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Background:

As computation is made commonplace it becomes essential to consider the role of place. Once ascribed to specific geographic locations, place situated culture and tradition. Geographic attributions such as indigenous vegetation, topography and climate of the local region has traditonaly informed culture through an integrated systemic relationship. In places, communities assimilated diet, ritual, practice, language, and taboos as tactics to overcome the challenges of the land however, the places of today are remarkably different. Conditioned through a process of industrialization and urban migration, the unification of space removed the natural boundaries, and impose its own mandates. Economic efficiency and comprehensibility displace the traditional sense of Architecture as a ‘genius loci’[1]. No longer struggling against the forces of nature, cultural development had become an abstraction, frequently scripted in the forces of production.

The subject of this research is the proliferation of ‘non-places’, and the subsequent effects on contemporary public space. The ‘non-place’ defined by the anthropologist Marc Auge as “a space, which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity (Auge, 78); the ‘non-place’ folds into itself the simultaneity of “all other real sites” and takes on ‘everything-ness’, creating a space that is other by subsequently taking on a ‘nothing-ness’ that consists of an equalization or neutralization of ‘everything-ness’ by shear volume. (Auge).

Spaces associated with transition are paramount examples of non-place. Full of ‘solitude and similitude’ the spaces we inhabit today create a society of individuals isolated together. This Individualization renders it difficult to ascribe stable reference to any civic meaning within the Non-Place. Unable to participate to a collective end, the individual does not contribute signification and thus “the public space [simply] becomes a derivative of movement” (Sennett, 14). The ‘silence’ within the non-place is an indication of the individual’s tendency to be mute and deaf towards a larger civic group. Each individual is permitted to do as he or she pleases, but the nonplace does not ‘hear’, or remember the intervention. The individual ignores non-place; and likewise non-place ignores the individual.

The networked extensions of space and locative media are beging to question how place and non-place relateto each other. Mobile computing and participatory media allow a re-contextualization of ‘non-places’ using network technology to create connections to an unsettled ‘Digital Ground’ composed of multiple subjective histories. Distributed collaboration and community emerge through shared actions and values rather than shared territory. Architecture in digital place necessities ‘synchronization in which process and duration are just as important as form.’ (Bouman, 1996) Now mobile and site specific computing allows inhabitants to (re)insert significance into the spaces of everyday life. The proliferation of locative-networkeddevices creates an informational interface to a hybrid public domain.