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Author: shannon
Another Publication Opportunity: The Spectre of Artificial Intelligence
Call for Papers #6: ‘The Spectre of Artificial Intelligence’
Over the last years we have been witnessing a shift in the conception of artificial intelligence, in particular with the explosion in machine learning technologies. These largely hidden systems determine how data is gathered, analyzed, and presented or used for decision-making. The data and how it is handled are not neutral, but full of ambiguity and presumptions, which implies that machine learning algorithms are constantly fed with biases that mirror our everyday culture; what we teach these algorithms ultimately reflects back on us and it is therefore no surprise when artificial neural networks start to classify and discriminate on the basis of race, class and gender. (Blockbuster news regarding that women are being less likely to get well paid job offers shown through recommendation systems, a algorithm which was marking pictures of people of color as gorillas, or the delivery service automatically cutting out neighborhoods in big US cities where mainly African Americans and Hispanics live, show how trends of algorithmic classification can relate to the restructuring of the life chances of individuals and groups in society.) However, classification is an essential component of artificial intelligence, insofar as the whole point of machine learning is to distinguish ‘valuable’ information from a given set of data. By imposing identity on input data, in order to filter, that is to differentiate signals from noise, machine learning algorithms become a highly political issue. The crucial question in relation to machine learning therefore is: how can we systematically classify without being discriminatory?
In the next issue of spheres, we want to focus on current discussions around automation, robotics and machine learning, from an explicitly political perspective. Instead of invoking once more the spectre of artificial intelligence – both in its euphoric as well as apocalyptic form – we are interested in tracing human and non-human agency within automated processes, discussing the ethical implications of machine learning, and exploring the ideologies behind the imaginaries of AI. We ask for contributions that deal with new developments in artificial intelligence beyond the idiosyncratic description of specific features (e.g. symbolic versus connectionist AI, supervised versus unsupervised learning) by employing diverse perspectives from around the world, particularly the Global South. To fulfil this objective, we would like to arrange the upcoming issue around three focal points:
- Reflections dealing with theoretical (re-)conceptualisations of what artificial intelligence is and should be. What history do the terms artificiality, intelligence, learning, teaching and training have and what are their hidden assumptions? How can human intelligence and machine intelligence be understood and how is intelligence operationalised within AI? Is machine intelligence merely an enhanced form of pattern recognition? Why do ’human’ prejudices re-emerge in machine learning algorithms, allegedly devised to be blind to them?
- Implications focusing on the making of artificial intelligence. What kind of data analysis and algorithmic classification is being developed and what are its parameters? How do these decisions get made and by whom? How can we hold algorithms accountable? How can we integrate diversity, novelty and serendipity into the machines? How can we filter information out of data without reinserting racist, sexist, and classist beliefs? How is data defined in the context of specific geographies? Who becomes classified as threat according to algorithmic calculations and why?
- Imaginaries revealing the ideas shaping artificial intelligence. How do pop-cultural phenomena reflect the current reconfiguration of human-machine-relations? What can they tell us about the techno-capitalist unconscious? In which way can artistic practices address the current situation? What can we learn from historical examples (e.g. in computer art, gaming, music)? What would a different aesthetic of artificial intelligence look like? How can we make the largely hidden processes of algorithmic filtering visible? How to think of machine learning algorithms beyond accuracy, efficiency, and homophily?
Deadlines
If you would like to submit an article or other, in particular artistic contribution (music, sound, video, etc.) to the issue, please get in touch with the editorial collective (contact details below) as soon as possible. We would be grateful if you would submit a provisional title and short abstract (250 words, max) by 15 May, 2018. We may have questions or suggestions that we raise at this point. Otherwise, final versions of articles and other contributions should please be submitted by 31 August, 2018. They will undergo review in accordance with the peer review process (s. About spheres). Any revisions requested will need to be completed so that the issue can be published in Winter 2018.
Contact
Inga Luchs: inga.luchs@leuphana.de
Original post here
Publication Opportunity: Tech in Community Building, Tech as Equity Advocate…
From Judeth Choi @ CMU:
.
I’m writing today as an editor of ACM’s student magazine XRDS (like CACM but for students http://xrds.acm.org/).
The fall issue is on “The Computer Scientist.” We’ll investigate what a computer scientist is and the values inherent in technical problem solving, as well as ask questions about the role of the computer scientist in society, how that changes in different contexts and when different people take on the role.
