Ubiquitous Photography

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Philosophy of Photography

Volume 3 Number 2

© 2012 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/pop.3.2.331_1

POP 3 (2) pp. 331–348 Intellect Limited 2012

Keywords

ubiquitycomputingnew mediatechnoscienceambient intelligence

Sarah KemberGoldsmiths, University of London

Ubiquitous photography

abstract

What is ubiquitous photography? The article addresses this question and argues that ubiquity signals some-thing more than the proliferation and dispersal of photography into everyday life. Moving beyond the ques-tion of digitization and of new or digital media, the premise of the argument is that ubiquitous photography is inseparable from the claims and innovations associated with the wider field of ubiquitous computing. Here, photography and the photographic are realigned within the terms of the technoscience industries and their quest to generate ambient intelligent environments, automated systems such as face recognition technology (FRT), animated artefacts and augmented reality (AR). Employing a feminist approach to technoscience, the article offers a gendered, genealogical and interventionist critique of photography’s ‘everywhere’ status.

Ubiquity as everywhere

This article seeks to probe and extend our current understanding of the relation between photogra-phy and ubiquity. One of the ways in which we1 understand this relation is through digitization and debates on new or digital media concerned with the proliferation of photography in public and private life. Through this perspective, we have a sense that photography is no longer a discrete medium but

1. My use of the collective pronoun does not assume or imply any consensus in debates

POP_3.2_Kember_331-348.indd 331 5/23/13 1:07:38 PM

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one that has become hybridized through computer technology. Just as the identity of photography as a separate medium2 appears to have come to an end, the endurance of photographic codes and conventions, albeit in what Henri Bergson might refer to as ‘forms ever new’, is conveyed through designations such as post-photography (1998). Geoffrey Batchen argues that ‘over the past two decades, the boundary between photography and other media like painting, sculpture, or perform-ance has become increasingly porous. It would seem that each medium has absorbed the other, leav-ing the photographic residing everywhere, but nowhere in particular’ (2002: 109). He comments on the perspective of those who mourn the loss of photography’s (mythical) objectivity, compromised as this is said to be by ‘new photographic simulation technologies’ (Batchen 2002: 109). Where William J. Mitchell (1992) and Fred Ritchin (1991) may exemplify this perspective, the irony, Batchen suggests, is that – despite a certain forgetfulness with regard to decades of semiotic analysis and indulgence in the folly of technological determinism – it may not have been entirely erroneous. Photography ‘as a separate entity might well be on the verge of disappearing forever, even as the photographic as a rich vocabulary of conventions and references lives on in ever-expanding splendor’ (Batchen 2002: 109). To be post-photography therefore, is to be after ‘but not yet beyond’ (Batchen 2002: 109).

In After Photography, Ritchen revises but does not dismiss his own previous declaration that digi-tization would bring about the demise of photography: ‘photography as we have known it’, he writes, ‘is both ending and enlarging’ (2008: 15). It carries within it what for Ritchen is a symbiotic, possibly parasitic medium that is growing and evolving; namely digital photography. Digital photog-raphy, reassuring in its guise as photography as we have known it, spreads like a virus for Ritchen, infecting all aspects, scales and dimensions of contemporary life so that, as photographically medi-ated realities, everything from politics to particles is as manipulable as a pixellated image. That everything includes us: ‘we are also changed, turned into potential [manipulable] image’ (Ritchen 2008: 21). For all that he may have failed to correct conceptual errors regarding the presumed inno-cence of analogue as against digital photography and the transformative effect of digital technology per se, Ritchen’s understanding of ubiquitous photography does at least raise a vital question: that of the relation between photography and the life it invades:

As in the sciences, the very act of observing can fundamentally change an outcome, and so can also fundamentally change us. Inventing new media, whether eyeglasses of computers or digital cameras, to better explore the world has the unintended consequence of rendering that world in which the inventions were made passé. The new inventions allow, and ultimately force, the world in which they were invented to change. And the planet that these media were meant to explore is no longer the same for the very simple reason that these media observe it.

(2008: 45)

on photography or any related discipline. I use it in preference to what I consider to be more awkward indirect modes of writing.

2. We must wonder if it ever actually was given its complex historical relationship with other visual media like film and video and with other imaging technol-ogies such as telescopy and microscopy.



