Smart City — An Unimaginative Imaginary?
Demystifying the Smart City round table discussion about the role of the digital artists in the “smart city”.
Organizers, Participants & theme of the discussion
For ‘Demystifying the Smart City’ round table discussion, we invited nine participants from academia, industry and the arts to discuss with us the role of the artists in the smart city. Gert Franke and Fabian van Sluijs organized and hosted the round table discussion for the following participants:
- Roy Bendor, Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial Design, TU Delft, and Fellow of the Urban Futures Studio, Utrecht University
- Michiel de Lange, Assistant Professor New Media at Utrecht University Co-founder of The Mobile City, Amsterdam
- Richard Vijgen, Owner at Studio Richard Vijgen, Design for Contemporary Information Culture
- Heerd Jan Hoogeveen, Director Startup Utrecht
- Douwe Schmidt, Project lead Tada.city Amsterdam
- Boyd Rotgans, Information Designer and Partner at studio RNDR The Hague
- Sabrina Verhage, Creative Technologists and Experience Design at Tellart, Amsterdam
- Sjoerd ten Borg, Artist and designer who deals with transformation in the city. Amsterdam
- Véronique Hoedemakers, Art critic and writer, member of the advisory committee’s art in public space and RAUM for Gemeente Utrecht
The overarching questions of the evening revolved around the role artists play in the Smart City and how art can allow us to engage with the Smart City.
Introductory presentation
In his presentation, Fabian put our research program into the broader context of current Smart City developments of which residents are often not aware. A city’s ‘Smart City agenda’ can concern many different aspects like mobility, sustainability, smart homes, open data. Quite often, however, the residents are missing in those agendas. Cities become more and more datafied, but how transparent are they really to their residents? Armin Beverungen (2017), from the Digital Cultures Research Lab at the University Lüneburg, comments: “what we witness today with the rise of smart cities is a new relation of public and private spaces, in which public spaces become privatized and private spaces are spied out by public institutions and potentially citizens themselves”. On the base of this provoking argument, Fabian presented a series of projects in which artists reflect on these developments. The themes of the projects included data visualization as in ‘data as an artistic material: architectural intelligence’; networks and infrastructure to make “the invisible visible”; the impact of facial and visual recognition software (‘algorithmic gaze’); how computers see the world and many others.
“Every technological innovation needs artists to create new imaginations on how to build our world. The Smart City is no exception” — Fabian van Sluijs
Round 1
Leading statement: Artists should have a more prominent role in the Smart City!
If so: What is required to give artists a more prominent role in the Smart City?
The discussion of this question started off by raising counter questions as in “why should the role of artists be different in the Smart City than in any other situation?” They could have a more prominent role in general but this should not necessarily be linked to urban developments. However, as artists are able to work for a long time on a specific site, they can connect to the people in a public space and have an advantage in that they can really commit to a specific site. While this already applies to artists, they still are more by-standers in the whole Smart City development. As dominant public and private companies are busy shaping our (smart) cities, artists might be interested in the happenings from an outside perspective and can give meaning to a process which is mostly defined as a functional process by companies and governments.
If they were to be integrated in smart city consortia, it would be questionable to ‘instrumentalize’ their work and make them, for example, design an efficient app for a big company or the government. It could be interesting and valuable to include artists and designers in smart city consortia, but instead of asking them to help work on efficiency, give them the opportunity to play around and add artistic value. Often, artists raise a critical voice or represent the eigenzinnige denker within a project, being the smart outsider who does not have an agenda and is free to think outside the box. Moreover, artists’ creative minds can help to reflect on current technological changes as they occur in many cities. Maybe they are able to connect the new emerging dots.
Gert: What should be the role of the artist then? If it shouldn’t be instrumentalized and it can be of great value for societies. How can we prevent that or redefine that then?
Given that the purpose of the Smart City is almost not to be seen, whilst it is used by the people who govern the network, the artist could uncover that power and eventually critique and dismantle it in the end. That would be an interesting role as there is a lack in critique. ‘Should’ the artist have to have a responsibility at all though? Theoretically, artists can have many possible roles (e.g. bringing in a critical perspective or bringing in more imagination to generally technical centered Smart City solutions). However, don’t artists often do unsolicited work? If we have a look at different projects, the artists are often not asked to do them or not even wanted. They decide on their own on interesting projects so that we could say artists should maybe have a more prominent role outside of the smart city.
