Geographers have long wrestled with the spatial characteristics of digital mediation. In this regard, ‘the virtual’ as somehow other and immaterial has proven a persistent trope. The aim here is to argue for a greater attention to the material conditions of the digital. This article revisits the articulation of ‘virtual’ geographies and reviews recent discussion of digitally mediated activity. To materially address ‘the virtual’, the fundamental relationship between humans and technology is investigated as ‘technics’, using recent work in the geographies and philosophy of technology. Observations are made about how this may inform broader understandings of spatiality and culture.

Within the development of technology, practices to`make futures present' often yield discursive and material products, in the form of reports, stories, and, of particular interest here, images. In this way, detailed depictions of possible worlds of technology use are produced alongside, and often instead of, materially manufactured prototypes. In this paper I specifically address the production of videos depicting imagined futures. I argue such videos are the means and media for rendering the presence of a future. These videos, when watched, rescript the``indeterminate potentiality'' (Massumi, 2007a, ½13) of the future by performatively establishing the presence of what has not happened and may, in fact, never happen. For example, as illustrated in the opening quote, in 2009 Microsoft's Stephen Elop espoused a future orientation, which he suggested is core to the company's strategy, through the medium of video. At its heart lies a process of foresight: literally and figuratively`envisioning' a future.Elop empirically demonstrated what he meant by``an inspirational view of what the world could look like five, 10, 15 years from now'' (Elop, 2009) by showing a video entitled``Future Vision of Productivity''. The attendees at the business conference at which Elop spoke saw a man standing in front of his office window, on which were displayed schematics from a current project (see figure 1). With a gesture the man sweeps them away, sits down at a desk, and begins to manipulate visualisations of information associated with tasks and people with his fingers and change perspective

This article addresses the discourse for a proactive thinking of futurity, intimately concerned with technology, which comes to an influential fruition in the discussion and representation of 'ubiquitous computing'. The imagination, proposal or playing out of ubiquitous computing environments are bound up with particular ways of constructing futurity. This article charts the techniques used in ubiquitous computing development to negotiate that futurity. In so doing, this article engages with recent geographical debates around anticipation and futurity. The discussion accordingly proceeds in four parts: First, the spatial imagination engendered by the development of ubiquitous computing is explored. Second, particular techniques in ubiquitous computing research and development for anticipating future technology use, and their limits, are discussed through empirical findings. Third, anticipatory knowledge is explored as the basis for stable means of future orientation, which both generates and derives from the techniques for anticipating futures. Finally, the importance of studying future orientation is situated in relation to the somewhat contradictory nature of anticipatory knowledges of ubicomp and related forms of spatial imagination.