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The possibility that media, including especially photographic media, are shaping the world that they pertain to represent is a significant adjunct to their everywhere status. What then do we make of the widespread use of digital mobile photography in the Arab Spring – and of the concept of a Facebook revolution?3 If Facebook does not cause revolutions (because causes are complex and not just to do with technology), can we say that revolutions such as the Arab Spring happened in part because of Facebook, because the protesters knew in advance that their images (and/as messages) would be spread all over the world, almost instantaneously? Can we even say that the images themselves resembled all other images of protests and revolutions and that the events that took place were therefore knowingly or otherwise scripted according to what we normally see and expect to see of political conflict? It might seem contentious to suggest that events like wars and revolutions are designed to be photographed, but as Susan Sontag pointed out in her article on Abu Ghraib, this does not make them any less significant (2004). How also do we assign meaning to increasingly dizzying statistics like the 250 million photos uploaded to Facebook or the one million plus photos uploaded to Flickr every day? Erik Kessel’s 2011 exhibition ‘Photography In Abundance’ consisted of a room filled with prints of every picture uploaded to Flickr in one 24-hour period. If this visual mountain of images captured something of the scale of photo sharing and the sense, as the artist puts it, ‘of drowning in representations of other people’s experiences’ (Bond) then Charlie Brooker’s drama, The Entire History of You (2011) comments on the role of photography in what may soon become a fully recorded life. Here, the protagonist’s eyes double as both projection screens and cameras, continually recording every single detail of lives shaped or scripted for the cameras (Brooker 2011). Although futuristic, such a phenomenon is not new. Sontag wrote about photography before the rise of social media and argued that we have long lived in an image-saturated culture, a visual culture as well as a culture of celebrity (1984).

As a condition of postmodernity, we live our lives through, and perhaps even as images. We construct our actions and identities through images to the point where the ‘ontological gap’ between image and life effectively closes.

(Barad 2007: 47)

In the context of a visually mediated culture, it was always as if we were starring in our own real-ity TV show, our own fashion shoot or our own drama. Similarly, the media themselves have been consistently fascinated with this idea. In 2001 a film called Vanilla Sky, (dir. Cameron Crowe., Pareamount Picutes, LA) for instance, told the story about a man who modelled his life on films and album covers. As Ritchen puts it ‘even before the ubiquity of a billion cell phone cameras, we were already in rehearsal for the pose, the look, and a diminished sense of privacy’ (2008: 21).

3. Jeffrey C. Alexander has indicated that media had a perfor-mative role in the Egyptian uprisings (2011).


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Aside from the material as well as metaphorical alignment of politics, particles, pixels and people, Ritchen also characterizes life after photography in terms of processes of automation, animation, augmentation and ambience. Photography becomes automated when the machine offers to do it for us, ‘using face recognition to remind us with whom we are talking at a party, or recording what we missed when inebriated’ (Ritchen 2008: 163). It is animated by virtue of the representational trope of liveness – the illusion of movement and of unmediated vitality conveyed in part through the hybrid-ization of photography with the moving image. The once self-contained image can now be overlaid or augmented with information tailored to the viewer’s location and specification,4 and the digital camera itself ‘will be further absorbed into other devices’ including not only mobile phones but ‘refrigerators, walls, tables, jewellery, and ultimately our skin’ (Ritchen 2008: 143).

Photography beyond new media

At this point, photography becomes ambient, environmental and irrevocably tied to a set of discourses that lie outside those of digitization and of new or digital media. The proliferation and dispersal of photography after photography has, perhaps predictably, raised questions about photog-raphy theory (Elkins 2007) and produced arguments, including my own, for a more expanded and expansive discipline (Kember 2008). For me, this expansion exceeds an account of photography as a new, new medium: social, networked, user based, amateur, personal or even vernacular (Rubenstein and Sluis 2008; Van House 2011; Batchen 2002). The premise of this article is that ubiquitous photography is increasingly inseparable from the claims and innovations associated with the wider discourse of ubiquitous computing. Here, media are realigned within the terms of the technoscience industries and their quest to generate ambient intelligence (AmI), automated systems, animated artefacts and augmented reality (AR). I will analyse this quest by means of a feminist approach to technoscience that frames new claims and innovations – in this case pertaining to ubiquitous computing – in relation to historical ones, and that takes a broadly interventionist as well as gendered approach to technology.5 What is more, by focusing on face recognition technology (FRT) as a current example of the coevolving relation between ubiquitous computing and ubiquitous photog-raphy, I will show that photography is doing considerably more than crossing always unstable boundaries between public and private, professional and amateur realms. It is, rather, becoming part of a reordering of life under the cover of practices of media and communication that are deemed ordinary, every day, user based, personal, private and vernacular. In as far as photographic systems like face recognition are involved in the reordering and instrumentalization of life in relation to technology and capital, the advantage of an interventionist and genealogical approach is, in short, to be able to see where the technology has come from and to reject as inevitable the direction in which it is going. Precisely by addressing industry claims as well as innovations, a feminist

4. See the Layar app, for example.

5. Feminist technoscience studies are strongly influenced by Haraway’s interventionism. This is manifest in a call to technological arms, which in turn, is part of the project of ‘reworlding’ or generating alternative futures less-impaired masculinist forms of knowledge and power (Haraway 1991).



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perspective emphasizes the storied nature of technoscience and the possibility of telling the story differently (Haraway 1991).

