comment some conference highlights.

Crossing Boundaries

The Networked City

The network is the new urban location. Inside the network we’re no longer tied to geographical places but to inter-connectivity and bandwidth. If we want to move from one place to another we don’t need pathways and doors, we move along network connections. The ability to connect defines an ever-increasing part of our lives: “connectivity has become the defining characteristic of our twenty first-century urban condition.“ [1] In networks of various types and sizes we play various network roles. Today, the network, rather than the enclosure, is emerging as the desired place. Connectivity is becoming the central condition of our globalized world.

No more „here and now“

With the advent of omnipresent interconnectivity we’re living in an age of globalized network-time in which traditional concepts of “here“ and “now“ no longer have meaning. Digital interconnectivity has led to the existence of a networked parallelism. Daily behaviors are fragmented: “they are no longer bounded by walls, but by the reach of our networks” [1]

For some time physical proximity no longer defines the scope of our actions and social interactions. More and more, social networks are characterized as “dynamic patterns of presence”; group affiliation is experienced as a dynamic construct via electronic networks.

Crossing boundaries

Networks are the new vehicles we use to link ourselves together. It follows thus: we cannot connect without also separating. In order to maintain our distance from people we don’t know, we enclose ourselves within a variety of boundaries. Countries, cities, houses, rooms, clothes or even social or cultural boundaries all function as semi-permeable filters that determine what we let in and what we don’t. Only our network-connections have allowed us to transcend these physical barriers. Connection crosses boundaries. Yet only those who have access to the network – an access point – can connect to it. “Our networks [...] have well-defined access points, and between these points things are in a kind of limbo.” [1] We can only experience networks at their interfaces.

The spread of urban displays

Following the global inter-linking of computers, the digitalization of physical space has now begun: “At the beginning of the twenty first century the research agendas, media attention, and practical applications have come to focus on a new agenda – the physical – that is, physical space filled with electronic and visual information.” [3]