We’d love for you (or your colleagues/students/community partners at the Digital Equity Lab) to contribute an article. I am particularly interested in the computer scientist as community builder or as a partner with community builders (What do community builders want from computer scientists? How can computer scientists be good partners?), but am also very interested in any perspective that asks what it means to advocate and fight for equity while navigating the technology sector.
Some quick details: Articles are by invitation, and may cover previously published findings and ideas (in fact, a higher-level synthesis and broader view is encouraged). Articles are roughly ~2500 words long and are archived in the ACM Digital Library.
If you’re interested we’d need to know in the next couple of days (please do let me know either way). The deadline for articles is June 4. We’d be happy to provide any further information.
If you are not available, but have suggestions of colleagues who may be interested in contributing to the issue, please let me know!
Thanks for considering this!
Best,
judy
Futures Symposium: Sensing the City, NYU, April 26
For the first time in history, more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas. In just a few more decades, 70 percent of the world will live in cities. Enabling those cities to deliver services effectively, efficiently, and sustainably—while keeping their citizens safe, healthy, prosperous, and well–informed—will be among the most important undertakings of this century. In parallel to this growth, the volume, variety, and production rate of data—much of which is being collected by a variety of sensors—are unprecedented. If properly acquired, integrated, and analyzed, “big data” can take us beyond today’s imperfect and often anecdotal understanding of cities to enable better operations, better planning, and better policy.
Most data currently generated by sensors are used only for the purpose for which they were collected—for example to detect and control anomalies. However, given the breadth of data generated by sensors, there is considerable value in exploring best practices in creating and exploiting sensor network data for future re-use and immediate integration with other data. With the support of The Kavli Foundation and industry sponsors, NYU’s Center for Urban Science + Progress is proud to host focused and engaged discussions on emerging sensing topics with leading voices from across the US.
Sensing the City will engage the local community in exploring overarching challenges and opportunities as urban sensing capabilities and ambitions continue to expand, inviting participants across New York to join sensing luminaries from across the USA for a blend of talks and panel discussions on three core themes.
Agenda and registration info here
Call for Proposals: Smartness Conference, Eindhoven, Nov 15-17
15th Architectural Humanities Research Association International Conference
15th – 17th November 2018
Department of the Built Environment, TU Eindhoven
Smartness?
Increasingly the world around us is becoming ‘smart.’ From smart meters to smart production, from smart surfaces to smart grids, from smart phones to smart citizens. ‘Smart’ has become the catch-all term to indicate the advent of a charged technological shift that has been propelled by the promise of safer, more convenient and more efficient forms of living. When combined, all these so called ‘smart’ devices amount to a ubiquity of computing which is heralding a new technological paradigm and a fundamental shift in the way buildings and cities are both experienced and understood. Through a variety of sensors, cities and buildings are now defined not by the people that inhabit them, nor their functions, nor their identity or history, but simply as increasingly larger sets of data. Such sets are then processed to immediately adjust and alter (physical) conditions in real time. Although such large scale collection and use of (big) data has an inevitable effect on the way people live and work, there has yet to emerge a clear answer to how architecture and cities should respond and assimilate such brave new world.
Carried by both corporate and governmental initiatives the ‘smart’ paradigm has entered architecture and cities as a powerful force. Even as it indelibly reshapes our patterns of inhabitation, the particular ways in which the ‘smart’ paradigm affects architectural and urban debates, design practices, and our forms of living remains woefully under-analysed. An open question that gains further urgency and demands debate, as with each development the meaning of ‘smart’ becomes more diluted.
We seek to stimulate a broad understanding of ‘smart’ technologies – one that conceives them not merely as “efficiency oriented practices, but [as practices that] include their contexts as these are embodied in design and social insertion” (Andrew Feenberg, 1999). Such a broad understanding includes questions of responsibility, accountability, ethics, participation, knowledge (necessary to both produce and participate), and many more. Effectively, beyond comfort, safety and efficiency – how can ‘smart design and technologies’ assist to address current and future challenges of architecture and urbanism?