In order to contest the possibilities of life after photography, we must move beyond new new media studies and its preoccupation with digitization and engage with the underlying rationale of the technosciences.

Photography as a medium has been addressed through competing definitions and characteris-tics of new media (Manovich 2001; Lister et al. 2003; Bolter and Grusin 2000). The characteristics of new media, as Lister et al. define them, are problematic in that they rely on conceptual divisions – between old and new, analogue and digital, active and passive, virtual and real and so on – that remain largely unreconciled (2003). Old and new, analogue and digital media are not divisible. They coexist in an ongoing, dynamic relationship of remediation that extends to the hybridization of media with other media and cultural forces (Bolter and Grusin 2000). This process of hybridization, which is not necessarily new to the development of new media, is what leads us to question the integrity of specific media such as photography. One characteristic of new media is interactivity, but interaction is only possible if we presuppose the existence of entities that can interact because they are separate and discrete – pre-existing their interaction. But, recalling the insights gained from tech-noscientific fields such as cybernetics, theorists such as N. Katherine Hayles have argued that tech-nologies and their users are – ontologically speaking – rather more entangled than that (2001). This entanglement, of what Lister et al. refer to as ‘biological and technological things’ is part of what is vital about all forms of mediation (Lister et al. 2009; Kember and Zylinska 2012). It does not neces-sarily result in the emergence of cyborgs, posthumans or other biotechnological objects/entities. But it does signal the ongoing evolution, or coevolution of humans and communicative machines that do not so much inter-act as ‘intra-act’ where intra-action ‘signifies the mutual constitution of entan-gled agencies’ (Barad 2007: 33).

The current entanglement of technologies and users belies the conceptual divisions that persist, I suggest, through debates on new media, social media and cross media. Where cross media desig-nates a primarily technological phenomenon whereby content is delivered across a range of platforms,6 social media, associated with Web 2.0 arguably over-emphasizes the role of media use and users. Geert Lovink has recently referred to it as ‘networking without a cause’ – networking for the sake of networking, photo and file sharing for the sake of sharing (2011). This, for him, rather purposeless proliferation of digital communication obscures not only continuities of predominantly commercial interest, but also an enhanced and renewed investment that is anything but organic, participatory or bottom-up. For Lovink, ‘social media as a buzzword of the outgoing Web 2.0 era is just a product of business management strategies and should be judged accordingly’ (2011: 6). It is, he suggests, a veneer of democratic participation covering over the revival of e-commerce. The veneer is effective since the ‘citizen-as-user’ is still embroiled in Flickr and Facebook and the

6. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossmedia#Further_reading. This is a designation that belongs primarily to industry while academic research is more focused on notions such as x reality, referring to media that cross online and offline realities (see Coleman 2011).


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‘networks without cause’ are still using up users’ time, preventing them from even knowing what they should be looking out for (Lovink 2011: 6).

What to look out for, I suggest, is a strictly non-organic, top-down entangling of technologies and users that exploits their agential intra-action in order to derive value from it. The strategy of the technology industries is indeed to revive e-commerce as Lovink suggests, but, more specifically by staking direct claims to relationality, sociality and an environment constituted by users and intelli-gent artefacts alike. Such claims derive from research in ubiquitous computing and materialize through discourses and innovations that through the media and communications of everyday life, seek to change the meaning of it.

Ubiquity as ‘everyware’

Ever more pervasive, ever harder to perceive, computing has leapt off the desktop and insin-uated itself into everyday life. Such ubiquitous information technology ‘everyware’ – will appear in many different contexts and take a wide variety of forms, but it will affect almost every one of us, whether we’re aware of it or not.

(Greenfield 2006: 9)

Photography after photography can no longer be theorized purely in terms of its – increasingly uncer-tain – status as a separate medium, albeit one with a distinct history, aesthetic and pattern of social uses. I am arguing that there is more at stake than its proliferation, diversification and dispersal in private and public, amateur and professional realms. It is almost as if the current emphasis on the vitality of photography – although empirically and philosophically sound (Van House 2011; Kember 2008) – is nevertheless an answer or reaction to the early, if unfounded, threats of digitization. Having appeared to be terminal, digitization emerges as life giving or at least as life enhancing, empowering an increasingly wide user base with an effortless, if not yet intuitive tool7 of self-expression and community formation. Clouds have certainly appeared on the ever-expanding horizon of photogra-phy, not least with the introduction of cloud computing and concerns about data protection and privacy. Without for a moment seeking to undermine legitimate legal concerns about intellectual property, copyright, data protection and ownership, and equally legitimate complaints about the small print, large-scale infringements of privacy incurred by users of Google or Facebook, I want to situate these within what I have referred to elsewhere as ‘the image and operation of total surveil-lance and marketing’ that is facilitated not by social media per se but by contemporary forms of technoscience that enrol specific media and by the legacy of ubiquitous computing in particular (Kember 2011b: 54). It is important to emphasize that in saying this, I do not mean to evoke any kind

7. See MIT’s sixth sense technology project for the ultimate in intuitive media (http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/ sixthsense/).



