C
I T Y O F D U S T The
urban ether swims with a billion invisible particles: the
residue of ash and aerosols, signals and light.
Drifting through the
city is the dust of industry
and history, and soon, if the latest technological promise holds, innumerable
specks of “smart dust.” Smart dust in the form of microscopic
wireless sensors will navigate through the skies, coordinating and radioing
the details
of an electronic urban ecology from mote to mote. In the city of wireless
communication, the dense atmosphere circulates not just with the dust of
firing messages,
but also with programmed debris that assembles in telepathic clouds of data. This “unstoppable
conversation” relayed from machine to machine
forms the invisible background to the wireless city. At the scale of dust,
the particles of wireless communication operate silently and invisibly beyond
the limits
of perceptibility. The exchange among machines transpires remotely, in the
dense opacity of ether, a space that gives rise to conjecture and imaginings
about
the telepathic correspondence among machines. Telepathy, or literally “remote
sensation,” occurs as invisible and instant communication beyond the
channels of sense. Such a form of communication aptly describes an invisible
city
that continually talks to itself, organized in what Marshall McLuhan would
call a “galaxy
of machines.”
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