Bringing the Forest into the City: Digital Media Infrastructures, Mass Timber Architecture, and Restless Landscapes / Megan Wiessner, New York University

In response to growing alarm about the planetary effects of concrete and steel’s embodied carbon, many architects and several major technology corporations are investing in engineered wood products as alternative structural materials. Imagined as both ecologically and technologically advanced, mass timber architecture evokes the rural forest lands it allegedly protects, even its largely urban uptake is shaped by developments in automated manufacturing and design, computationally intensive modelling, and modular prefabrication. My research explores how mass timber is constructed as a “smart” material: high-tech, climate-ready, and amenable to local economic development. Talk of digital fabrication, VR in construction, and carbon life-cycle analysis software abounds, even as mass timber’s growth is shaped by local histories of patrilineal settler family businesses in logging and milling; tribal assertions of sovereignty; and changing, burning, out-of-control forests. Through a photo essay and accompanying text piece which draws on industry promotional materials, technical documents, and conversations during fieldwork in Oregon and Washington during Fall 2021, I invite viewers to join me in thinking through the curiosities that emerge from this state of affairs. My aim is not to show that the persistence of the rural, tribal, or familial undermines mass timber’s technological sheen, but to suggest that forest products and worlds can become a source of social legitimization for digital tools themselves, and to ask how digital technologies must adapt to different worlds even as they try to smooth them over. 

Bio: Meg Wiessner is a researcher and artist based in New York. She investigates relationships between computational media, design, and architectural materials. Her doctoral research asks how digital technologies shape the emerging political ecology of mass timber in the Pacific Northwest. 

Sacrificio Chiribiquete / Juan David Figueroa

Sacrificio is a virtual environment that emulates a portion of the Chiribiquete, a site that some describe as the "Sistine Chapel" of America's archeology, located in the Colombian Amazon. Chiribiquete is one of the largest biodiversity centers in Colombia and a gateway to ancient cosmologies holding a collection of more than 75,000 cave paintings, petroglyphs, and pictograms. It is currently a protected park, being a mixed heritage of UNESCO. Its access has been very limited since its recent discovery in 1989. Only a handful of expeditions have been carried out to Chiribiquete, making it almost untouched by modern men. Sacrificio proposes a digital (and fictional) reconstrucción of Chiribiquete that was made through the process of photogrammetry. Photogrammetry is a (smart) technique that utilizes photography to measure the dimension and position of physical objects or locations. This data is used to create a 3D (three-dimensional) model or virtual reproduction of the same object or environment. It is the process of measuring (metria) with light (photos). This tool has been widely used in engineering, architecture, and geography to construct precise three-dimensional cartographies that accurately represent cities or vast landscapes. For this project, we used the limited audiovisual material available from Chiribiquete in order to build Chiribiquete’s fictional replica through photogrammetry, somehow repurposing the idea of this smart technology. We want to invite visitors to navigate the new memories of this sacred place through a multidisciplinary art experience, without being physically present, hoping they’ll recognize the need for protecting this majestic place.

Reclaiming the Planet / Orit Halpern, Concordia University

Canada, and in particular Northern Quebec, is the site of vast extractionary infrastructures in agriculture, forestry, and mining. These regions have histories of colonialism, inequity, violence, and environmental degradation and contamination. Currently, these industries are also being radically reformulated through new information and computational technologies. Quebec’s situation is both local and global. All over the world, humanity faces the question of how to inhabit post-industrial and toxic landscapes, and how to contend with the planetary scale impacts of extractionism, new information technologies, and industrial agriculture. In response to this contemporary situation, this project results from a one and a half year research-studio, Reclaiming the Planet, that was a collaboration between researchers at Concordia University, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Université de Montréal School of Architecture, and the Departments of Geoengineering and Environmental Science at Université de Quebec, Abitibi-Temiscamingue. The studio’s central question was how to reclaim and reimagine infrastructures for the future? The studio approached this problem in two directions; examining histories of the industry and the impact of new information technologies while engaging with how information technology and design will shape the future. We ask critical questions such as: how do we wish to live? And what worlds do we want to build?  How do we imagine more egalitarian, just, and sustainable infrastructures? What shall we do with the ruins of extractionary and industrial infrastructures? How will information technologies impact these futures? In the course of this video and website you will see some of our responses. And can download a booklet of the final projects. https://www.reclaimingtheplanet.net/ .

