Abstract
For some time now, my personal interest in artistic practice is that which looks to capitalize on what I call the "cracks" in our culture. In this I relate to those interstitial parts of society which offers possibilities to the practitioner for delivery of cultural content. These include screensavers, Personal Digital Assistants, intelligent agents and microcontrollers to name a few, and I gave a talk called "the next little thing"[1] in 1999 at the Invencao symposium in Sao Paulo, Brazil. In that presentation, I looked at these cultural gaps and how art that utilizes them challenge monumental and novel forms of technological art through utilizing 'small systems initiatives'. By this, I mean the use of small, inexpensive, or transparent technologies to communicate a cultural or aesthetic experience through a sense of personal engagement. My practical inquiry since that time has broadened to include information appliances, responsive environments and cybrids [2]. Such a practical turn makes visible that the inquiry into "small systems initiatives" is actually a journey into the exploration of a culture of computational ubiquity. In my body of research vis-à-vis the shift in praxis from the screen to the palm to the body to the space, there are issues of representation that are revealed through the way that aesthetic content is embodied through the interface. This interface may be a screen, dataglove, head-mounted display or responsive space, but each mode of representation illustrated by each display or input device indicates a unique space of interaction and expression, whether on the screen body, or reinscribed in space itself. As we consider the arc of praxis from screen to body to space, perhaps this may create some insight into how a culture of technological ubiquity will be constructed, and what modes of expression may emerge from such cultural forms and technological developments.