Panel #3: “Smart” imaginaries
A collection of artwork and presentations
Panel image artwork by Dubinski
Crystal Palace / Neilson Koerner-Safrata
A century after automotive industrialization, the car is now centred in another industrial shift, a vehicle for autonomous machine intelligence. The new computational Fordism of smartness, simulation, and deep learning promises to create the cognitive and sensorial capacities of a driving agent. If the car was the agent that was able to redefine our relationships to industry, energy, and the built environment, etc., then as the silicon chip eats the car, will these relationships not be rebuilt once over in this image? The manufacture of self-driving vehicles, a combined governmental and computational task, will disclose how humans and autonomous machine agencies do or do not coexist within the policies of computational Fordism. An automobile is already a cognitive device, or at least a computational one. As ongoing chip shortages completely halt car production, and while petrol shocks come and go, lithium and silicon are now two key ingredients in operating automobiles. When the cognitive capacities to drive are eventually developed, would this new autocene not also coincide with the creation of the noocene, an explosion of autonomous agents? Who or what a car is, and the distributed effects of this uncovering, are broached in a speculative way between intelligences and automotives, when do cars begin to think, and what do we think of cars.
Bio: Neilson Koerner-Safrata is a video game designer, along with his twin brother Milan, he runs the interactive studios SCRNPRNT and Engine, building upon the modern infrastructures of play and game engines. His work has been exhibited at Now Play This, A MAZE, Vancouver International Film Festival, Independent Games Festival, IndieCade, and Ludicious.
Latent Pines / Peter Dubinski, University of Ottawa
Latent Pines is a generative video loop that considers the fragility of journalistic truth. Developed through a generative adversarial network (GAN), an algorithmic architecture that generates synthetic instances of data derived from inputted information, the work consists of hundreds of nocturnal photographs of pine trees that have been manipulated by machine learning to establish new connections between the varying organic forms. Seeking thresholds of documentary photography, the work asks if photographs allow us a view of previously dormant aspects of the world? Or do photographs only allow us understanding through connections made by a second hand? The light of the flash can only reach so far. Guided by an interest in the processes of mythmaking and the ways in which the internet accelerates and warps shards of information, Latent Pines embodies a sense of the familiar crossing into the strange.
Bio: Peter Dubinski (b.1999) makes photographs among the woods and rivers of Ontario and Quebec, seeking thresholds of the human role as a quiet observer and active participant in photographic storytelling. Subjects and interests that guide his practice include; animals, myth, the fragile line between fact & figment, and the human role in ecological disturbance. He considers his work sequentially within the pages of photographic books.
Smart Cities’ broken promises / Adi Kuntsman, Manchester Metropolitan University, Liu Xin, Karlstad University
The idea of a “smart city” often includes the notion of environmental efficiency. Although ecology is usually not the primary focus of smart cities’ self-promotion, many smart cities’ websites tell a story of how they would ultimately make the environment better. They would streamline the collection of waste by using smart bins; use smartphone-operated bike-rental schemes; monitor air pollution; control traffic via digital dashboards; and run paper-free e-government services. The literature about smart cities, similarly, privileges celebratory terms such as “sharing cities”; “green growth”, “green infrastructure”, “progressive urbanisation”, “sustainable urbanism”, “green technology innovation”, “resilient cities”, “smart future” and more. However, despite the overwhelming rhetoric of being environmental saviours, smart cities pose multiple ecological threats, most of which are invisibilised, because they take place elsewhere. Our project offers a critical reading of smart cities promises – the promise of data, the promise of resource efficiency, and the promise of connectivity and mobility. Using the notion of broken promises, we look at what is physically broken in the process of urban digitisation; as well as what is symbolically left out of smart cities’ celebratory narratives. What is silenced and deliberately invisibilised? What is promised but never delivered? What is promised, but in such a way that a promise becomes a trap, a form of violence, where refusing a promise is impossible. Mapping ways in which questions of digitisation and those of environmental care fail to meet; our project traces the materiality and the environmental costs of smart cities’ daily realities, asking, what breaks when a city promises to become “smart”?
