Smart Cities New York (SCNY) is North America’s leading global conference exploring the emerging influence of cities in shaping the future. With the global smart city market expected to grow to $1.6 trillion within the next three years, Smart Cities New York is Powered by People and guided this year by its “Emerging Power Of Cities” theme. The conference brings together top thought leaders and senior members of the private and public sector to discuss investments in physical and digital infrastructure, health, education, sustainability, security, mobility, workforce development, and more, to ensure cities are central to advancing and improving urban life.

High-profile speakers and panelists have confirmed their participation at Smart Cities New York 2018, including:

• Stefano Boeri – Architect, Founder of Stefano Boeri Architetti, and Professor, Politecnico, Milano
• Alice Charles – Urban Development Lead, World Economic Forum
• Ali Chaudhry – Deputy Secretary for Transportation, Office of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo
• Peter Hirshberg – Principal & Co-Founder, Maker City Project
• Sarah Hunter – Director of Public Policy, X (Formerly Google [X])
• Don Katz – Founder & CEO, Audible, and Founder, Newark Venture Partners
• Bastian Lehmann – Co-Founder & CEO, Postmates
• Jeffrey Sachs – Director of SDSN, Co-Author of U.S. Cities SDG Index and Professor at Columbia University
• Andy Stern – President Emeritus, Service Employees International Union (SEIU)
• Mary Stuart Masterson – Actress, Filmmaker & Founder, Stockade Works

Website: www.smartcitiesny.com

Hashtags: #SCNY18  #SmartCitiesNY #PoweredbyPeople

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Call for Papers #6: ‘The Spectre of Artificial Intelligence’

Original post here

For the first time in history, more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas. In just a few more decades, 70 percent of the world will live in cities. Enabling those cities to deliver services effectively, efficiently, and sustainably—while keeping their citizens safe, healthy, prosperous, and well–informed—will be among the most important undertakings of this century. In parallel to this growth, the volume, variety, and production rate of data—much of which is being collected by a variety of sensors—are unprecedented. If properly acquired, integrated, and analyzed, “big data” can take us beyond today’s imperfect and often anecdotal understanding of cities to enable better operations, better planning, and better policy.

Most data currently generated by sensors are used only for the purpose for which they were collected—for example to detect and control anomalies. However, given the breadth of data generated by sensors, there is considerable value in exploring best practices in creating and exploiting sensor network data for future re-use and immediate integration with other data. With the support of The Kavli Foundation and industry sponsors, NYU’s Center for Urban Science + Progress is proud to host focused and engaged discussions on emerging sensing topics with leading voices from across the US.

Sensing the City will engage the local community in exploring overarching challenges and opportunities as urban sensing capabilities and ambitions continue to expand, inviting participants across New York to join sensing luminaries from across the USA for a blend of talks and panel discussions on three core themes.

Agenda and registration info here

Migration and Mobility in a Digital Age: Paradoxes of Connectivity and Belonging Conference

Heyman Center @ Columbia University
April 10-11, 2018

The image of Syrian refugees with a smartphone shooting ‘selfies’ upon reaching dry land has captured the international imagination (Chouliaraki, 2017; Kunstman, 2017; Risam, forthcoming 2018). It suggests an image of the ‘connected migrant’ (Diminescu, 2008), which is shaped by a profound ambivalence: migrants are expected to be people fleeing from war, violence, and poverty; they are not expected to be ‘digital natives’, equipped with technologies to navigate their difficult journeys. While smartphones are accessible, affordable, and easy to use, in the realm of the public imaginary the image of the disenfranchised and disconnected migrant remains that of the ‘have nots’, and therefore subject to ‘high tech orientalism’ (Chun, 2006, p. 73). This posits the figuration of the migrant as outside the realm of development and modern forms of communication, disenfranchised and vulnerable in order to be worthy of international aid and pity (Boltanski, 20000; Ticktin, 2008). And yet smartphones are ubiquitous, and migrants have been early adopters and heavy users of technologies for the simple reason that these technologies are ingrained in their daily practices and everyday lives, which often involve perilous crossings but also the need to keep in touch with the home front and their diasporic communities. The promise of connectivity that is guaranteed even under duress becomes fraught with the profound disconnection brought about by the disciplining gaze of Western media and publics.

