Preface

Summary

Mundania started to take shape for me some years into the new Millennium. Google was quite new, and so were so-called social media. There were no iPhones. Advanced AI-generated content was considered as science-fiction. Pervasive, sensor-laden, networked and computational systems were talked about, but they were far from being part of people's everyday lives. I was working with mixes of art and cultural analysis, and one part of this work was associated with site-specific art and something that at the time was called locative art. We used digital equipment such as GPS-receivers, to make artworks that questioned ideas about geography, tourism and experiences of places.

Some years later, all the disparate equipment that we had been using was bundled into small rectangular slates of glass and metal: smartphones. These devices were continuously connected to socio-techno-economic systems that became increasingly hard to outline or pinpoint. Devices and systems were used daily, but were never really domesticated, tamed or under control. Instead, technologies were mundanized: they became part of everyday lives but were impossible to grasp. Pervasive digitalization and so-called digital transformation have never been about the taming of technologies. Not domestication. Instead mundanization.

What if this expanding mundanization is part of the gradual emergence of the realm Mundania? A shape-shifting entity. Mundania is something that gradually arises, like an all-encompassing haze that gradually sets as layer after layer of ever more complex technologies and offerings are presented. I have not been able to get rid of that imaginary. What if most of us live in Mundania, or rather in various guises of Mundania? The realm where new technologies repeatedly become ordinary. Where the very ordinary gradually mutate. The atmosphere thickens, new layers crop up.

While dealing with Mundania, while writing this book, I have been working as a researcher and as an artist. I have been based at the Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences at Lund University, an interdisciplinary environment at the Faculties of Humanities and Theology.