34 Portability

Globalization is often portrayed as hyper-mobility across spaces of heterogeneity. In this imaginary landscape, unfettered movement, seamless translation and complete reciprocity reign. Such an utopia requires impossibly totalizing and instantaneous objects, things like universal translators and total-information computers. But whether unleashed in reality or in science fiction, mobile objects quickly become encumbered by quotidian problems: “Roaming” frustrates.

thresholds 34 situates portability—the fidelity of function across cultures, languages, platforms, spaces—as a central design problem of the mobile age. Art, Architecture, and Design, can respond to the fictions of the mobile in both critical and productive ways. Our contributors probe the historical roots of free exchange, explore the contradictions unleashed by mobile objects and concepts, create portable solutions, or use portable objects themselves to investigate place-based constructs, transactions, or politics.

 

35
Residual

34
Portability

33
Form(alism)

32
Access

31
Ephemera

30
Microscosms

28
Baroque

27
Exploration

26
Denatured

25
Sacrosanct

23
Deviant

22
Fashion

20
Be-longing

19
The Invisible

16
Speed. IMPACT. Change

14
Landscape and the Environment