The Sentient City Survival Kit probes the social, cultural and political implications of ubiquitous computing for urban environments. The project consists of a collection of artifacts for survival in the near-future sentient city.

As computing leaves the desktop and spills out onto the sidewalks, streets and public spaces of the city, information processing becomes embedded in and distributed throughout the material fabric of everyday urban space. Pervasive/ubiquitous computing evangelists herald a coming age of urban information systems capable of sensing and responding to the events and activities transpiring around them. Imbued with the capacity to remember, correlate and anticipate, this “sentient” city is envisioned as being capable of reflexively monitoring our behavior within it and becoming an active agent in the organization of our daily lives.

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CREDITS:

The Sentient City Survival Kit is a project of Creative Capital. It is sponsored by the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and the Office of the Vice President for Research at the University at Buffalo.

Additional support provided by the Network Architecture Lab @ Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation; V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam; and Eyebeam Art+Technology Center, New York City.