Bio: Orit Halpern is Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University in Montréal. Her work bridges the histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with design. She has also published widely. Her first book Beautiful Date: A History of Vision and Reason (Duke UP 2015) investigates histories of big data, design, and governmentality. Her forthcoming book with Robert Mitchell (MIT Press December 2022) is titled the Smartness Mandate. It is a history and theory of “smartness”. She is also the director of the Speculative Life Research Cluster and D4: The Disrupting Design Research Group, both are laboratories bridging the arts, environmental sciences, media, and the social sciences. www.orithalpern.net 

Fishing for Data / Hronn Holmer and Phoebe Sengers, Cornell University

Within rural primary production (e.g. fishing, agriculture, forestry), automated data collection and analysis are often introduced with the idea of increasing productivity while improving sustainability. Our work examines the consequences of the data-driven optimization of natural resource extraction for rural communities. We focus on the case of Iceland, which introduced pervasive data collection throughout its fisheries starting in the 1980’s and is now one of the most high-tech fisheries in the world. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, we examine how ubiquitous datafication is reshaping work practices, industrial organization, and relationships to the environment in the Icelandic fishery. We identify 3 consequences for this fishery: (1) a shift in the imagined relationship to fish populations from an unknowable “gift from God” to an apparently calculable and predictable resource; (2) a shift in captains' labour from blue-collar to “powder blue-collar” work, which incorporates aspects of white-collar work in service of data surveillance, but without a corresponding increase in prestige or autonomy; (3) a feedback loop of data and governance whereby the availability of more data leads to more governance, while the desire for more governance leads to increasing data collection. We describe how these shifts foster an increasing urban dominance over rural livelihoods by centralizing the fishery, increasing barriers to entry, and reducing fisher self-determination. 

Bios: Phoebe Sengers is an associate professor of Information Science and Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University. Her work integrates historical, ethnographic, and design methods to analyze the impact of technology design imaginaries and to speculate alternative directions. Hrönn Brynjarsdóttir Holmer grew up in Reykjavík, Iceland. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of Iceland and a Master’s degree in Human Factors Engineering from Cornell University. Hrönn’s doctoral work was chaired and supervised by Dr. Phoebe Sengers. Other committee members were Dr. Lee Humphreys, and Dr. Tarleton Gillespie, at Cornell University, and Carl DiSalvo at Georgia Institute of Technology. Hrönn currently resides in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, seven year old son and a grouchy cat.

The right to rural futures in the shadow of the “smart city” / S. Ashleigh Weeden, University of Guelph, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives 

The struggle to reconcile rural realities with the language and ethos of smart cities frameworks echoes Barraclough’s (2013) struggle to reconcile Lefebvre’s (1996) concept of the right to the city with an interpretation that preserves a right to the countryside. The persistent rural/urban divide in both the availability of technological infrastructure and the capacity to effectively manage it often obscures or ignores rural realities and priorities. Technology is frequently offered as a sensible solution to the challenges of service delivery in sparsely populated areas – yet it comes at a cost. For example, if connectivity allows us to be in multiple spaces at once, whether physically or virtually, and the right to be rural is conceptualized as claiming rural spaces, how will rural people negotiate this networked future? If digital infrastructure is required to meet the demands of contemporary life, but rural people must concede to corporate capture or make themselves consumable goods to acquire that infrastructure, what does this mean for rural citizenship rights? If we are to be intentional about the right to rurality today and in the future, we must question ‘smartification agendas’ - from Smart Specialization in Europe to super-clusters and smart cities in Canada – and challenge the failures of imagination that assume urbanity as the default and position technology as inherently progressive or positive. This provocative presentation will invite participants to place the right to multiple futures at the centre of a critical reckoning with the ways that digital technologies may expand access to some rights while introducing new risks to critical citizenship rights. 

