Below you will find the images that I produced to accompany the paper that I presented in Venice in December at the First International Conference on User-Centric Media. The paper was about the traditional behavioural and symbolic role of the hearth in the house and what the potential fate for this is in an increasingly nomadic age. The images hence represent three semi-whimsical attempts to imagine technologized portable hearths:
Nomadic spaces such as an airport waiting area can be very disorienting.
What if you could access your own personal existential grounding tool through your smartphone?
What if you could share that with others, creating a focal point for gathering?
Perhaps you could use this nifty little smartphone easel in order to do this.
Alternately maybe some sort of infrastructure is required in order to orchestrate communal gathering and sharing of narrative (creating cosmologies in common within which to situate us).
Couldn't this commuter infrastructure do with a little hearth?
Like this? Rather than everyone concentrating on their own little windows into their own little worlds, maybe they could all plug in their smartphones into this infrastructure in order to create something akin to a hearth where these disparate worlds could be blended, remixed into something new.
It could look something like this for instance.
Or maybe, rather than a fixed infrastructure, it could be portable, like this router.
This fabric router can be unrolled onto the ground, kind of like a picnic blanket. It would create a local network for digital communication between nomads and then it could create a shifting, dynamic image out of the information flowing through it. Again, our worlds are shared and remixed, sort of similar to the effect of sharing stories around a fire. . .
Perhaps such a technology could look something like this.
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