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of teleology or linear progressive history in which ubiquity is the end point of the evolution of photog-raphy. Ubiquitous computing does not supersede or substitute for ubiquitous photography but rather I will try to show how ubiquitous photography is in a relation of becoming-with ubiquitous comput-ing.8 This relation is, moreover, distinctly asymmetric, meaning that photography is now enrolled in an industry driven, top-down vision of networked, distributed, embedded and invisible computing that is totalizing, seemingly unstoppable and far more invested in photographic codes, conventions and rituals than in photography as an enduring medium. FRT will provide a case in point and also broadly corresponds with the key characteristics of ubiquity: ambient or environmental; augmented; automated and, to the degree that it draws on moving images as well as stills, animated.

What, first of all, does ubiquity mean outside of new new media studies?While the latter remain invested in the computer and the Internet, discourses of ubiquitous

computing are invested in the end of the computer and the beginning of computing. Networked, embedded computing generates an environment that is both social and smart. Mark Weiser’s semi-nal paper ‘The computer for the 21st century’ begins by stating that: ‘the most profound technolo-gies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it’.9 For Weiser, writing is such a technology and the premise of his paper is that computing should become as ubiquitous as writing. The key to achieving ubiquitous comput-ing, he suggests, is invisibility, a natural, user-friendly interface and the rejection of the sort of attention-seeking hubris marked by earlier developments such as virtual reality: ‘virtual reality focuses an enormous apparatus on simulating the world rather than on invisibly enhancing the world that already exists’.10 As the field develops through the 1990s to the present day, this sense that it rejects earlier forms of hubris in favour of more quotidian goals develops with it. For example, AmI is a branding and development of ubiquitous computing that places more emphasis on the social and environmental features that were already there. Rather than distinguishing itself from virtual reality, AmI seeks to differentiate its vision from that of artificial intelligence (AI), or rather, it seeks to constitute ‘an “AI” that could soon form a natural part of our everyday lives’ (Marzano 2003: 8). As a continuation of Weiser’s ubiquitous computing project, AmI strives to replace the computer with computing and to place the user – inconvenienced by having to adapt to the ways of computers – centre stage: ‘After fifty years of technology development for designing computers that require users to adapt to them, we now must enter the era of designing equipment that adapts to users’ (Aarts et al. 2004: 4).

User-centric computing requires a networked, distributed and embedded computing connecting ordinary artefacts and things within the environment of the home, city, transport, shop, airport or even clothing (Aarts et al. 2004: 8). Ambient intelligent environments ‘should be able to recognize the people that live in it [sic], adapt themselves to them, learn from their behaviour, and possibly show emotion’ (Aarts et al. 2004: 6). Embodying the key features of embeddedness, context

8. This notion of becoming-with is predicated on an understanding of agency – including technological agency – that is fluid, dynamic and relational rather than autonomous. It does not assume that agents are equivalent or in a relationship that is necessarily symmetrical in terms of power.

9. http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/SciAmDraft3.html.



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awareness, personalization, adaptation and anticipation, the overall vision of AmI is of a form of ubiquitous computing that is servile and ultimately all about ‘you’ as an individual user:

Personalization refers to adjustments at a short timescale, for instance to install personalized settings. Adaptation involves adjustments resulting from changing user behaviour detected by monitoring the user over a long period of time. Ultimately, when the system gets to know the user so well that it can detect behavioural patterns, adjustments can be made ranging over a very long time scale. For the latter we often refer to the classical Victorian butler, a person whom the family members did not know very well, but who knew the family members often better than they did themselves with respect to certain rituals or stereotypical behavioural patterns. So anticipation could help them just at the point where they concluded that they needed some support.

(Aarts et al. 2004: 8)

Lucy Suchman has reflected on the role of the butler artefact as a continuation of the master/slave dichotomy that marks the history of human–machine relations in both industry and popular discourse (2007). This dichotomy fuels an ongoing paranoia in those relations because the technolo-gies that serve ‘us’ can quickly revert into technologies that control us. The character of Hal 9000 in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (dir. Stanley Kubrick, MGM, LA) is a classic case in point, turning from a conversational, eager to please, chess playing, spacecraft flying companion into a relatively monosyllabic murderer and terrifying a generation of computer scientists into building technologies not like him (Stork 1996). The latest generation of technologies that seek to distinguish themselves from Hal sacrifice his level of expertise and autonomy for an intelligence that is more robust and flexible by virtue of being more relational. But what does relationality mean in this context? In AmI, machines designed to relate to and reassure the user may in fact have more to say to each other about the user.

