I am currently at Newark International Airport with two of our Ph.D. students, waiting at the gate for a United Airlines flight that will take us to Glasgow, Scotland. For the next week I shall be immersed in the world of the annual conference of SIGCHI (the Special Interest Group of Computer\/Human Interfaces, which is one of the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) SIGs (…)).<\/p>\n
Sorry, nearly got caught in a recursion there. Where was I?<\/p>\n
Oh right. Newark Airport. Looking around, I realize that I am situated in one of those odd liminal places that exists only to come from some other location in order to go to some other other location.<\/p>\n
This is a place, but not a “place”. After all, nobody is really here because they want to be here. In fact, they are here precisely because they want to be someplace else.<\/p>\n
Train stations, bus depots, taxi stands, these are all liminal places. But airports are different because of the sheer amount of time one tends to spend in them.<\/p>\n
The nature of air travel requires you to wait before you can depart — and sometimes to wait a very long time. Being in airports may be the longest amount of time that I spend essentially being nowhere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I am currently at Newark International Airport with two of our Ph.D. students, waiting at the gate for a United Airlines flight that will take us to Glasgow, Scotland. For the next week I shall be immersed in the world of the annual conference of SIGCHI (the Special Interest Group of Computer\/Human Interfaces, which is … Continue reading “Being nowhere”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21080"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21080"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21080\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21081,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21080\/revisions\/21081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}