Bios: Adi Kuntsman is Reader in Digital Politics at the Department of History, Politics and Philosophy and the coordinator of Digital Politics research cluster and PhD programme. Adi’s current work focuses on the politics of ‘opting out’ of digital communication; smart cities; digital memory; and environmental impacts of digital technologies. Liu Xin (she/her) is a senior lecturer at the Center for Gender Studies, Karlstad University. She has published articles in journals such as Feminist Review, Australian Feminist Studies, Journal of Environmental Media, Parallax, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture, Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, Media Theory Journal, Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equality. Her recent research projects are located in the intersection of feminist theory, environmental humanities, critical race studies, science and technology studies, social theory and digital media research.
New Electronic Ecosystem: unsettling the fantasies of seamless interoperability through artistic research / Hanna Husberg and Agata Marzecova
Introducing Towards Atmospheric Care, an interdisciplinary project developed through situated case studies, our two-voice presentation proposes artistic research as an enabler of boundary perspectives. Asking what meaningful alliances can surface between art, science and critical theory in times when technoscience and digital technologies predetermine environmental sensibilities, it will focus on New Electronic Ecosystem, our ongoing inquiry researching intelligent sensing landscapes in Finland (a country which has self-positioned itself at the forefront of the geopolitical race around the future of 5G and 6G technologies). Extending the 5G-driven imaginary of seamless connectivity from indoors to whole landscapes, smart roads and maritime routes projects (Sod5G, Aurora Snowbox and One-Sea) exemplify the ‘smartification of everything’ as a materially, historically and geographically situated process emerging at the nexus of political economy, infrastructure and the atmospheric medium (as a carrier of the electromagnetic spectrum). Following feminist scholarship on care (Michelle Murphy) and maintenance and repair (Shannon Mattern), the project aims at unsettling imaginaries of ‘seamless interoperability’ of these novel smart ecosystems through artistic research, advancing the conviction that non-expert engagement is crucial to explore possibilities of alternative futures to the high-tech enclosure of the electromagnetic domain. In this context, the experimentation with (and questioning of) the tools, formats, and outcomes of art-led inquiry will be presented as an integral part of the effort to mindfully reflect on how to perform interdisciplinarity, employ collective imagination and broaden the discussion on what technoecological networks and digital ecologies we need for communal concerns in the ongoing socioecological crisis.
Bios: Towards Atmospheric Care is a long-term art-led research collaboration between visual artist Hanna Husberg (Stockholm) and Agata Marzecova (Tallinn), researcher in ecology, photography & new media, which explores air as a naturalcultural phenomenon situated in the nexus of media, science and technological mediation.
The Art of Quantifying the Smart City / Burcu Baykurt, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Harvard University
Many U.S. municipalities increasingly work with data analytics companies that help them build and maintain urban big data. Often described as “gov-tech” companies (i.e. “government technologies”), these digital firms aim to monetize and circulate public datasets, but little is known what particular services they provide and how they translate municipal data into instruments of governance and markets. Through in-depth interviews with data scientists and founders of digital startups in the field of gov-tech, I argue these firms capitalize on the dysfunctional politics of the federal system in the U.S. and the economic pressure on local governments to digitize, repackage, and monetize publicly available data. While placing themselves among tech giants, municipal agencies, and community groups as epistemic brokers, these data analytics firms, on the one hand, instrumentalize critiques of the smart city as justifications for constant data collection, such as instituting equity in decision-making, streamlining data processes, or building public-facing civic tools. On the other hand, they make a concerted effort to access and extract value from municipal data and seek to offer a coherent area of expertise that solves local problems. Drawing on feminist science and technology studies and feminist geography, this paper investigates how the cultural techniques of data capitalism exploit bureaucratic inefficiencies and in what ways civic spaces of the so-called smart city are incorporated into American techno-capitalism.
Bio: Burcu Baykurt is an assistant professor of urban futures and communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University