Data relations in ambient photographic systems

In their contribution to The New Everyday. Views on Ambient Intelligence, John Cass et al. describe the home as an environment in which individual memory and history is externalized in ‘complex collec-tions of artifacts: books, images, letters, souvenirs, etc.’ (2003: 219). These artefacts acquire the status of an ‘extended self’ and act as triggers in a ‘cycle of self-reinforcement’ (Cass et al. 2003: 220). Relationships, demonstrated ‘through collections of objects and photographs in their space’, are merely part of this same cycle of self-reinforcement (Cass et al. 2003: 220). In another piece in the same volume, S. Marzano confirms that in this new manifestation of AI, all of the attention will



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be on us, rather than on machines that can talk, play chess and eventually turn against us. The tech-nology of AmI is thus positioned as chastened, humble, inconspicuous and servile. It will suppos-edly ‘recognise us, notice our habits, learn our likes and dislikes, and adapt its behaviour and the services it offers us accordingly’ (Marzano 2003: 9).

Suchman connects the behavior of such technology to the broader logic of the service economy, and recognizes its consistence with the main tenets of neo-liberalism as well as with the traditional master–slave dynamic. The paranoia of master–slave relations is refigured and even extended in AmI, which envisages artefacts and devices that ‘will also show their intelligence by communicating among themselves’ (Marzano 2003: 9). In AmI, such machine–machine relations thus enter the cycle of self-reinforcement in which the individual user is regarded as paranoid and insecure, and in which reinforcement answers a supposedly basic need for security, integrity and autonomy. Adam Greenfield argues that, in the context of AmI – or, as he puts it, ‘everyware’ – ‘relational’ refers to the fact that ‘that values stored in one database can be matched against those from another, to produce a more richly textured high-level picture than either could have done alone’ (2006: 81). That picture might be of you, and it might be produced for marketing or surveillance purposes. Equally, it might be of the variables affecting the price of your Starbucks coffee (Greenfield 2006: 81–82). Machine–machine relations create what Mark Andrejevic calls the ‘digital enclosure’, while at the same time enabling it to function (2007: 132). As far as Andrejevic is concerned, all of the interac-tions that take place within such an enclosure ‘are shaped by asymmetrical power relations’ and the dominant interests of commerce and/or policing (2007: 132). This is why it is important to offer a critical examination of the industry-led discourse of AmI that will recognize the asymmetries such a discourse seeks to conceal, while also avoiding any tendency to reproduce the very paranoia and technophobia on which it is based.

The asymmetries, or ‘dissymetries’, that underline human–machine relations, might be obscured and elided not only in an industry discourse of relationality but also in a critical discourse. A sense of relationality as the mutual constitution or intra-action of humans and machines, technologies and users was originally developed, Suchman points out, in the context of technoscience studies, as a ‘corrective to the entrenched Euro-American view of humans and machines as autonomous, inte-gral entities that must somehow be brought back together and made to interact’ (2007: 268). Yet, no matter how valuable this concept is as a critique and an intervention, the sense of relationality as mutual constitution should not be equated, for Suchman, either with the establishment of fixed ontologies or with the idea of relational symmetries. Instead, she argues that ‘we need a rearticula-tion of asymmetry, or more impartially perhaps, dissymetry, that somehow retains the recognition of hybrids, cyborgs, and quasi-objects made visible through technoscience studies, while simultane-ously recovering certain subject-object positionings – even orderings –among persons and artifacts and their consequences’ (Suchman 2007: 269).


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The contemporary environments of ubiquitous computing reorder subjects as objects (users as used) within a neo-liberal economic and political rationality. The emergent self, in the process of becoming data, takes part in a significant shift of the values that have been traditionally associated with subjectivity and citizenship, even while those same values appear to be reinscribed and rein-forced. AmI is therefore rather more hubristic than it appears to be, since the ordinary, everyday life of the individual it is producing, not least through practices of ubiquitous photography, is a chang-ing one, albeit retroactively reinforced and underlined. Photography is enrolled across the spectrum of ambient intelligent environments: domestic and urban, mobile and fixed. Weiser stipulated that ‘ubiquitous computers must know where they are’11 and photography now is key to this locatedness. Where Cass et al. (2003) pursue the role of photography as an intimate medium, Francesco Lapenta has shown how the photographic has come to co-constitute what he calls ‘geomedia’ that seek to map the world with increasing exactitude (Lapenta 2011).12 Examples include Google Earth, Google Maps, Photosynth13 and AR.14 AR as an overlayering of information onto a visual scene viewed through a mobile digital camera seems to fulfil Weiser’s call for technologies that merely enhance rather than replace or recreate reality. But as part of a phenomenon of ‘digital photographic mapping’ where one photograph ‘(and I wonder if this is still the proper name to indicate what this image is) is able to seamlessly merge many photographs of contiguous places taken at different times’ its function, again, may be more ambitious (Lapenta 2011: 17). Not only does it juxtapose ‘the photo-graph’s indexicality’ with ‘a heterogeneous and hybrid organizing principle, geolocality’ (Lapenta 2011: 18) and signal what William Uricchio calls an ‘algorithmic turn’ in visual culture (2011), it also stakes a claim to totality that requires reflection.

