Telepathically Urban

A medium is a medium is a medium. As the sentence says, there is no difference between occult and technological media. Their truth is fatality, their field the unconscious. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The urban ether swims with a multitude of invisible particles: the residue of ash and aerosols, signals and light. Circulating through the city is the dust of industry, a pixelated material history. But dust also circulates through the urban and technological imagination as a potentially " smart " material that shapes wireless sensor communication. In the wireless city, communication technologies have been described as " utility fogs " and " pervasive networks " as well as " smart dust " in order to capture the possibly miniscule yet ubiquitous extent of wireless infrastructures. While smart dust in particular has developed as much as a technology of conjecture as application, the notion of dust that circulates and communicates the details of an electronic urban ecology is pursued in this chapter as a resonant figure for imagining the transmission and sedimentation of signals in an urban context. Smart dust has been envisioned in the form of microscopic and drifting wireless sensors that coordinate radio signals from mote to mote. From clouds of signals to smart particles, the imagined wireless city becomes charged with invisible, instant, and