The Role of the Digital Artist in the Smart City
Recap: Demystifying the Smart City meet-up
Tuesday, 07.05.19
By Mavi Irmak Karademirler & Marie-Louise Schandler
During the 3rd meetup of Sensor Lab’s Demystifying the Smart City project, we invited three speakers: Dan Hassler-Forest (assistant professor at Utrecht University), Raphael Reimann (moovel Lab) and Martina Huynh (researcher and interaction designer). Each presented parts of their work that look into the question of artistic engagement via smart technologies in cities.
Dan Hassler-Forest started by reflecting on the current mode of despair that surrounds the envisioning of our future in cities. In an environment where the prevailing political despair blocks and paralyzes our ability to imagine a better future, Hassler-Forest thinks that we need the presence of more utopian horizons. Having a background in film and television studies, he gave an overview of science fiction movies dealing with the futuristic scenarios of cities.
From the early 20th century onwards, writers and movie directors have created an archive of futuristic visual imaginaries which have acted as an important inspiration for the use of new technologies in cities. Those visual imaginaries reveal an aspect of how we talk about cities and (apocalyptic) utopias. According to Hassler-Forest, a utopia in this context offers creative approaches, inspirations, fears, and hopes. This way, it has the potential to establish dialogues between artists, policy makers, and academics by bringing them together for imagining better futures.
He demonstrated this potential of science fiction films in a video essay he made by putting together a broad variety of shots from several movies, which all imagined the city of the future in different ways. The video was a part of the ‘Places of Hope’ project that exemplified his main argument — sparking conversations among people from different fields on the basis of utopian urban approaches.
Following this, Raphael Reimann, a founding member of the anti-disciplinary research lab ‘moovel’ attracted our attention to a similar point: the importance of collaboration with people from different disciplines and backgrounds. In their work, moovel Lab tackles particularly the varying modes of transportation by creating new perspectives, tools, and ways of visualizing mobility in cities. moovel Lab’s projects aim to make mobile data more tangible and available while creating visual materials to imagine how the future cities could look like.
Reimann shared two projects as an example — ‘What the Street’ and ‘Open Data Cam’ — which both try to empower citizens and understand the city through data. moovel Lab’s overall way of representing the alternative imaginings of the mobility within cities gives considerable importance to inclusivity and openness, making the tools and the visualizations accessible to a broader audience. Accordingly, Reimann thinks that artists should be active in creating choices rather than merely making choices for others.
The last speaker of the meetup Martina Huynh, centers her thinking around the question of “What do we want our technologies to do for us?” In her work, she re-imagines the city infrastructure and the daily use of digital technologies through speculative design. With her project ‘Living Infrastructure’, her imagining extends to a collaboration between humans and different species. Looking at the symbiotic relationship between fungi and plants, she explores and experiments with the possibility of building infrastructures with fungi, instead of damaging the ecosystem by installing, for example, cables underground.
According to Huynh, this project allows us to work towards alternative technologies suitable for an era beyond the human-centric mindset that has been shaping the Anthropocene. Those technologies could be interspecies collaborations or some sort of living machines that would integrate better into the environment and help break the nature/technology binary. She pointed out how in contemporary Smart Cities, every aspect is tailored exclusively to humans. With her research, she wants to create an awareness of the need to live together with surrounding ecologies, rather than working against them by harming them and neglecting their needs.
The inspiring talks of the evening continued with a discussion shaped around the questions regarding the role of the artist in the Smart City. Given the importance of creativity and imagination, we concluded that thinking about alternative technologies to create constructive future scenarios for our cities is attainable through collaborative practices on political, artistic, and social levels.
Demystifying the Smart City is a research made possible with the support of the Creative Industry Fund and CLEVER°FRANKE