Conference website and CFP here
Migration + Mobility in a Digital Age: April 10-11
Migration and Mobility in a Digital Age: Paradoxes of Connectivity and Belonging Conference
Heyman Center @ Columbia University
April 10-11, 2018
The image of Syrian refugees with a smartphone shooting ‘selfies’ upon reaching dry land has captured the international imagination (Chouliaraki, 2017; Kunstman, 2017; Risam, forthcoming 2018). It suggests an image of the ‘connected migrant’ (Diminescu, 2008), which is shaped by a profound ambivalence: migrants are expected to be people fleeing from war, violence, and poverty; they are not expected to be ‘digital natives’, equipped with technologies to navigate their difficult journeys. While smartphones are accessible, affordable, and easy to use, in the realm of the public imaginary the image of the disenfranchised and disconnected migrant remains that of the ‘have nots’, and therefore subject to ‘high tech orientalism’ (Chun, 2006, p. 73). This posits the figuration of the migrant as outside the realm of development and modern forms of communication, disenfranchised and vulnerable in order to be worthy of international aid and pity (Boltanski, 20000; Ticktin, 2008). And yet smartphones are ubiquitous, and migrants have been early adopters and heavy users of technologies for the simple reason that these technologies are ingrained in their daily practices and everyday lives, which often involve perilous crossings but also the need to keep in touch with the home front and their diasporic communities. The promise of connectivity that is guaranteed even under duress becomes fraught with the profound disconnection brought about by the disciplining gaze of Western media and publics.
It is, therefore, crucial to focus on the specific way in which digital technologies bridge or magnify the gap in migration between geographical distance and digital proximity. How are affect, intimacy, and belonging negotiated online in the face of forced migration and expulsions (Sassen, 2012) but also of circular migration, expatriation, and transnational movements?
This conference aims to cover a broad range of conflict-related issues on migration in a digital age. Using the latest insights from a range of interdisciplinary fields, it will explore theories of displacement such as diaspora, cosmopolitanism, and nomadism, and the transformations brought about by the digital revolution, through the analysis of virtual communities, social media platforms, and digital activism. It will also focus on media production and the regulation of information on forced migrants in a ‘post-truth’ era: fake news; the humanitarianism-securitization nexus, migration management, social and political conflicts related to migrant and diaspora communities, radicalization and online counter-terrorism, hate speech and racism, but also solidarities, activism, and protest.
For the schedule and RSVP info
Image: Bouchra Khalili
Four Months of Harun Farocki @ NYU and Anthology
April 8 – July 15, 2018
Over the next four months, 80 Washington Square East and Anthology Film Archives will screen films and videos by Harun Farocki. Screenings will take place first at Anthology Film Archives and later at New York University.
Harun Farocki was born in 1944. He lived in India and Indonesia before moving with his family to Germany at age 10. In his early twenties, he left for West Berlin to further his studies in cinema, and spent most of his working life there. By the time of his death in 2014, he had a prolific body of films to his name. Laboring under the burden of Europe’s history, a history in which the Holocaust loomed large, Farocki was a naturalist of loss. One’s ability to forget what they do not want to know, to overlook what is before them, was seldom put to the test better than in Germany’s reconstruction after the Second World War. The writer W.G. Sebald said that postwar Germany was “an almost perfectly functioning mechanism of repression.” Farocki, on the other hand, did not sweep things under the rug. His work, often graceful in its observations, was never far from the injury of our world. “He was endlessly patient,” Antje Ehmann wrote, “with the strangeness, the beauty, the stupidity, and even the unbearable cruelness of our world.”
His films often track the effects that free markets, war, and their attendant technologies have on the individual. His films invariably reflect on the methods we use to construct and distribute images and the uses to which these images are put. Frequently, he went to places of focused production – a prison, a virtual reality facility used to train soldiers, a commercial photo shoot – and managed to describe the abstractions, the rules, the exercises and negotiations of power behind the surface of such images. About his method, Farocki once remarked, “My maxim was: I tell a company that the movie is an advertisement for what they are doing and tell the TV station [Farocki’s employer] that the film is a criticism of this practice. And try not to do either one or the other.”
Launch Party: LOGIC Magazine’s SCALE Issue, April 26
LOGIC MAGAZINE ISSUE 04: SCALE
7PM – WED APR 25, 2018
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC – LIBERTY HALL, NEW YORK
Logic is a magazine about technology that comes out three times a year. Tonight we celebrate one of those times, the issue number is 04 and the prompt is Scale.
Talks include:
K. Sabeel Rahman on new tech monopolies and how to tame them
Nina Sparling on “open-source agriculture”
Ross Perlin on small languages, smartphones and the internet
Moira Weigel on #MeToo, the death of print media, and the structure of the internet
Ben Tarnoff on how data got “big”, and how we might democratize it
This event is organized by Logic Magazine. For the latest news and updates, check out their event page. Please note RSVP here is required to attend and your email may be shared with Logic for a one-time opt in request.
