3. ”The modern city exists as a haze of software
instructions" (Amin & Thrift)
• RFIDs and the “Internet of things”
• Also biometrics, algorithmic CCTV, tagging, new bordering technologies,
‘smart’ infrastructures, geodemographics, GPS
• Machine readable entities--sensors---databases to recognise and track
individual ‘objects of interest’’
• Ubiquitous computing and the promise of the always-on, everywhere
network
• Architectural and urban spaces continually animated, brought into being,
and continually performed through ubicomp or ambient intelligence
• ’Technological unconscious’ or ‘calculative background’
4. FOUR KEY STARTING POINTS ONE: Not real/virtual
binary or ‘real city’ & virtual ‘cyberspace’
but process of urban ‘remediation’
‘Cyberspace’ "is very much a part of our contemporary world. It is
constituted through a series of remediations. As a digital network,
cyberspace remediates the electric communications networks of the past
150 years, the telegraph and the telephone; as virtual reality, it remediates
the visual space of painting, film, and television ; and as social space, it
remediates such historical places as cities and parks and such 'nonplaces'
as theme parks and shopping malls. Like other contemporary telemediated
spaces, cyberspace refashions and extends earlier media, which are
themselves embedded in material and social environments".
Bolter, J. and Grusin, R. (1999) Remediation, MIT Press.
5. TWO: Cities are 'fluid machines” -places which continuously combine
‘distant proximity’& ‘proximate
distance’ in all sorts of ways:
”There is a continual fluctuation of people, goods, data, and services as
moving entities, together forming a society where the whole structure is
in movement. This dynamic is supported by thousands of signs
indicating both movement and intensity of urban flows. Each flow
individually forms its complex horizontal network, further linked
vertically through different transportation systems. Both new
infrastructures and the hyper-concentration of facilities [in cities] create
a strategic terrain for a network of international corporate cultures
(international finance, telecommunications, information technology).
These networks are open systems capable of absorbing new centres
without causing instability" Gutierrez and Portefaix (2000)
6. THREE: Paradoxically, ambient, ubiquitous or locative media,
like all new technological systems, tend to
become hidden and ‘disappear’ at precisely the moment that
they become most important:
“The most profound technologies are those that disappear.
They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until
they are indistinguishable from it”
(Mark Weiser, 1991)
7. Become Socially ‘Black boxed’ as ‘Infrastructure’
• Embedded (i.e. “sunk into other structures);
• Transparent (“it does not need to be reinvented each
time or assembled for each task”);
• Offers temporal or spatial reach or scope;
• Is learned by its users;
• Is linked to conventions of practice (e.g. routines of
electricity use);
• Embodies standards;
• Is built on an installed base of sunk capital;
• Is fixed in modular increments, not built all at once or
globally; and
• Tends to become visible when it fails (Susan LeighStar, 1999)
8. FINALLY: The ‘Automatic Production of Space’
Produces a New Urban-Technological Politics
• "Software challenges us to
understand new forms of
technological politics and new
practices of political invention,
legibility and intervention that we
are only beginning to comprehend
as political at all" (Thrift and
French, 2002)
10. •
•
•
•
•
1. Consumerisation/Neoliberalisation: ‘Friction-Free’
Capitalism?
New ‘control revolution’ through persistent,
pervasive & inter-operable surveillance and tracking
‘Data-driven mass customization’ (Andrejevic
2003)
‘Bricks’n’clicks’ assemblages of electronic and
material provision in this augmented landscape
Often used to ‘unbundle’ and recommodify public
urban infrastructure into neoliberal mobility
marketplaces
Reanimate long-standing utopian commercial
tropes of perfect flow, complete efficiency,
seamless interconnection, annihilation of space
through time
17. ‘Software-Sorting’
techniques often
used to ‘unbundle’
and recommodify
public urban
infrastructure into
neoliberal mobility
marketplaces
Code Space:
Software-Sorted
Mobilities
18. “The public sphere malled”? Dana Cuff
• Automatic detection of individuals
• Dress code enforcement by reading
clothing types of those entering
• Detection and removal of ‘groups’
• Radically unbundled pricing/ special
offers e.g. ‘bookmarked’ stored in
Japan
• Electronic lists of excluded and ‘socially
undesirable’
• ‘Flatten’ public qualities of mall space
20. II Securitisation and Militarisation:
“The targeting of mobile bodies, things, objects or monies is
becoming a matter of locating - positioning in the sights, if you
like -- so that the opportunities of a mobile global economy
might be seized, while the capability to take out the target
remains. []The technologies that have made possible a global
supply chain of export processing zones and offshore sites, are
simultaneously being embedded into border crossing cards,
visas, passports and immigrant ID cards that include mobile
people within governable space by means of their targeted
exclusion.” Louise Amoore
25. Tracking, ‘Security’ and Militarisation
• Jordan Crandall: a militarisation through ‘Armed Vision’:
“Tracking is an anticipatory form of seeing”
• ”Identifying targets becomes the role of statistical
algorithms which sift the mass and flux of registered and
sensed data searching for [Mark Seltzer’s]”‘statistical
persons’”
• “A gradual colonization of the now, a now always slightly
ahead of itself”
• “While civilian images are embedded in processes of
identification based on reflection, militarised perspectives
collapse identification processes into “Id-ing” - a one-way
channel of identification in which a conduit, a database, and
a body are aligned and calibrated” (Crandall 1999).