By offering a brief genealogy of the technosciences, I have suggested that ambient and augment-ing photographic systems undermine the story of a shift from autonomous to relational and from expert to user-centric technologies. FRT, as an example of a system that is also increasingly auto-mated, further undermines this story. In as far as it makes manifest a military-industrial quest for total surveillance and control it offers, through its very hubris, an opportunity for intervention. Such an intervention might exploit forms and fantasies of control by, for example, gendering them, under-lining the technological limitations of totalizing systems and offering alternative, more limited or ‘partial’ and decidedly less instrumental visions of life after photography (Haraway 1991).

automated face recognition

Ulrik Ekman points out that ‘whether in cultural theoretical or technical discourses, the terms of “ubiquity,” “pervasiveness,” and “ambience” come slightly freighted with a notion of totalizing universality’ (2011: 4). Similarly, M. Crang and S. Graham, in their article on sentient cities, look through the user-centric claims of AmI in order to reveal the dissymetries of commercial and military


12. Lapenta calls on Borges’ short story ‘On exactitude in science’ (http://cartographie-softheabsolute.word-press.com/2012/03/22/on-exactitude-in-science/).

13. http://photosynth.net/.

14. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_ reality.



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investment and examine the extent to which artistic interventions might disrupt ‘fantasies of perfect urban control’ (2007: 791). The extent to which those fantasies are made real is contestable. The technologies of total marketing and surveillance include radio frequency identification (RFID) tags used in a commercial context by manufacturers to track the location of products; global positioning satellite (GPS) technologies, monitoring and tracking devices; video cameras; closed circuit television (CCTV); sensors; speech-recognition devices and a range of biometric technologies including FRT. The limitations of some of these technologies are more severe than others. For example, FRT as a means of automating the recognition and identification of faces of potential terrorists, criminals and consumers alike is unreliable, producing a high rate of false positive identifications (Introna and Nissembaum). In fact, despite being consistent with the origins of facial identification in the police force and with wider disciplinary photographic practices of the nineteenth century that contributed to both social control and reform, FRT as a technology is markedly flawed. In response to this, FRT research is invariably oriented towards the problem of system accuracy and performance. Where performance is improved within ‘constrained environments such as the office or household’ it cannot be guaranteed outdoors and is also affected by the size of the database (Turk and Pentland 1991: 71). FRT fails to operate in conditions of poor lighting or when the target face is at an angle not commensurate with the standard frontal or profile mugshot. It is foiled by low resolution, excess facial hair and glasses as well as by expressions that resist classification and by the substitution of a face for a cardboard cutout (Kember 2011b). Such limitations are partly those of computationalism per se (how does a computer ‘know’ what a face is?) but they do not preclude the continued pursuit of reductionist computational logic or ‘the one code’ that, for Donna J. Haraway, constitutes the ‘central dogma of phallogocentrism’ (1991: 176).

Whatever its technological limitations, FRT remains productive, as I have argued, of faces recog-nized from nineteenth century disciplinary typologies and indeed of photography extended and transformed through its underlying codes and conventions. In addition to its reliance on frontality and flat lighting, FRT repurposes the composite portrait in the form of the ‘eigenface’. Francis Galton’s composites, produced by superimposing a number of images and eliminating extraneous facial detail were part of a disciplinary and highly discriminatory way of seeing (Tagg 1988). Eigenfaces, like composite portraits, compress data, eliminating unwanted facial information. They decompose the individual face into a type or template – of which each individual is then a vector. Identification is achieved by comparing the target face with a database of reduced or compressed facial images. FRT draws on a number of different algorithms, each with the ability to learn or improve over time (Turk and Pentland 1991). These include linear discriminant analysis (LDA) that produces known classes or types of faces against which a target can be assessed. It aims to maximize variation between classes and minimize variation within them and it is strongly reminiscent of, for example, Havelock Ellis’ criminal and sexual types produced in the nineteenth century (Etemad and Chellappa 1997).


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With this faulty, discriminatory, but nevertheless, generative status of totalizing and ubiquitous photographic technologies in mind, Ekman urges us to distinguish between ubiquitous computing ‘as a historically specific term denoting certain actual socio-cultural and technological developments during the last two decades’ and ‘the more metaphorically slanted terms “ubiquity” and “pervasive-ness” which appear consistently as idealities’ (2011: 3). My point is that the idealities are as, if not more, potent than the technologies themselves.