The Help-Yourself City, Book Launch Monday 3/26 @ 6pm at NYU
Logistics + RSVP on the Institute for Public Knowledge website
NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge invites you to join for the launch of Gordon Douglas’s The Help-Yourself City: Legitimacy and Inequality in DIY Urbanism. The author will be present in conversation with Caroline Lee and Harvey Molotch.
When local governments neglect public services or community priorities, how do concerned citizens respond? In The Help-Yourself City, Gordon Douglas looks closely at people who take urban planning into their own hands with homemade signs and benches, guerrilla bike lanes and more. Douglas explores the frustration, creativity, and technical expertise behind these interventions, but also the position of privilege from which they often come. Presenting a needed analysis of this growing trend from vacant lots to city planning offices, The Help-Yourself City tells a street-level story of people’s relationships to their urban surroundings and the individualization of democratic responsibility.
Gordon C. C. Douglas is Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Director of the Institute for Metropolitan Studies at San José State University. He is a multidisciplinary urbanist whose work sits at the intersection of urban political-economy, community studies, and cultures of planning and design. Prior to joining the Dept. of Urban and Regional Planning at San José State, he was the Rebuild by Design Postdoctoral Fellow at New York University, where he also served as Associate Director (2015-2016) and Acting Director (2016-2017) of the Institute for Public Knowledge.
Caroline W. Lee is Professor of Sociology in the Anthropology & Sociology Department at Lafayette College. She is a comparative institutional sociologist with research and teaching interests in the following areas: political sociology, social movements, economic sociology, law, sociology of knowledge and culture, urban and environmental sociology, and research methods. She is the author of Do-It-Yourself Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2015) and an editor of the volume Democratizing Inequalities (NYU Press, 2015).
Harvey Molotch is Professor of Sociology and Metropolitan Studies at New York University. His writings focus on cities with special attention to economic development, urban security, artifacts, and product design. He is the author of several books including Against Security: How We Go Wrong at Airports, Subways and Other Sites of Ambiguous Danger (Princeton University Press, 2012), and Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computers and Many Other Things Come to Be as They Are (Routledge, 2003).
Being in Two Places at Once: Art + Geopolitics of Remote Sensing, 3/20 @ NYU
Being in Two Places at Once: Art and the geopolitics of remote sensing
Tuesday 20 March 2018 — 9:30am – 7pm
NYU Tisch Dean’s Conference Room
721 Broadway, 12th Floor
See Tisch website for Program + RSVP
Scales and subjectivities of vision and photography are transforming under the influence of remote-sensing arrays, machine visions, and global observation systems. Computational and composite photography capture not just an image in time, but also in space, permitting 1:1 digitization and replication of spatial objects, bodies, and landscapes. Remote sensing offers at once extended apparatuses of viewing, feeling, and operating in the world, as well as expanded dynamics of population control. These large-scale spatial mapping technologies are primarily deployed, administered, and understood by economically dominant world powers and multinational scientific consortia. Asymmetrical power relations are thus reproduced and amplified at the planetary scale. There is an urgency for these images and models to be legible to wider publics and constituencies than solely at the levels of industry, military, and governance.
How can artists operate within these scales of perception for new imaginative and political potential? What kinds of interventions, trespasses, transformative subjectivities are occurring through the deliberate decolonization and appropriation of networks of remote sensing by those on the peripheries of power?
Model Cities Program @ UnionDocs, Thursday March 15 @ 7:30pm
Thursday, Mar 15 at 7:30 pm
What is the Model City?
Screening to be followed by a presentation by Susanne Schindler and a discussion with Schindler, Gordon Hyatt, and Rebecca Amato.
What was the Model Cities program and why have so few people heard about it? Join architect and historian Susanne Schindler as she explains the origins, trajectory and legacies of the Great Society program launched in 1966. Model Cities’ goal was to improve the quality of life in the nation’s most impoverished urban areas by coordinating federal funding and community participation. Despite the best intentions, however, the program’s implementation was rocky. By 1970 it was considered a problem, and in 1974 it was terminated. New York City had three Model Cities Neighborhoods—Central Brooklyn, the South Bronx, and Harlem–East Harlem—areas that today are once again highly contested in light of municipal planning policies.
The program will include a screening of Gordon Hyatt’s never-before-shown film, Between The Word And The Deed, followed by a discussion with the filmmaker as well as Rebecca Amato from NYU’s Urban Democracy Lab.
