Ambient Intelligent Photography

The start point of this chapter is a phenomenon only recently referred to as ubiquitous photography. This phenomenon can be understood by means of two related but distinct contexts that we might summarize as follows: the networked computer and distributed, embedded, intelligent computing. The substitution of one context for another – of the computer as an object with computationally enabled intelligent or smart environments – is the goal of the still futuristic, still evolving project of ubiquitous computing. While I have explored the relation between ubiquitous photography and ubiquitous computing elsewhere, what I aim to do here is to track both the goal and the evolution of the ubiquitous computing project as it enrolls photography and strives to transfer – or, as Martin Hand suggests, ‘morph’ – it from a context in which it is everywhere to one in which it becomes, in Adam Greenfield’s term, ‘everyware’ (Hand 2012: 12; Greenfield 2006: 9).