As a potent ideality, ubiquitous photography and its manifestation in, and as ubiquitous comput-ing, calls for a mode of theorization and critique that incorporates and exceeds the scope of its status as a medium and as a technology. The discourses and practices of surveillance and marketing enable us to foreground the socio-economics of ubiquity and its incorporation of biometrics high-lights its role in biopolitics. Biopolitics is M. Foucault’s term for the way that power operates at the level of individual and social bodies as well as, and in relation to the state. Crucially, for him, power is not a one way, top-down, state to subject process caught up exclusively with technologies of domination, but it is also negotiated by means of technologies of the self that are both restrictive and enabling (Foucault 2008). For example, FRT, incorporating a particular history and tradition of photography, might then be considered to be a technology of domination and of the self, simulta-neously limiting and facilitating what individuals can be and do in relation to a set of external norms. Its role is thus governmental, but by no means confined to the institutions of government. With its roots firmly established in the US departments of defense and homeland security (which continue to provide the bulk of research and development funding), FRT is becoming increasingly commercialized and somewhat controversially incorporated into forms of social networking includ-ing Facebook and, more hesitantly, Google. Using FRT, Facebook makes automatic tag suggestions to its users (600–800 million worldwide) as they upload photographs of friends. This ‘service’ is acti-vated by default (meaning you have to opt out of it) and generates lucrative volumes of biometric data destined for advertisers, app developers and so on. For Greenfield, the always-on biopolitics of ‘everyware’ technologies makes opting out desirable if difficult, and demands perhaps a more hands-on intervention in order to explore the possibilities of repoliticization (2006). I have argued that, in relation to FRT, face distortion apps such as Apple’s Photo Booth serve only to contain those possibilities within current norms (Kember 2011b). I would also challenge Crang and Graham’s suggestion that artistic practices are necessarily sufficiently distinct from those of commerce and surveillance to constitute a basis of opposition. Notwithstanding the appeal of projects such as Zapped, that ‘entailed fitting hissing cockroaches with RFID tags and then releasing them in Walmart’ or a biomapping project ‘about enabling individuals to make use of gathered information about their own bodies’ (Crang and Graham 2007: 806), it is also the case, as Ekman points out, that art is not only permeable to the rationality of ubiquity, but may even be one of the key constitutive sites of actual ubiquitous computing (2011).



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The question of critique

The status of ubiquity as everywhere, and as ‘everyware’ – albeit nowhere in particular – problema-tizes and therefore highlights the question of critique. In the absence of any obvious place or space of opposition (Laclau 2007), the liberatory potential of ubiquity surely lies, as Crang and Graham themselves come to realize, within the ‘inevitable granularity and gaps’ of ubiquity itself and the ‘shadows and opacities’ it produces (2007: 814). It is certainly the case that the claim of and quest for ubiquity is shadowed by the limited presence of particular devices that have, as yet, no overall coher-ence of design, infrastructure, public awareness or demand (Greenfield 2006). I agree with Ekman’s wish to emphasize ‘the multiple actual ways in which interaction designs for ‘ubiquity’ partake of infinite finitude’ (2011: 5) and like him, I query the extent to which the association of ubiquity with invisibility has been weakened in recent years (2011: 8) not least because the more intuitive and less-obtrusive the technology is, the greater the ease with which it is rendered ‘habitual’ (2011: 9). What interests me though, is not the transition or alteration between invisible and visible states of computing and computational devices, but rather the degree to which internal disagreement concerning the question of visibility is manifest as a contest over the fulfilment or otherwise of Weiser’s original goals. Gendered forms of science and technology studies have traditionally oriented themselves towards the paternalistic and patriarchal structures underlying scientific and technologi-cal innovation (Faulkner and Arnold 1985; Wajcman 1991). They are particularly alert to the role of ‘founding fathers’ and indeed disciples whose adherence to the father is a complex of scientific, spir-itual and social loyalties (Adam 1998; Kember 2003). Where the good disciple interprets, debates and preaches the word of the father/god, seeking to fulfil his vision of a world of ubiquitous, ambi-ent intelligent computing (Marzano 2003; Aarts et al. 2004) – and of individual agents made in his image – the good critic exposes not only this instance of omniscience but the pattern of omnipo-tence fantasies and paternalisms that recur throughout the technosciences from cybernetics (Hayles 1999) to AI (Adam 1998) to artificial life (ALife) (Kember 2003; Helmreich 1998) and onwards. My feminist genealogical approach to technoscience has also enabled me to track shifts from artifice to ambience, to wonder about the sudden turn away from (all too visible) hubris towards the ordinary everyday life made artifice – informationalized, reordered as data and thereby marketized – that was always ultimately at stake. The goal of technoscience is never so much the creation of life-as-it-could-be as it is the recreation of life-as-we-know-it15 and yet the conservatism of current forms of human-centric computing is insidious, revealing old habits of dehumanization that die hard.

