Screenicity: Pathetic Fallacies and Category Mistakes

Mark Shepard (Buffalo State University) is the main speaker in this lecture about Pathetic Fallacies and Category Mistakes: making sense and non-sense of the sentient city. 

As computing leaves the desktop and spills out onto the sidewalks, streets and public spaces of the city, we increasingly find information processing capacity 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 is envisioned as being 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.

This talk will unpack some of the tacit assumptions, latent biases and hidden agendas at play behind new and emerging urban infrastructures.

Comment: Ragnhild Tronstad, AHO

About Screenicity

The recent decade has seen a rapid evolution in the field of digital media. Handheld electronic devices and urban screens are now being integrated into every aspect of urban life. GPS and augmented reality (AR) technologies have transformed the new generation of mobile devices from a communication and information platform into a navigational tool, fostering a new alignment of reality and image perception.

As a result, the image has been radically dislocated. The theory of the image needs to take these dislocations into account and exert a paradigm shift from ontology to typology and topology. We should not only ask what the image is, but rather how and where the image is. The speakers series aims to discuss the new ubiquity, mobility, and operability of the digital image in terms of aesthetic transformation. That is, in terms of how we experience images and urban space through the new digital and screen based modes of aisthesis.

The research area Media Aesthetics brings together four international scholars with a background in art and architecture, film studies, and software studies, to investigate SCREENICITY in terms of digital augmentation, navigation, and public screen culture. Given the multi-facetted nature of the Augmented City, the lectures will cover a broad range of issues and approaches: from the Software City focussing on the role of software art and culture in the city, and public screens being the sites of both consumption and resistance culture in a suburban setting in Shanghai (Chris Berry) to the Sentient City as a near-future scenario of a city capable of monitoring and organizing the life of its citizens (Mark Shepard), and emerging Augmented Reality technologies for smartphones fostering a performative cartography of urban space (Nanna Verhoeff).

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Concept: Ingrid Hoelzl, Department of Media and Communication, UiO