New Custom-Curated Collection of Artists’ + Independent Publications re: Urban Intelligence
The kind folks at Library Stack offered to curate for us a custom collection of independent and artists’ publications related to Urban Intelligence. You’ll find it here. If you’re logged into the New School network, you should have access. Thanks to Benjamin Tiven!
Urban Digital Humanities: Design and Sustainability – Feb 27
February 27 6-7:30pm
NYU Center for the Humanities
20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor
Registration
Urban Digital Humanities: Design and Sustainability
Metropolis Now: A New Series @ The Atlantic
A new series on technologized cities at The Atlantic — including pieces on Sidewalk Labs’ Toronto project, China’s social credit score, etc.
Artificial/Animal Intelligences: Screening @ Anthology Film Archives, Feb 15
Screening | Andrew Norman Wilson: The Order of Ought
Thursday, February 15, 7:30pm
Anthology Film Archives
32 2nd Ave
New York, NY 10003
website
This screening, featuring videos and selections by Andrew Norman Wilson, presents works in which artificial and animal intelligence play a role in the production of images that emphasize alien perspectives for human viewers.
Wilson writes, “The works amount to an ethical disturbance in which the involvement of intelligent, amoral actors complicates a humanist legacy that understands the world as having been given for our needs and created in our image. From these revisionary vantage points, this stagnant legacy begins to contradict itself, amounting to an ecologically murderous, even suicidal tendency. Thankfully, I also sense an order of ought, a program for escape.”
PROGRAM
- Stan Brakhage, Mothlight,1963, 4 min, 16mm (preserved by Anthology Film Archives)
- Andrew Norman Wilson, Ode to Seekers 2012, 2016, 8-min loop, digital
- Yuri Ancarani, Da Vinci, 2014, 25 min, digital
Andrew Norman Wilson, The Unthinkable Bygone, 2016, 2-min loop, digital - Chimpanzee Enjoys a Cigarette, 2010, 34 sec, digital
- Jos De Gruyter and Harald Thys, Die Aap van Bloemfontein, 2014, 23 min, digital
- My Finger Family Rhymes, Funny Animals Swimming Race Animals INDOOR PLAYGROUND For Kids 3D Colors Animals Finger Family Songs, 2017, 5-min excerpt, digital
Tickets are available at Anthology’s box office on the day of the show only. The box office opens 30 minutes before the first show of the day. There are no advance ticket sales. Reservations are available to Anthology or Swiss Institute members. For more ticket information, please see here: http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/buy-tickets.
This screening is wheelchair accessible. For other accessibility concerns at Anthology Film Archives, please email lou@swissinstitute.net.
Andrew Norman Wilson is an artist based in Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions include Techne and the Decency of Means at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2017), Dreamlands at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2017), the Gwangju Biennial (2016), the Berlin Biennial (2016), the Bucharest Biennial (2016), Bread and Roses at the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw (2016), and On Sweat, Paper and Porcelain at CCS Bard in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2015). He has lectured at Oxford University, Cambridge University, Harvard University, Yale University, and UCLA, where he is now visiting faculty. His work has been featured in Aperture, Art in America, Artforum, Buzzed, Frieze, Gizmodo/Gawker, The New Yorker, and Wired. He has published writing in Artforum, e-flux, DIS, and a Darren Bader monograph from Koenig Books.
Right to the Smart City: Integrated Design and the Civic Imaginary”
Anthropology Lecture
Thursday, February 8, 6-8pm
Dorothy Hirshon Suite, Arnold Hall, 55 W 13th St, Room I-205
Beth Coleman, Associate Professor of Experimental Digital Media at the University of Waterloo will deliver a lecture: “Right to the Smart City: Integrated design and the civic imaginary.”
Abstract: In an age of smart technology, big data, and the concomitant threat of a surveillance society, how do we understand the citizen’s right to the city and how that right is manifested? In this talk, I discuss my research relation to the complexity of the sociotechnological world we inhabit through the lens of smart city infrastructures and interaction design. The term “smart” describes autonomous computational processes built into the physical environment, such as traffic lights that work responsively (as opposed to mechanically) to fix congested roadways. Smart technologies, such as those projected for a smart city, presents risks and opportunities in regard to privacy, social inclusion, and civic futures. The rights of a civic body and the civic imaginary by which these rights may be articulated speak to valuable, albeit complex, intersectionalities of civic culture, such as race, class, and territory that address critical issues of our time: urban density, income inequality, economic and political instability, population mobility, environmental stewardship, among others. My work directly addresses a recognized gap in the smart city research domain that “civic actors are not yet central to smart city design.” Equally though, my research—manifest in ethnographic fieldwork, data analysis, and speculative design—speaks to a recognition of a poetic city as a critical aspect of the urban imaginary that should not be left aside from the projected efficiencies of the smart city. I address modes of engagement across platforms, formats, and context that include big data analysis, augmented realty (AR) interface, distributed narratives, games & play.
