Panel #1: Smartness in Progress
A collection of artwork and presentations
Panel image artwork by Moreschi and Pereira
Future Movement Future REJECTED / Bruno Moreschi, University of São Paulo; Gabriel Pereira, London School of Economics, Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research
In a not too distant future, an anonymous researcher and their team applied for funding to develop their newest invention: a new algorithmic model for smart cameras which would allow an analysis of the movement of cars at a previously unheard-of scale. This system was said to enable new forms of predictive capabilities to emerge: the algorithm would be able to, for example, predict the route drivers wanted to take but had not yet taken – including, for example, their occult inner desires for getting away with a secret lover. A panel of academic reviewers from three different universities audited and reviewed the proposed system. All that is left are segments of the video report resulting from this meeting, which became an urban legend among technology researchers. The short film “Future Movement Future – REJECTED” is the story of a dystopian surveillance future that was barred by institutional refusal. Rather than heeding to the imperatives of smartification, the uncontrolled expansion of smartness in our lives, the reviewers said 'no'. Their actions importantly remind us about how total surveillance, the “almighty algorithmic eye,” may end up seeing-predicting much less than imagining-dreaming. This project is part of a recent publication in Surveillance & Society Journal: https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/15126.
Bios: Bruno Moreschi is a researcher and multidisciplinary artist. He is a postdoctoral fellow at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo (FAUUSP), PhD in Arts at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), with a Capes scholarship, and exchange at the University of Arts of Helsinki (Kuva Art Academy), Finland, via CIMO Fellowship. His investigations are related to the deconstruction of systems and the decoding of social practices in the fields of arts, museums, visual culture and technologies. Projects recognized by ZKM, Van Abbemuseum, 33rd Bienal de São Paulo, Rumos Award, Funarte, Fapesp, University of Cambridge, and CAD+SR. Gabriel Pereira is a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (UK), funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark International Postdoc grant. His research focuses on critical studies of data, algorithms, and digital infrastructures, particularly those of computer vision. Projects with Gabriel have been exhibited in venues such as the 33rd Sao Paulo Art Biennial, the Van Abbemuseum, IDFA DocLab, and Itaú Cultural. He is a Researcher in Residence at the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research (CAD+SR). https://www.gabrielpereira.net/.
Sotheby’s Dead / Joel Secter, University of Ottawa
Joel Secter’s projects grapple with cultural politics and examine the way the gender binary and white cisheteronormativity structure our relationship to power and ourselves. He takes a conceptual approach to sculpture and installation seeking unity between the cultural and material. Working with found objects procured from estate sales and online marketplaces, Secter explores the multiple and layered meanings and histories accrued in consumer goods, bridging the gap between personal and shared experience. Sotheby's Dead is Joel Secter’s first work of Internet art that considers how the market for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) is encroaching on the traditional art market. Featuring virtual relics of Grateful Dead history that were auctioned at Sotheby's New York in the fall of 2021, Sotheby's Dead considers the hallmark of an NFT, how blockchain technology will impact our lives and the rules that govern access to property in the virtual world. For the full experience please visit www.sothebysdead.com.
Bio: Originally from Winnipeg, Joel Secter studied Spanish and traveled throughout Latin America and Spain before pursuing motion pictures. His film The Best of Secter & The Rest of Secter was awarded Best Documentary at the Whistler Film Festival and played on Sundance Channel, Independent Film Channel and CBC. He is a graduate of the Ottawa School of Art’s Fine Arts Diploma Program and currently an MFA Candidate at the University of Ottawa.
Urban digitalisation in the 'Global South' / Devika Prakash, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
With the global spread of 'smartness', smaller cities are increasingly adopting digital technologies, partly as a result of funds promised by national and supranational smart city projects. I aim to understand the processes of digital transformation of urban infrastructure in cities by following the engineers and planners working on constructing and maintaining digital infrastructure. My particular focus is on how data-driven urbanism changes the way that the city is conceptualized and managed, i.e., how knowledge about the city is produced by engineers and planners while taking seriously the materiality of this transformation. I situate my case in the ‘Global South’ to understand the contextual nature of digital transformation and to be able to contribute to a more diverse urban theory. The theoretical framework and methodology for the paper is informed by Actor-Network Theory, which views the making of scientific knowledge as enacted through webs of interaction between human and non-human actors. Thus, it brings together knowledge-making and materiality by envisioning the ‘powers’ of engineers and planners as constituted along with the tools they use and the technologies they build and maintain. To this end, I build upon scholarship on the anthropology of infrastructure to do an ethnographic study of the Integrated Command, Control, and Communications Centre (IC4) in the city of Kochi in South India. The IC4 is a physical manifestation of the smart city paradigm from which sensors, cameras and smart metres are extended into the city to collect data. Through this study, I aim to contribute to scholarship on 'actually existing' smart cities, critical infrastructure studies and Southern urbanism.
Bio: Devika is a PhD student at KTH in Stockholm. Devika is interested in how cities outside of the so-called Global North undergo digital transformation, and how practices of smartness travel across the world. Devika has a background in Science and Technology Studies and architecture.
