thresholds - Home

Portability

Winnie Wong, ed.

Contents:

Introduction .pdf
Winnie Won Yin Wong
Food Comes First .pdf
Remei Capdevila Werning
“The New Object,” or “The Bongo Bowl Esthetic” (1967) .pdf
Stanford Anderson
Mobilis in Mobile: The Hunley, the Nautilus, and the Ethics of the Portable Atmos .pdf
James D. Graham
On Deck for Abortion Rights: Women on Waves Sails to Portugal .pdf
Susan Davies and Rebecca Gomperts
Free and Offshore: Saud Sharaf / Megaport .pdf
Nadia M. Alhasani
Cities of Ports: The Warehousing Act of 1846 and the Centralization of American Commerce .pdf
Gautham Rao
Max Kuo / Beijing Profit Recentering Project .pdf
Hijoo Son
The Geography Simulator: Plamen Dejanoff / Planets of Comparison .pdf
Mihnea Mircan
Joel Ross / Room 28 .pdf
Dina Deitsch
Xiao Xiong / Enter and Exit .pdf
Winnie Won Yin Wong
Broadcast Culture: The Fate of the Arts in the Space of British Radio (1927-1945) .pdf
Shundana Yusaf
Travels of the Carpet Myth: Retracing Owen Jones, Ibn Khaldun, and Gottfried Semper .pdf
Anneka Lenssen
Mobile Foundations: US-Mexico Construction(s) .pdf
Carlos Martín
Lalibela and Libanos, the King and the Hydro-Engineer of 13th-Century Ethiopia .pdf
Mark Jarzombek
“Ole Cloes” .pdf
Hanna Rose Shell
Disassembling the Cinema: The Poster, the Film and In-Between .pdf
Thomas Stubblefield

On July 1, 1979, the Sony Walkman TPS-L2 went on sale in Japan, ushering in an age of mobile privatization. Since then, the portability of cultural and informational content has become ever more portable: television consumers of today can timeshift with the TiVo and placeshift with the Slingbox, reminding us that TV, like fast food, need not be different everywhere.

More object-oriented than the concept of mobility, design for portability aims to maintain the coherent function, appearance, and identity of the thing transported: be it a lipstick carried in a purse, software moved to a competing platform, health care benefits taken to another job, or a Star Trek officer who needs to be beamed down to the planet. Thus, the pursuit of the thing's fidelity after transport and transfer is also a quest of translatability, enabling exchange and reciprocity in an age of translocational identity. Just as mobility and immobility encapsulate modern social dilemmas, portability encapsulates all things in transition between times and places, and the desire to make solid, truthful, and durable, all that melts into air. We are as much mobile agents, as we are porters of weighty baggage.