Panel #6: Scaling Smartness
A collection of artwork and presentations
Panel image artwork by Lindley, Gradinar, and Coulton
Ghosts in the Smart Home / Joseph Lindley, Adrian Gradinar and Paul Coulton, Lancaster University
We are in the midst of a ‘post-anthropocentric’ turn in design, research and technology. The term refers to a renewed interest in a wide range of concepts, theoretical perspectives, and methodologies. Ghosts in the Smart Home is a post-anthropocentric experiment which manifests as a film—which has been serialised into 11 short episodes—whose cast of characters are all internet connected ‘smart’ devices. The motivation is to prototype and establish new ways to see, to be, and to know, which respond to the 21st century’s complex, post-anthropocentric, socio-technical systems. The film is set in an unremarkable suburban house and has the following cast of characters: Vector is a small robot which has no utilitarian purpose; Canvas is an attractive ‘smart light’ display; Petcube is a remotely operated pet feeder and webcam; Google Home is a smart speaker; Smarter Kettle is an app-operated kettle; Sphero is an educational programmable spherical robot; and Router is—as the name suggests—a router. The objects, which co-exist in the same physical space, but also coexist in the same digital space, have become aware that their human users are considering going off-grid. The humans have become paranoid that some of their connected devices are insecure and are leaking data about them. The film tells the story of the devices grappling with this concept. What would it mean for their existence and realities if their internet connection was severed; whose fault is it; and how do the devices’ different characters impact upon their relationships?
Bios: Dr Joseph Lindley is a Research Fellow, Dr Adrian Gradinar is Lecturer in Smart Home Futures, and Professor Paul Coulton is Chair of Speculative and Game Design. All three are members of the academic team at ImaginationLancaster, one of the United Kingdom's leading Design-led Research labs. Their portfolio of work includes methodological innovation relating to Design Fiction, Research through Design and Object-Oriented Ontology. Their research is thematically focused on the intersection of society and emerging technology. Current projects include explorations of the Edge Computing and Sustainability, the Trustworthiness of Autonomous Vehicles, and the realities of the Future Mundane.
Critical Geographies of Smart Development / Hilary Oliva Faxon, University of California, Berkeley, University of Copenhagen; Kendra Kintzi, Cornell University
The development of smart infrastructures is a political act that intersects, in powerful ways, with ongoing decolonial struggles in the uneven landscapes of the postcolonial world. This paper develops a grounded, relational approach to the critical geographies of smart development that starts from place-based relations of power to investigate how specific postcolonial struggles inflect the global articulation of smart development. Our approach situates the development of smart infrastructures within longer, contested histories of geopolitical intervention and capitalist transformation and foregrounds ongoing land, labour, and livelihood dynamics as key vectors of transformation. Using critical ethnography and relational comparison in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, we show how Myanmar’s smart farms and Jordan’s smart grid were built and selectively adapted or refused in ways that furthered existing inequalities and ontologies of disconnection, while providing material conduits for the enhancement of ethnonationalist projects to define the postcolonial state. This approach reframes the stakes of smart development, providing pathways for generative comparison that centers ongoing equity struggles and historically-situated constellations of power to understand how smart development materializes in the postcolonial world.
Bios: Dr. Hilary Faxon is a human geographer and political ecologist working on environment, development, and technology with a focus on social justice in the Global South. She is currently working on a book about struggles for land and democracy in Myanmar, and completing a Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Berkeley. This spring, she will begin a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship at the University of Copenhagen. Kendra Kintzi is a human geographer and doctoral candidate at Cornell University, where her research focuses on uneven development and environmental change in the Middle East. She draws together theory and methods from political ecology, postcolonial feminist geography, and digital geography to question the relationship between energy and political power, asking how urban communities in Jordan experience and shape digital infrastructure and environmental change.
From the Baltic Sea to the Desert: Exploring Smartification through the Cases of Kalasatama, Helsinki and Egypt's New Administrative Capital / Bassam El Baroni, Aalto University; Miina Pohjolainen, Public Art Agency Finland
This paper examines the socio-economic, political and ecological implications of smartification across two different locations in two different continents – the smart neighbourhood of Kalasatama in Helsinki, Finland and the new administrative capital city of Egypt, both still under construction. Through these two case studies we map out how financialization drives the paradigm of the smart city and shifts according to different politics, needs, and ecologies. The same characteristics of ‘infrastructure space’ can be detected across these two sites. Essential to understanding the conditions of possibility for such replicability is recognizing contemporary urbanism as not so much located in buildings, bridges and materials etc. but in the information layers of cities that in turn shape how people, objects and information itself are organized and circulate. The resilience of such ‘infrastructure space’ and its adaptability across cultural and political systems (the case studies represent liberal democracy and military-authoritarianism respectively) is largely due to its deep entanglement with the platform urbanist model whereby businesses provide the hardware and/or software infrastructures for others – urban developments, institutions, people, governments – to operate on and, in which the key resource is data extracted from users.
Bios: Bassam El Baroni is assistant professor in curating at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Aalto University, Finland. His current research engages with financialization in relation to artistic practices and artists’ engagement with infrastructural futures and histories. He is the author of various essays and editor of Between the Material and the Possible: Infrastructural Re-examination and Speculation in Art (Sternberg Press, 2022). Miina Pohjolainen is an artist and curator working in the intersection of contemporary art and spatial research. Her work addresses the entanglements of knowledge-based economization, spatial development and art. Currently, she is conducting independent curatorial and artistic research on the old shopping malls in Helsinki, Finland and working as art coordinator in Public Art Agency Finland.
Out of thin air: Vertiplaces / Simon Rabyniuk, University of Toronto, TU/Eindhoven
Whether territorializing sky, land, or water, the system-based nature of media engenders comprehensive planning projects that displace local forms of knowledge and practice: anthropologist James Scott conceptualizes these processes as “thin simplifications” (Scott 1998). This paper studies the planning process scaling commercial drones from test bed experiments into national systems. It analyzes an architectural proposal, set out in four documents published between 2019-2021, that were produced at a drone testbed in New York State. These definitional documents set out performance characteristics, concepts for operation, and approaches to automation for “vertiplaces” (colloquially referred to as droneports). Scott’s concept provides a theoretical frame for reading these documents. Thin simplification describes cultural, spatial, or economic impositions, including media infrastructure, for which vertiplaces are one example. While these projects aim for an idealized social order, thin simplifications fail due to ignoring forms of local variation. Not every urban scheme meets Scott’s criteria, and here the process of creation, expansiveness of vision, and disposition of schemes are paramount. For Scott, acts of thin simplification combine the material reconfiguration of the urban, a modernist logic, and authoritarianism, each of which are traits discernable in the vertiplaces scheme. While steeped in technical language and specifications, these documents are acts of world-building, and have broad implications for the design of the built environment (Koolhaas 2015). Through analyzing the planning process for emerging urban infrastructure this discourse analysis opens a series of questions about the reterritorialization of national airspace systems for commercial drones.
Bio: Simon Rabyniuk is an architectural researcher and designer based in Toronto. His research and teaching develop historical and theoretical perspectives about technology and urbanization. He is currently a PhD candidate at TU Eindhoven in architectural history and theory, and serves as a sessional lecturer at Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. From 2010-2015 he was principal at the research, art, and design studio Department of Unusual Certainties. He holds a professional graduate degree in Architecture from the University of Toronto (2019) where he was the recipient of multiple awards.