It is, therefore, crucial to focus on the specific way in which digital technologies bridge or magnify the gap in migration between geographical distance and digital proximity. How are affect, intimacy, and belonging negotiated online in the face of forced migration and expulsions (Sassen, 2012) but also of circular migration, expatriation, and transnational movements?

This conference aims to cover a broad range of conflict-related issues on migration in a digital age. Using the latest insights from a range of interdisciplinary fields, it will explore theories of displacement such as diaspora, cosmopolitanism, and nomadism, and the transformations brought about by the digital revolution, through the analysis of virtual communities, social media platforms, and digital activism. It will also focus on media production and the regulation of information on forced migrants in a ‘post-truth’ era: fake news; the humanitarianism-securitization nexus, migration management, social and political conflicts related to migrant and diaspora communities, radicalization and online counter-terrorism, hate speech and racism, but also solidarities, activism, and protest.

For the schedule and RSVP info

Image: Bouchra Khalili

April 8 – July 15, 2018

Over the next four months, 80 Washington Square East and Anthology Film Archives will screen films and videos by Harun Farocki. Screenings will take place first at Anthology Film Archives and later at New York University.

Harun Farocki was born in 1944. He lived in India and Indonesia before moving with his family to Germany at age 10. In his early twenties, he left for West Berlin to further his studies in cinema, and spent most of his working life there. By the time of his death in 2014, he had a prolific body of films to his name. Laboring under the burden of Europe’s history, a history in which the Holocaust loomed large, Farocki was a naturalist of loss. One’s ability to forget what they do not want to know, to overlook what is before them, was seldom put to the test better than in Germany’s reconstruction after the Second World War. The writer W.G. Sebald said that postwar Germany was “an almost perfectly functioning mechanism of repression.” Farocki, on the other hand, did not sweep things under the rug. His work, often graceful in its observations, was never far from the injury of our world. “He was endlessly patient,” Antje Ehmann wrote, “with the strangeness, the beauty, the stupidity, and even the unbearable cruelness of our world.”

His films often track the effects that free markets, war, and their attendant technologies have on the individual. His films invariably reflect on the methods we use to construct and distribute images and the uses to which these images are put. Frequently, he went to places of focused production – a prison, a virtual reality facility used to train soldiers, a commercial photo shoot – and managed to describe the abstractions, the rules, the exercises and negotiations of power behind the surface of such images. About his method, Farocki once remarked, “My maxim was: I tell a company that the movie is an advertisement for what they are doing and tell the TV station [Farocki’s employer] that the film is a criticism of this practice. And try not to do either one or the other.”

For the list of screenings and RSVP info

Register

In cities where demand for air travel is high, it’s not uncommon to find two, three or even—as is increasingly the case in some metropolitan areas—six airports. These multiple-airport cities present new challenges for passengers and urban dwellers who may struggle to navigate their aerial infrastructure. The fragmentation of airports in a single city, frequently owned and operated by different governing bodies, can lead to unpredictable and even confusing experiences.

Despite the ambitious renovations and annexations underway, from London to Tokyo and Istanbul to New York, a city’s metropolitan aerial infrastructure is rarely understood as a single urban system. How should we rethink multiple-airport cities more holistically?

With seven airports in its metro area, New York City offers a perfect case study to reimagine airports as a choreographed urban ecosystem, which relies as much on architecture and urban planning as it does on technology and data-driven design. A panel of experts will discuss challenges and opportunities for the future of New York City’s aerial infrastructure, drawing from the think tank’s focus on urban design and digital interfaces.

This panel discussion is presented as part of the AERIAL FUTURES: Urban Constellations think tank taking place in New York City between April 5-6, 2018.

Speakers:
Margaret Newman, FAIA, LEED AP, Principal, ARUP Marcel Botha, CEO, 10X Beta
Robert Chicas, AIA, LEED AP, Director of Global Aviation + Transportation, HOK

Moderator: Ben Rubin, Director, Center for Data Arts, The New School

Organized by: AIANY Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and Aerial Futures

LOGIC MAGAZINE ISSUE 04: SCALE

7PM – WED APR 25, 2018
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC – LIBERTY HALL, NEW YORK

RVSP Here

Logistics + RSVP on the Institute for Public Knowledge website

NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge invites you to join for the launch of Gordon Douglas’s The Help-Yourself City: Legitimacy and Inequality in DIY Urbanism. The author will be present in conversation with Caroline Lee and Harvey Molotch.