Are there enough art projects linked to the Smart City?
Our participants reported on a few to no projects explicitly linked to the idea of Smart Cities of which they know or follow. According to them, one of the reasons could be that a lot of useful data is not accessible as open data. Also, as the Smart City is mainly an imaginary (Bendor & Sadowski 2018), artists struggle to have room in that. There might be art around the Smart City, it just takes different aspects of this technological apparatus: there is data art, art about algorithms or art about machine learning. Those are closely linked to the Smart City. Additionally, there is urban art happening which is looking at different aspects of the Smart City.
Smart City — An unimaginative imaginary?
In current Smart City developments, where new spheres are created by only a few dominant players, many people, including artists are left out. One of our participants was wondering if what is lacking should be filled up by artists or rather by creatives or designers, as it could be more helpful to be able to visualize or communicate the information and ideas that are hidden to most people in cities. Another approach mentioned was to possibly increase citizen participation and information to fill this communication gap. We cannot expect to “bring out the artist who should suddenly fill the gap” and should move beyond the idealization of art. “I don’t know if artists should or want to have a seat at the table were Smart City discussions are made. But sure, we need art and we need it every time that life outpaces our capability to make smart decisions about it: art can help us.”
Round 2
Leading statement: There is not enough work made by Artists about the Smart City?
Is this a problem? If so: how can we change that?
During the second round, one of the participants further speculated about the reasons for the lack in artistic projects concerning the Smart City. According to him, one reason could be that artists like to be ahead of something and maybe, right now, they are already ahead of something else which does not involve Smart City discussions. Additionally, in the realm of art, the question of framing remains. There might be art around and about technologies that is also linked to the Smart City, but this art is usually not framed as art in the Smart City treating those technologies in the urban context.
Another speculation about the absence of artistic projects concerning the Smart City could be that artists respond to what they see and feel. However, since ‘the Smart City’ is rather invisible, artists have to speculate to respond to something that is not already there. If we have a look in the newspapers for example, we would find headlines about new technologies (e.g. algorithmic profiling etc.) but not about the Smart City per se. Once artists would start doing more projects, there would come more awareness and thus also more questioning. Only then artists would find the discourse more fruitful to engage with.
Gert: Who could help to create this awareness?
This question quickly led to discussions about education, the funding of research and the funding of art. Also, concerning the education of artists it might be a problem that there is no specialized PhD programmes linked to art and technology in the Netherlands.
Re-considering what counts as art about the Smart City
One of our participants stated that there might just be no hype about the Smart City anymore, but nowadays more focus is put and more work is done on machine learning. Compared to that, the Smart City would get less publicity. According to another participant, it is very difficult to make art about the Smart City, but easier to have art that deals with technologies which might also enable the Smart City. Given the amount of tech art that has been made in the last few years, he does not regret the lack of art labelling itself as specifically dealing with the Smart City. Therefore, we could perhaps consider tech art as being part of art about the Smart City as well. Then, there are enough art projects to help us develop ideas what a Smart City can be. With the help of curation, this art could eventually be regrouped under the term of Smart City and thus be made more visible as such.
Accessibility to the tools and accessibility to the craft
In order for artists to create art about technologies or the Smart City, they need to have material and knowledge how to deal with it. One issue about Smart Cities is the difficulty to access data generated by sensors etc. Only if this data was more accessible, artists could potentially pick it up and use it. One solution to this would be the existence of more transparent municipalities, which give access to open data. This would present a simple way for municipalities to foster art without engaging in person with artists. Additionally, once they have the material, they also need to know how to deal with it. Therefore, digital literacy like coding could be boosted generally by education.
Why should artists want to play with data about Smart Cities?
“It’s part of reality and part of the future.”
“There are many interesting problems linked to society.”
“Artists problematize what we take as natural.”
“Artists should talk about issues that are relevant to all of us, like privacy and surveillance issues.”
According to one participant, one example that makes contemporary complex issues more accessible is the series Black Mirror which is a narrative that is understood by people from outside the “tech savvy bubble”. Narratives like that are powerful and meaningful. Sooner or later, artists might create such narratives about the Smart City as well and people will start to assign meaning to it rather than just function. In that artists have a very important role: The more artists work on a specific issue, the more this broad topic is present in society.
Demystifying the Smart City is a research program made possible with the support of the Creative Industry Fund and CLEVER°FRANKE.