Negotiating smart cities – smartification covering conflicts / Benedict Lang, European New School, Europa-Universität Viadrina
Smart city projects are pushed by a big variety of actors. Diverse players with different agendas and interests join forces in the effort of making life for the citizens better. But how is the better life imagined and constructed by the different players and how is it negotiated among them, reflecting their diverse backgrounds and the numerous interests of the involved parties? When these different players come together, not only different imaginations of a better life collide but also underlying interests and agendas. And more importantly within this project, different notions and conceptualizations of the city clash: Startups, social entrepreneurs and big corporations frame citizens as homines economici that trade goods and services. Participation is negotiated through offers and demands. The city is conceptualized as a market on which goods and services are to be traded. Diametral to that, municipalities and public bodies are legally bound and inherently committed to the idea that access to basic goods (e.g. water, electricity, mobility and others) is organized separately from markets. In Germany, this task for public bodies is often referred to as öffentliche Daseinsvorsorge. The planned thesis project on “negotiating smart cities” is asking questions about the clash of conceptualizations of cities that is occurring when diverse actors join forces to collectively build smart cities. The pre-empirical assumption that is driving this PhD project is that conflicts of interest and conceptual differences are bridged through the common interest in an abstract smartification of cities.
Bio: Benedict has a background in business informatics and has worked in a media company in the IT department, before studying Responsibility in Engineering, Science and Technology. His research focus is on development processes of digital technologies and infrastructures. His engagement in municipal politics in Munich also shapes his perspective on the importance of public service.
What is ‘Optimized’ Agriculture? A Discourse Analysis Exploring the Meanings and Impacts of ‘Climate-Smart’ Agriculture in the Canadian Ag-Tech Innovation Space / Sarah Marquis, University of Ottawa
‘Climate-smart’ agricultural technologies are often framed as necessary to ensure sustainable food supply for the world’s growing population (Taylor, 2018). This paper is an exploration of the ways in which the operationalization of smartness is conceptualized by ag-tech stakeholders in the Canadian ag-tech innovation space. This work will particularly focus on the meanings of ‘optimization’ and the material infrastructures that facilitate it in the Canadian agricultural context. Halpern et al. (2017) have identified that the purported result of smartness is resilience. My research agenda for this project specifically questions what kinds of resilience optimized agriculture will ostensibly result in. This paper will use discourse analysis of presentations by ag-tech stakeholders at the 2021 Precision Agriculture Conference and Ag Technology Showcase. This showcase is specifically directed at ‘farmers who are interested in optimizing returns on inputs while preserving resources, reducing costs and reducing waste, all while improving yields and minimizing farming environmental impacts to the land. Further questions that this work seeks to answer are: In what ways does the operationalization of smartness on the farm open up new pathways for accumulation of data and capital; how are unequal power relationships reproduced and enhanced by the application of this logic of optimization, and how are logics of optimization an example of Jaccques Ellul’s concept of technique, defined as ‘methods to achieve absolute efficiency’. Finally: how should we be thinking differently about optimization, resilience, and efficiency in the age of catastrophic global climate change.
Bio: Sarah Marquis is a PhD student in Environmental Sustainability at the Institute of the Environment at uOttawa. Her academic research focuses on the impacts of ‘digital farming’ or ‘smart farming’, and the relationship between agricultural big data and sustainability.
Digital governmentality: an essential concept for interpreting the contemporary world / Adrien Savolle, Université Laval, University of Ottawa
Digital technologies are redefining our social and technical world as well as our general lexicon. Thus, safe cities are becoming more and more important in urban planning projects worldwide, with the self-proclaimed mission of ensuring the safety of inhabitants by implementing prevention tools against potential criminal actions, and by incorporating response mechanisms in case of crises of any kind: attacks, disasters, climate change. However, these cities require the cooperation (voluntary or not) of their inhabitants and thus raise the problem of the reduction of individual liberties in favour of optimal security. This type of governmental management is increasingly facilitated by the generalization of the Internet of Things, which connects many objects to the Internet under the guise of a horizontal democracy based on the behaviour of the inhabitants. This interpretation of the social dynamics underway ignores the changes in the distribution of the tools of power that accompany digital planning of the urban (covering a spectrum from surveillance capitalism to digital totalitarianism) and the implementation of digital governmentality that accompanies it. Indeed, if every urban planning project is a "means of social control of the urban order", it is also an "ideological artefact" influencing the symbolic representation of the city and the practices and lifestyles of the inhabitants of these areas. The widespread deployment of an urban "digital skin" and the type of digital governmentality that results from it will be the focus of my presentation.
Bio: Adrien Savolle is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Université Laval and a teaching fellow at Université de Montréal. His doctorate focuses on the social and cultural changes brought about by the construction of safe cities in a Chinese context. He is a research fellow for the Research Center on the Future of Cities at the University of Ottawa, for the Centre d’Études Asiatiques and the Centre d’Études et de Recherches Internationales at the University of Montréal. He is also a current student of the Groupe de Recherche sur le Tibet et l’Hymalaya at the Laval University (Québec).