Continuum explores the notion of history. History is the sociopolitical, cultural, physical, mental, material and spiritual processes of action and reaction. As we see from Britain’s joining to the EU in 1973 to the current Brexit chaos, from the French Revolution in 1789 to the Yellow Vests Movement in 2018, from Korean’s March 1st movement in 1919 to the Candlelight Revolution in 2016-17, history is the entanglement of action, counteraction, narrative, counter-narrative, and reflection. Then, in the context of today’s era of computation, has the notion of history been reconfigured, altered or remained the same? What would be the most significant quality that will still sit at the heart of our history?

These questions engendered Continuum. 

It is incredibly easy to overlook how profoundly the world has changed over the last couple of decades with digital technologies. Kitchin and Dodge (2011) examined that our daily spaces are increasingly dependent on code, and thus computation creates new spatialities in our everyday life, turning the space into code/space. As such, computation is extensively and intimately woven into the fabric of our lives. Then have we really become ‘smarter’ than before with all these ‘smart’ aids of computer? With automation, data collection, pervasive computing, IoT technologies, we are actually losing our agencies ever than before and will increasingly lose it at the speed of light that runs through the fibre-optic cable if we would not recognize that our life is intensely shaped by the co-constitutive relationship between human, machine, and software. 

Continuum captures our history that is no longer fully comprehensible with linear temporality alone as it folds and unfolds by continuously expanding its spatio-temporal dimensions. In so doing, data and algorithm will be at the centre of the system, underpinning how history was and continue to be written. Therefore, it is hugely important for us not to be trapped in the computational, algorithmic abyss and to critically weave our history in this profoundly transitional time.

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