Locative Atmospheres: Practices in Networked Space

Smartphones and social media create locative atmospheres: transportable, affective spaces modulated by the data of our temporal, networked identities. How might these atmospheres form, and how can we consider them in interior design? The conditions of these locative atmospheres are emergent; our practices with technology evolve quickly, requiring an understanding of how they affect us that extends beyond specific devices and applications. Within this ever-evolving context, it is crucial that interior design students have a philosophical understanding of the ways that technology might intersect with humans and lived space. Atmosphere is a useful spatial construct to begin unpacking this relationship in order to develop a critical stance. How might technology entangle with people atmospherically? This paper will read diffractively around theoretical positions, looking for patterns that might help to understand how atmospheres might emerge through technology. Initially, it will introduce atmospheric practices as a way of orienting the relationship between humans, affect, and atmosphere. It will then consider how the practices of technology are implicated in this relationship through the formatted subject and computational models of mind that are controlled by algorithms within the data gaze. Intersecting these ideas with Karen Barad's agential realism allows that the practices of technology might be atmospheric, to view our engagement with networked devices as producing an ongoing archipelago of locative atmospheres. It will conclude by speculating on ways to design attentively in order to reconsider our entanglement with data-driven, networked technologies in lived space.