Paging Urban Studies Undergrads
Perhaps you’d be interested in one of Parsons’ graduate urban programs? Check out the open house on Wednesday, February 7!
Rendered Cities exhibition @ Apex Art
Rendered Cities
organized by ANGL Collective
January 18 – March 17, 2018
Opening Reception:
Wednesday, January 17, 6-8 pm
Featuring work by:
Felicity Hammond
Lawrence Lek
Laura Yuile
In a society obsessed with the visual, there is an increasing tendency to mistake good images with good architecture. Perfect renderings printed on glossy billboards have not only colonized global cities, but are also used to approve, evaluate and sell new construction projects. These digitally constructed, imagined landscapes become real before reality: their shiny presence merges with the existing urban environment, masking the raw construction sites they overlook and forming a representation of a future city in citizens’ minds. And when construction terminates, finished buildings imitate the aesthetics of digital architecture, leading to a hyper-real experience of physical space, as well as a fixed idea of what life in the city should look like.
Rendered Cities will present newly commissioned works by artists Felicity Hammond, Lawrence Lek, and Laura Yuile, that address the future of our cities in light of these digital aesthetics, and investigate the political, economic, and ideological forces behind their proliferation.
Felicity Hammond’s work uses photography and sculpture to reflect on how digital representations of buildings become part of the urban fabric before their construction, and how these marketing techniques create the effect of a ruin in reverse when buildings are completed. A video essay by Lawrence Lek will trace the political symbolism of the skyscraper as the global repetition of an urban form and a contemporary manifestation of wealth and power. Laura Yuile will present an installation that will change throughout the duration of the show, which considers how familial structures and methods of living are sold to us via advertising and narratives of wellness and wellbeing.
Ways of Knowing Cities conference @ Columbia, February 9
Ways of Knowing Cities
Friday, February 9, 2018, 9:30 am
Wood Auditorium, Avery Hall
Pre-registration is now closed, the auditorium seating is first come first served. Registration does not guarantee seating. The conference will be live streamed to Ware Lounge in Avery Hall and online at arch.columbia.edu.
Please note, seating will be first come, first serve. Registration does not guarantee seating. The event will be livestreamed on arch.columbia.edu
Technology increasingly mediates the way that knowledge, power, and culture interact to create and transform the cities we live in. Ways of Knowing Cities is a one-day conference which brings together leading scholars and practitioners from across multiple disciplines to consider the role that technologies have played in changing how urban spaces and social life are structured and understood – both historically and in the present moment.
Keynote lectures by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Trevor Paglen
Participating Speakers
Simone Browne, Maribel Casas-Cortés, Anita Say Chan, Sebastian Cobarrubias, Orit Halpern, Charles Heller, Shannon Mattern, V. Mitch McEwen, Leah Meisterlin, Nontsikelelo Mutiti, Dietmar Offenhuber, Lorenzo Pezzani, Robert Pietrusko, and Matthew Wilson.
From John Snow’s cholera maps of London and the design of the radio network in Colonial Nigeria to NASA’s composite images of global night lights, the way the city and its inhabitants have been comprehended in moments of technological change has always been deeply political. Representations of the urban have been sites of contestation and violence, but have also enabled spaces of resistance and delight. Our cities have been built and transformed through conflict, and the struggle is as much informational and representational as it is physical and bodily. Today, the generation and deployment of data is at the forefront of projects to reshape our cities, for better and for worse. As a consequence, responding to urban change demands critical literacy in technology, and particularly data technologies. The conference addresses itself to the deep ambivalence of interventions in the urban, as it explores the ways that knowledge regimes have impacted the built world. In this sense, it seeks to catalyze more robust, creative, and far-reaching ways to think about the relationship between the urban and the information systems that enable, engage and express the city.
Please note, seating will be first come, first serve. Registration does not guarantee seating. The event will be livestreamed in Ware Lounge, Avery Hall and on arch.columbia.edu.
Support for Ways of Knowing Cities is provided through a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and hosting by Columbia GSAPP.