Networked: (a networked book) about (networked Art)

Mark Shepard
http://www.andinc.org
mshepard {at} andinc {dot} org
{one page CV} {bio}

ABSTRACT

Cities have always been sites of networking, exchange and interaction. From roads and rivers to trains and the telegraph, the infrastructure linking urban centers has long played a role in shaping the experience of the city and the choices we make there. More recently cities have become networked both locally and globally through a range of mobile, embedded and wireless information technologies. Since the late 1980s, computer scientists have been researching ways of embedding computational “intelligence” into the built environment. Looking beyond the paradigm of personal computing, which placed the computer in the foreground of our attention, research in ubiquitous computing projected a world where computers would vanish into the background, displaced to the periphery of our awareness. Enabled by tiny, inexpensive microprocessors and low-power wireless sensor networks, information processing was to become ambient. At the dawn of the 21st century, we find ubiquitous computing appearing all around us, particularly in urban environments. The future envisioned by ubiquitous computing has arrived, just not in the form it was originally imagined. These media, communication and information systems are beginning to form what has been characterized as a "sentient" city capable of sensing and responding to urban life in increasingly sophisticated ways. This chapter critically examines some of the key claims and aspirations surrounding these developments, focusing specifically on the implications for conditions of privacy, autonomy, trust and serendipity in this highly observant, ever-more efficient and over-coded city.

KEYWORDS

cities, architecture, urbanism, ubiquitous computing, responsive systems, urban computing, locative media, ambient informatics, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, sentience, science fiction, near-future, hertzian space, weather systems

PROPOSAL

As computing leaves the desktop and spills out onto the sidewalks, streets and public spaces of the city, information processing capacity becomes embedded within and distributed throughout the material fabric of everyday urban space. Artifacts and systems we interact with daily collect, store and process information about us, or are activated by our movements and transactions. Ubiquitous computing evangelists herald a coming age of urban infrastructure capable of sensing and responding to the events and activities transpiring around them. Imbued with the capacity to remember, correlate and anticipate, this near-future “sentient” city (Crang and Graham, 2007) is capable of reflexively monitoring its environment and our behavior within it, becoming an active agent in the organization of everyday life in urban public space.

Few may quibble about “smart” traffic light control systems that more efficiently manage the ebbs and flows of cars, trucks, and busses on our city streets. But some may be irritated when discount coupons for their favorite espresso drink are beamed to their mobile phone as they pass by a Starbucks. And many are likely to protest when they are denied passage through a subway turnstile because it “senses” that their purchasing habits, patterns of movement and current galvanic skin response (GSR) reading happens to match the profile of a terrorist.

What are the implications for conditions of privacy, autonomy, trust and serendipity in this highly observant, ever-more efficient and over-coded city?

This chapter will develop three vectors along which to problematize near-future visions for “sentient” systems within urban environments. Readers will be asked to respond with examples (text, image, audio, video) of research and projects related to each vector as well as counter arguments to their initial framing. In this respect, this proposal is underspecified with respect to the specific projects implied by this conceptual framework and seeks to actively solicit re-framings of the issues at stake.

The initial vectors to be developed are:

Making Sense and Non-sense of the Near-future Sentient City

Sentience refers to the ability to feel or perceive subjectively, not necessarily including the faculty of self-awareness. As a concept, sentience has long been a flash point of controversy between the humanities and sciences when non-human actors are concerned. Ruskin (1856) coined the term “Pathetic Fallacy” to signify any description of inanimate things that ascribes to them human capabilities, sensations, and emotions. Within literature, the attribution of human qualities and characteristics to inanimate things (anthropomorphism) is by now an accepted literary device, yet within the natural sciences, for example, it is still considered a serious error in scientific reasoning if taken literally. Latour suggests that the difficulty lies in describing agency in the absence of anthropomorphic actors, that there is a lack of accepted vocabulary to address the non-human agency of “things,” technological or otherwise. His “actant” is but one contribution to building such a lexicon. Anne Galloway’s recent post on “lacking words to describe non-humans, and what this means if we try to account for relations between humans and non-humans” is essential reading. This vector intends to develop a vocabulary for forms of non-human agency through word, image, video, audio and other media as appropriate.

Ambient Informatics, Hertzian Weather Systems and Urban Architecture

In the catalog for the 1963 exhibition “Living City” organized for the ICA in London by the young British architecture group Archigram, Peter Cook writes: “When it is raining in Oxford Street the architecture is no more important than the rain, in fact the weather has probably more to do with the pulsation of the Living City at that given moment” (Cook, 1963). In place of natural weather systems, however, today we find that the dataclouds of 21st century urban space are increasingly shaping our experience of the city and the choices we make there. City of Sound blogger Dan Hill has observed that “The way the street feels may soon be defined by what cannot be seen with the naked eye… We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data… This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street.” This vector will explore how these Hertzian weather systems are becoming as important, if not more so, than the formal organization of space and material in constructing contemporary urban experience.

Toward an Archaeology of the Near Future

In “Yesterday’s Tomorrows: notes on ubiquitous computing’s dominant vision”, Bell and Dourish (2006) point out that while most computer science research has traditionally focused on elaborating technical problems based on past results, ubiquitous computing research has always been organized around a shared vision of the future. This vision is by now more than two decades old, and today we inhabit the future the field’s pioneers imagined, just not in the way they originally foresaw. The future “originally envisioned by Weiser (1991), and still motivating much research in ubiquitous computing,” they write, “is one that is firmly entrenched in its own particular moments, locations and cultural contexts, a vision as much of the past as of the future.” Less focused on projecting utopic visions of near-future seamlessness, the work of Dunne and Raby posits a form a “critical design” that looks upstream at near-future technology research and development in order to produce present day artifacts that explore some of the messy social and cultural implications of this research and its applications within everyday life. This vector focuses on how the production of “critical artifacts” can help catalyze public discussion about what kind of future we might want for our cities.

References

Bell, G. & Dourish, P. (2006). Yesterday’s tomorrows: notes on ubiquitous computing’s dominant vision. Personal Ubiquitous Comput. 11, 2 (Jan. 2007), 133-143.

Cook, P. (1963). Introduction to Crosby and Bodley, eds., Living Arts, no. 2, p. 70. London: Institute for Contemporary Arts and Tillotstons.

Crang, M. & Graham, S. (2007). Sentient Cities: Ambient intelligence and the politics of urban space. Information, Communication & Society; 10:789 - 817.

Ruskin, J. (1856) "Of the Pathetic Fallacy", in Modern Painters, volume iii, pt. 4. London: Smith, Elder and Co.

Weisser, M. (1991) "The computer for the twenty-first century”, Sci. Am, Sept. 1991, 94-104.

Writing samples:

http://www.sentientcity.net/blog/?p=3
http://www.sentientcity.net/blog/?p=7
http://www.sentientcity.net/blog/?p=8