About the Event

With predictions that around the world population concentration will shift to cities, the urban space has attracted considerable interest among researchers, architects, artists, and more. Urban spaces are increasingly ‘smart,’ where application of digital technologies convert cities into (supposedly) self-learning systems, such as automated traffic control. While proponents highlight smartness approaches and digitalization as a resource-efficient way to live in and govern the city, it is not always evident whose interests are served, or what issues may arise in the long run. Yet cities are not the only ‘smart’ spaces, and this points to two more recent trends: a shift in attention to the rural, and a growing smartification of those spaces beyond the urban. Researchers turn to smart forests, smart oceans, or smart agriculture as sites of techno-social-environmental change. When corporations are busy collecting environmental data, what implications does this have for contemporary and future developments? 

This symposium takes up these imbrications and diffusions, and seeks to put into dialogue scholars and artists to explore the social, political, cultural and environmental implications of the smartification of the city, the rural, and beyond. What can be learned from such cross-examinations both about the ‘smartified’ fields, and smartness itself? Through what other (smart?) media, art and interactive formats may we engage with these issues? The ‘Smartification of Everything’ is a hybrid event with an in-person and virtual component that consists of a symposium, an exhibition, and interactive events.

The symposium and exhibition are guided by the following provocations, which invite us to not only see connections between different fields – from the urban to the rural – but also between academic work and the arts:

How do ‘smart’ systems in the city differ from or relate to those applied to the forest, ocean, climate, or agriculture? Is this a mere story of technology diffusion from the urban to the non-urban, and if not, why and how?

What do processes of diffusion, adaptation and region- or local-specific forms of ‘smartness’ say about power relations? Do smart systems effectively challenge social and environmental inequalities, and what role does design play in these processes?

In cross-examining urban, oceanic, agricultural or climate settings, what can be learned about the very meaning of ‘smartness,’ and the specific digital technologies?

In what ways do such applications and systems norm smartness as technical property, and with what consequences? What happens to practices that are in contrast rendered ‘stupid’, and what may be the joy and refusal in such declared stupidity?

How do technology-smart systems reconfigure its object or sphere as in need of smart transformation; that is, how do smart systems render the city, agriculture, the ocean, the forest and environments technology-smart, thereby shaping epistemologies and ontologies?

What is an artificial ‘intelligence’ in the context of a smart city, forest, or ocean?

What Indigenous cosmogonies and alternative approaches, such as agroecological or forest-caring practices and principles, may be silenced as a result?

How does gender and race intersect with, or refuse smartness, and what does this say about the respective identities and properties?

What (raw) material and energy resources are required to set up smart systems? Contrasting them with such systems’ affordances for a seemingly more sustainable future, what is ‘smart’ about them?