When local governments neglect public services or community priorities, how do concerned citizens respond? In The Help-Yourself City, Gordon Douglas looks closely at people who take urban planning into their own hands with homemade signs and benches, guerrilla bike lanes and more. Douglas explores the frustration, creativity, and technical expertise behind these interventions, but also the position of privilege from which they often come. Presenting a needed analysis of this growing trend from vacant lots to city planning offices, The Help-Yourself City tells a street-level story of people’s relationships to their urban surroundings and the individualization of democratic responsibility.

Gordon C. C. Douglas is Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Director of the Institute for Metropolitan Studies at San José State University. He is a multidisciplinary urbanist whose work sits at the intersection of urban political-economy, community studies, and cultures of planning and design. Prior to joining the Dept. of Urban and Regional Planning at San José State, he was the Rebuild by Design Postdoctoral Fellow at New York University, where he also served as Associate Director (2015-2016) and Acting Director (2016-2017) of the Institute for Public Knowledge.

Caroline W. Lee is Professor of Sociology in the Anthropology & Sociology Department at Lafayette College. She is a comparative institutional sociologist with research and teaching interests in the following areas: political sociology, social movements, economic sociology, law, sociology of knowledge and culture, urban and environmental sociology, and research methods. She is the author of Do-It-Yourself Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2015) and an editor of the volume Democratizing Inequalities (NYU Press, 2015).

Harvey Molotch is Professor of Sociology and Metropolitan Studies at New York University. His writings focus on cities with special attention to economic development, urban security, artifacts, and product design. He is the author of several books including Against Security: How We Go Wrong at Airports, Subways and Other Sites of Ambiguous Danger (Princeton University Press, 2012), and Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computers and Many Other Things Come to Be as They Are (Routledge, 2003).

The kind folks at Library Stack offered to curate for us a custom collection of independent and artists’ publications related to Urban Intelligence. You’ll find it here. If you’re logged into the New School network, you should have access. Thanks to Benjamin Tiven!

Cities around the world, and the people who live, work and do business in them, are rethinking the social, political, environmental and economic life of urban centres for the age of driverless cars and exponential technologies.

Register here.

Join sparks & honey for an exploration of the Future of Cities with our Advisory Board Member, Dr Laura Forlano, design lead on the Driverless City Project – an Illinois Institute of Technology Nayar Prize finalist.

• How does 21st-century society — which has been built, in ways large and small, around human drivers — change and reconfigure when they all become mere riders?
• How might designers understand and engage with the opportunities presented by these and other emerging technologies?
• How might designers ensure that these technologies reflect our values and ethical commitments?
• What new questions will designers need to ask and what new skills and literacies are necessary in order to design for the driverless city?
• How might designers involve communities and practice inclusion of diverse needs and aspirations?

About Dr Laura Forlano

Laura Forlano has been working at the intersection of emerging technologies and the future of cities for the past ten years in the US, Canada, Hungary, Germany, Spain, Australia and Japan. She is a social scientist and design researcher currently working as Associate Professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design. She is a Fulbright scholar and National Science Foundation scholar whose perspectives are sought out by the media, academic and professional institutions, and conferences on topics related to smart cities and the ‘internet of things’.

She has presented to The Art Institute of Chicago, Northwestern University and The Architecture League of New York and was most recently a keynote speaker on “Predicting the City” (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) and the SmartCity Expo World Congress (Barcelona, Spain).

Laura works with a range of organizations including the Institute for the Future, the Social Science Research Council, New America Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Foundations and the World Bank and has testified before the New York City Council and represented the public on the Federal Communications Commission’s Consumer Advisory Committee.

The Driverless City project was recently featured in The New York Times Magazine and in an exhibition at the Vienna Biennale.

February 27 6-7:30pm
NYU Center for the Humanities
20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor
Registration

Urban Digital Humanities: Design and Sustainability

A new series on technologized cities at The Atlantic — including pieces on Sidewalk Labs’ Toronto project, China’s social credit score, etc.