If, as I suspect, the technosciences with their dynamics of de and rehumanization, de and reter-ritorialization (Derrida and Stiegler 2002) overlap in complex ways with critiques concerned with these dynamics and with those of demystification and denaturalization then how do we stop the spiral – how, in a figurative sense, do we stop the spiral from forming the perfect double helix in

15 This, for me, is the central paradox of biotechnologies that close down, as they open up, possibilities for change.


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which action and counteraction, opposing, non-complimentary pairs join up to make one blueprint? Again, a genealogical approach reveals the extent to which developments in technoscience adapt to critiques – internal and external – of earlier forms. So, for example, evolutionary psychology softens the language of sociobiology and ALife is founded on alternatives to the top-down command and control, masculinist methods of AI (Kember 2003). AmI, as a form of ubiquitous computing, in turn seeks to demarcate itself from its more demanding and showy predecessors. Genealogies help us to knit the story together and by paying attention not only to the way in which the story is written but to the writtenness of the story, we may, as Haraway long ago suggested, discover the tools that we need to reinvent our (ordinary, everyday) lives (1991).

Christian Ulrik Anderson and Søren Pold are alert to the possibilities that exist in what they call ‘The scripted spaces of urban ubiquitous computing’ (2011). For them, the concept of scripted space highlights ‘the written, coded quality of ubicomp’ as a technology that is not so much seamless and invisible as messy, cultural and opaque (Anderson and Pold 2011: 1). Citing G. Bell and P. Dourish, they point to the ‘many parallel technologies, networks, gadgets, and software developments’ that have become part of various cultural scripts surrounding, for example, mobiles, social media and Web 2.0 (2007: 1). Where the script is understood to reside at the level of software and of algo-rithms, it remains, they suggest, unreadable to most users who nevertheless experience its effects alongside the perhaps more readable signs of architecture, visual media, street signs and so on (Bell and Dourish 2007: 2). Literary and science fiction authors16 have evoked our experience of those effects and where Anderson and Pold remain focused on the possibilities of creating or hacking code, I would want to widen the field of writing to include fiction, architecture, visual media, includ-ing photography and other cultural forms – including forms of technoscience that can be consid-ered, in Roland Barthes’ terms, not only readerly but writerly (1970), not only programmed but programmable. Rather than consisting of a point of opposition, writing constitutes both the grain and the gap of ubiquitous, ambient environments. It connects Weiser’s seminal text with works of fiction that precede and succeed it. One such work that precedes Weiser’s is Philip K. Dick’s novel UBIK, a parody of talking doors that demand cash for opening and closing (2004). These may or may not be being realized through developments in ubiquitous computing17 but remain, nevertheless, entangled with current industry visions within which they tell an entirely different story about ubiq-uity; one that is always already a form of dissent.

It is worth noting that Weiser was so enamoured of writing as a model for ubiquitous computing that he told a story of his own. This story, like a number that have come after it (Briere and Hurley 2007), features a woman, in this case called Sal, and her adventures with ubiquitous computing at home as at work. Regardless of whether or not it is a good story (it is not) it is consistent with those that date from the 1950s onwards and involve women embracing technologies that promise to save labour and instead both multiply and regulate it (Kember and Zylinska 2012). Weiser himself is aware that

16. They cite Thomas Pynchon, but see also Don DeLilo, Paul Auster, Phillip K. Dick, etc.

17. Greenfield also refers to treacherous toilets (research and develop-ment into smart toilets taking place in Japan) and these feature in my own forms of writing (Greenfield 2006; Kember 2011a).



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technologies of convenience become inconvenient when placed ‘in the wrong hands’ of ‘overzealous government’ and ‘even marketing firms’ (1991: 8). Writers of non-celebratory science fiction such as Dick already knew this, and so one intervention that can meaningfully be made is writing not as a model for ubiquitous computing in the way that Weiser intended, but as an alternative form of it.

What are the implications then for ubiquitous photography as a form and process of ubiquitous computing? Once we have thought through from its everywhere to its ‘everyware’ status, we might more easily observe the fallacy of claims regarding use and user-centrism, and perhaps derive purpose from the proliferation of the photographic, based not on sharing for the sake of sharing but on writing for the sake of rewriting. As Alex Juhasz18 has commented on the increased use of social media, it is not enough to make it, or take it, or share it or use it if it lacks a critique of current forces of control and consumption. A writerly approach to ubiquitous photography constitutes one poten-tial mode of creative critique and an alternative to the current industry vision.

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Suggested citation

Kember, S. (2012), ‘Ubiquitous photography’, Philosophy of Photography 3: 2, pp. 331–348, doi: 10.1386/pop.3.2.331_1

Contributor details

Sarah Kember is Professor of New Technologies of Communication at Goldsmiths, University of London. She coedits the journal Photographies and her most recent publication (with Joanna Zylinska) is Life After New Media. Mediation as a Vital Process (MIT, 2012).

Contact: Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London SE14 6 NW, UK.E-mail: [email protected]

Sarah Kember has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.


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Ubiquitous Photography