41. “Several large fans are stationed outside the city
limits of an urban target that our [sic] guys need
to take. Upon appropriate signal, what appears
like a dust cloud emanates from each fan. The
cloud is blown into town where it quickly
dissipates. After a few minutes of processing by
laptop-size processors, a squadron of small,
disposable aircraft ascends over the city. The
little drones dive into selected areas determined
by the initial analysis of data transmitted by the
fan-propelled swarm. Where they disperse their
nano-payloads.”
Defense Watch 2004
Sentient Cities as
War Machines
42. “After this, the processors get even more busy. Within minutes the mobile
tactical center have a detailed visual and
audio picture of every street and building in the entire city.
Every hostile [person] has been identified and located.
Unmanned air and ground vehicles can now be vectored directly to
selected targets to take them out, one by one. Those enemy
combatants clever enough to evade actually being taken out by the
unmanned units can then be captured of killed by human elements”
43. “Behind the fighters, military police and intelligence
personnel process the inhabitants, electronically
reading their attitudes toward the intervention and
cataloguing them into a database immediately
recoverable by every fire team in the city (even
individual weapons might be able to read personal
signatures, firing immediately upon cueing. Smart
munitions track enemy systems and profiled
individuals. Drones track inhabitants
who have been ‘read’ as potentially hostile and
‘tagged’” Defense Watch, 2004
44. III Art and Activism: Reenchanting,
Reanimating, Repoliticising the City?
• Direct challenge to visions of both sanitized and transparent corporate
and commercial spaces and militarised and securitised spaces .
• Technological re-appropriation: ‘The new hybrid space also calls for
new forms of public action. These can only be created and facilitated if
the users of hybrid space learn to see the influence of relatively invisible
digital structures and appropriate their technology where possible for
alternative use.’ (Kraan 2006).
• New social performances; address alienated experience; strive for
(digital) reenchantment of world; opening out authorial empowerment;
build collective community and participatory endeavour; struggle against
hegemonic commercialisation &/or securitisation
45.
46. Location-specific digital art
• Murmur project
Kensington Toronto
• Stories linked to sites
• Urban history/story circle
– Goes digital
goes
collaborative/public
47. Grafedia
• Clickable environment
– Grafedia written by hand onto physical
surfaces and linking to rich media content
– Viewers "click" on these grafedia hyperlinks
with cell phones by sending a message
addressed to the word + "@grafedia.net"
• ‘every surface becomes potentially a web page,
and the entire physical world can be joined with the
Internet’
• Tagging
48. Opening out authorial empowerment
e.g. Yellow Arrow Guerrilla Mapping, Innsbruck
• Massively Authored Artistic Publication
• Arrows point to object – text in – poems
politics and adverts
51. Animating the Present:
Urban Tapestries
• Allows people to author their own virtual
annotations of the city
– enabling community’s collective
memory to grow organically,
– allowing ordinary citizens to embed
social knowledge in the new wireless
landscape of the city.
– People can add new locations, location
content and the ‘threads’ which link
individual locations to local contexts,
• Accessed via handheld devices such as
PDAs and mobile phones.
52. Participatory urban visualisations:
e.g. Christian Nold’s Greenwich emotion map:
• Instead of security technologies
that are designed to control and
surveill behavior, envisages
new tools that allow people to
selectively share and interpret
their own bio data. Biomapping
• Pooling data as people move
• ‘Communal arousal surface’
58. Conclusions
• Three logics struggling to become fixed into infrastructure whilst
striving to remediate urban life in various ways.
• Emerging urban and technological politics based on assemblages
politics and remediations which fuse ‘proximate distances’ with
‘distant proximities’
• New temporalities: Anticipation/ remediating memory
• Dreams! Reality a ‘Kludge’ of ‘Little Brothers’
• Two huge challenges for research and activism:
– * ‘Unblackboxing’: Render new technological politics visible and
democratically accountable. Open up the politics of code…
– * Prevent complete dominance and normalisation of militarised
and consumerised logics based on software-sorting, targeting,
and emergence of a world shaped overwhelmingly by the agency
of invisible and opaque algorithms