Bio: S. Ashleigh Weeden, MPA is an award-winning rural futurist and community-focused researcher. Her work focuses on the way people, place, and power dynamics are reflected in and impacted by policymaking. Recognized as a thought leader in growing body of research and advocacy on ‘the right to be rural,’ Ashleigh works to advance evidence-based policy and public sector leadership across a wide variety of critical portfolios, including infrastructure, innovation, and inclusive community economic development. Her work can be read in publications like The Right to be Rural, 2021 State of Rural Canada, The Conversation Canada, CIGI Online, Policy Options, and Municipal World.

Rural Expertise and the Sewer / Jean Hardy, Michigan State University

The tracking of infrastructure health and the reporting of the resulting data is increasingly required of municipalities big and small in the United States. To ease adoption of new systems for creating infrastructure data, in 2013 the State of Michigan created a grant program to assist low-resource rural and urban communities to develop asset management plans for their stormwater and wastewater systems. This program was meant to assist communities in creating digital systems for surveying the quality and health of sewer and wastewater infrastructure, promoting equitable access to new tools for infrastructure maintenance at a time when the Flint water crisis was dominating the news. Yet, by the time I began ethnographic fieldwork in rural Michigan in the late 2010s, that data had been created and already fallen out of use. So what happened? In this talk, I provide insight into the creation of new forms of infrastructure data in small, rural towns and how this data butts up against multiple kinds of expertise in and out of these communities. In particular, I will show how, despite promises of equity and digital advancement, rural communities wind up navigating expertise and the knowledge of the sewer on their own tacit analog terms.

Bio: Jean Hardy is an Assistant Professor of Media & Information at Michigan State University, where he directs the Rural Computing Research Consortium. His research focuses on the role of technology in rural economic development, as well as the use of social technologies for community building among LGBTQ people living in rural areas.

Data-driven truth of farming?: Digitizing agriculture and farmers’ agricultural know-how in Turkey / Ziya Kaya, University of Arizona

Since the 2010s, digital agriculture in Turkey has become a part of a nationwide investment in innovation and informatics-driven productivity. A good deal of public and private institutions have undertaken projects for the “digitization” of agricultural production to address the country’s long-standing agricultural “crisis”–i.e., the growing population, shrinking agricultural lands, the aging demographic of farmers and their increasing financial precarity along with unstable produce sale prices and state subsidies. Inspired by the hype that more data equals more truth (Boellstorff & Maurer 2015), these projects aim to incorporate the “traditional” agricultural knowledges and practices of farmers into their digital solutions through big-data algorithms in order to enhance these solutions in the sense of providing “accurate” customized farming recommendations to farmers. Yet, such a participatory attitude does not prevent the project coordinators from pitting digital technologies against farmers’ agroecological know-how to underline their contributions to market-oriented efficiency, socioeconomic welfare, and ecological sustainability. Considering this “dual” outlook in the digital agriculture projects with regard to farmers’ knowledges, this paper is embroiled in debates whether “algorithmic governmentality” “traps” (Seaver 2019) or eradicates unitary individual subjectivities (Shapiro 2019; cf. Bowker 2014) and/or creates “dividual” subjects (Schüll 2016). By inquiring into farmers’ participation in these projects, this study will explore how the “dual” attitude towards local agroecological knowledge has been negotiated and contested and what happens to farmers’ farming practices in digitally-saturated farms. This paper relies on my ongoing doctoral research in Turkey with farmers, scientists, engineers, and public officials.

Bio: Ziya Kaya is a Ph.D. student in sociocultural anthropology with a minor in geography. He is currently conducting his doctoral fieldwork on digital farming technologies, agroecological knowledge and interspecies interactions, and assetization in agricultural landscapes in Turkey.