Screening | Andrew Norman Wilson: The Order of Ought

Thursday, February 15, 7:30pm
Anthology Film Archives
32 2nd Ave
New York, NY 10003
website

This screening, featuring videos and selections by Andrew Norman Wilson, presents works in which artificial and animal intelligence play a role in the production of images that emphasize alien perspectives for human viewers.

Wilson writes, “The works amount to an ethical disturbance in which the involvement of intelligent, amoral actors complicates a humanist legacy that understands the world as having been given for our needs and created in our image. From these revisionary vantage points, this stagnant legacy begins to contradict itself, amounting to an ecologically murderous, even suicidal tendency. Thankfully, I also sense an order of ought, a program for escape.”

PROGRAM

• Stan Brakhage, Mothlight,1963, 4 min, 16mm (preserved by Anthology Film Archives)
• Andrew Norman Wilson, Ode to Seekers 2012, 2016, 8-min loop, digital
• Yuri Ancarani, Da Vinci, 2014, 25 min, digital
  Andrew Norman Wilson, The Unthinkable Bygone, 2016, 2-min loop, digital
• Chimpanzee Enjoys a Cigarette, 2010, 34 sec, digital
• Jos De Gruyter and Harald Thys, Die Aap van Bloemfontein, 2014, 23 min, digital
• My Finger Family Rhymes, Funny Animals Swimming Race Animals INDOOR PLAYGROUND For Kids 3D Colors Animals Finger Family Songs, 2017, 5-min excerpt, digital

Tickets are available at Anthology’s box office on the day of the show only. The box office opens 30 minutes before the first show of the day. There are no advance ticket sales. Reservations are available to Anthology or Swiss Institute members. For more ticket information, please see here: http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/buy-tickets.

This screening is wheelchair accessible. For other accessibility concerns at Anthology Film Archives, please email lou@swissinstitute.net.

Andrew Norman Wilson is an artist based in Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions include Techne and the Decency of Means at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2017), Dreamlands at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2017), the Gwangju Biennial (2016), the Berlin Biennial (2016), the Bucharest Biennial (2016), Bread and Roses at the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw (2016), and On Sweat, Paper and Porcelain at CCS Bard in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2015). He has lectured at Oxford University, Cambridge University, Harvard University, Yale University, and UCLA, where he is now visiting faculty. His work has been featured in Aperture, Art in America, Artforum, Buzzed, Frieze, Gizmodo/Gawker, The New Yorker, and Wired. He has published writing in Artforum, e-flux, DIS, and a Darren Bader monograph from Koenig Books.

Since we’re having an Alternative Unknowns workshop later in this semester, this exhibition might be a good way to start thinking about uncertainties. It’s right around the corner at Pratt Gallery at 144 West 14th Street and a nicely spent lunch-break!

SEE YOURSELF E(X)IST

December 8, 2017–February 17, 2018

Pratt Manhattan Gallery presents See Yourself E(x)ist, an exhibition that looks at the future of humans and nature—at our poetic and futile attempts at agency, and our absurd productive efforts to control. The exhibition presents incidences of human interaction—with animals, insects, leaves, trees, earth, and time—that yield extraordinary artifacts, engineered forms of hope, and objects of power. They’ve taken the form of robots, videos, paintings, sculptures, and interactive objects. The art acknowledges the elegance of futility, the strangeness of attempts at permanence, and the absurdity of technological advances.

See Yourself E(x)ist features work from eighteen artists including painters, jewelry  designers, mixed media, and installation artists that address our human future in nature and our inevitable transformation, evolution, and decay.

Artists and designers include: Nobumichi Asai, Alan Berliner, Michael Candy, Fantich & Young, Kathryn Fleming, Gijs Gieskes, Lee Griggs, Ann Hamilton, Dorry Hsu, John Jerard, Lanzavecchia + Wai, Lorenzo Oggiano, Jaime Pitarch, Andrew Quitmeyer, Madeline Schwartzman, and Allan Wexler.

Curated by Madeline Schwartzman, author of See Yourself Sensing: Redefining Human Perception and See Yourself X: Human Futures Expanded

See Yourself E(x)ist Brochure