Emily Davidow

NextCity: The Art of the Possible took place last night at the New Museum of Contemporary Art as part of the New Silent series sponsored by Rhizome, which looks at the ways digital technologies have fundamentally altered our lives and experiences of urban space.

Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Speedbird, Urban Computing and its Discontents, and the upcoming The City is Here for You to Use, moderated an excellent panel discussion that included Christian Nold (who we loved at Pop!Tech), Eric Rodenbeck of Stamen Design, and J. Meejin Yoon of MY Studio and Howeler + Yoon Architecture. Here are the notes I took during the talk:

Adam Greenfield’s imagining metropolitan form and experience in the age of ambient informatics. What does it look like after the PC? He’s teaching a course at NYU’s ITP called Urban Computing with Kevin Slavin of Area/Code. They take as an assumption that in the near future, that which will primarily condition choice is not the physical, but a data overlay. What are the qualities of this data-gathering layer?

• embedded in enviornment
• wireless
• imperceptible, small/buried, recedea from consiciousness
• post-GUI
• multiple (tens to hundreds)
• relational
• locative (can locate themselves in space and time)
• situated (specific to places or conditions)

Examples of these technologies:

• GPS and ‘GPS’ – you need to be in sight-lines of 3 satellites for GPS to work. That’s hard to achieve in urban canyons, but ‘GPS’ is an urban substitute that can triangulate location through wifi or mobile phone networks.
• RFID – radio frequency tags like those used in easy pass, transit passes, credit cards, the new U.S. passports
• NFC – Near Field Communication, a short-range wireless communication technology that lets you pay for things with your mobile phone.
  Wifi, Wimax, Wibro bathing cities in open networks
• MEMS – Micro ElectroMechanical Systems like the accelerometers in the iPhone and Nike + iPod.

We now can see tremendous amount of information about cities, patterns of use and visualize them in new ways. Information can be made available locally in a way that it can be acted upon. For example, receiving an alert that says, “Hey! You’re about to enter a high crime/bad air quality area”. The result is a city that responds to the behavior of the people in it in real time.

Christian Nold is interested in embodiment and how we are embodied in the city. He recently had an experiment going through customs where he had to have his fingers scanned, but they were too sweaty for the machine to work from his running to catch a flight. We are encountering all kinds of new systems for dealing with our bodies.

With a promotional image for a lie detector apparatus up on the screen, Nold explained that many of these systems are about control. Our bodies are giving up data to institutions we don’t have control over, and we can’t get the data back. In a lie detector, your words are not trusted; the body’s data is the truth. In Christian Nold’s projects, subjects use a device that is similar in that it uses galvanic skin response (pictured left), but the people control their own data. First the body’s data is measured. Then, by looking at the tracks, the subjects talk about what they were experiencing that caused physical arousal.

When you go from the individual to the aggregate, you start to see some wonderful patterns, which Nold delightfully termed “communal arousal surfaces.” Each city is different.

In Stockport, people were hardly aware that they had a river running through town, since it was covered by a bridge and shopping area that dominates the town. The map also showed that the social heart of the city was still in the old market area.

The San Francisco Emotion Map (see above) featured a lot of people’s memories being embedded in a particular place. Another interesting highlight is murals. People care about and enjoy them, but they don’t show up on any other maps or tourist guides.

His projects are shifting away from art to local town planning and community activism. A recent project included handing out decibel meters to a community concerned with noise from an airport. The government measured acceptable levels of noise, but their information was based on one or two sensors placed on the road intermittently. The situation looks totally different when you base it on real data.

Showing a sensory homunculus (see right), a model of what a man’s body would look like if each part grew in proportion to the area of the brain concerned with its sensory perception, Christian asks us to start thinking in terms of sensory commons rather than public space. Public space no longer exists as interactions become more mediated than ever. How much control do we have? How much agency do we have? (Right now, more than people know.)

Eric Rodenbeck struggled at first to get the display connected and working with his Macbook Pro. This gave Adam an opportunity to point out that these ubiquitous technologies are sold as “seamless” and “perfect.” In the real world, technology breaks constantly, always and reliably. Plan on it. And push back when you see promises of perfection.

Once connected, Eric began explaining that mapping and data visualization is a medium with a wide expressive potential used for all kinds of things, including deception. He used as an example a map of red and blue states in the 2004 U.S. elections. It looks binary and grim with a blue “Baja Canada” and the rest red, showing little hope for a “United” States. But then we look by county, on a color spectrum from Democratic Blue to Republican Red and see that really we’re quite reddish-purple. And when you adjust it to show each county proportional to the population, as in the cartogram above, we see it’s even more mixed and widely democratic.

Roedenbeck’s interested in the idea that data visualization and mapping is the intersection of analysis and spectacle. Spectacle in this case meaning assertive, robust, active, specctacular and exciting. As a medium, data visualization is live, vast and deep. Stamen creates frames and structures that let you drive through data.

Cabspotting.org captures GPS data from Yellow Cab taxis in San Francisco. When looking at the paths, we see their flows defining the streets or arteries of a system that can only be described as a heart. (Pictured above, but watch the time lapse movie for full effect.)

Other projects discussed:

Mapping of development in Plano, TX for Trulia

Crimespotting in Oakland, California illustrates how these are not politically neutral. How public should public information be?

Eric recommends Modest Maps, a free display library for designers and developers who want to use interactive maps in their own projects.

J. Meejin Yoon asks “How do you physicalize ideas?” She’s interested in play – working with our own rules and restrictions. In architecture, the term “play” refers to the gap between two materials.

The defensible dress project was inspired by her experience with commuting in Seoul. Sensors detect someone approaching the wearer and trigger quills made from Flexinol wire to define the wearer’s personal space.

Other projects discussed:

White Noise White Light, an interactive light and sound field created for the 2004 Athens Olympics.

LowRezHiFi, a sidewalk and lobby installation in Washington D.C. with an interactive sound field and transparent field of pixels that displays information and registers movement as you pass by it.

Adam kicked off the discussion following the presentations by pointing out how this is becoming a politically charged issue. Recently, NYC council members drafted legislation requiring anyone who has a detector that measures chemical, biological or radioactive agents to get a license from the police department. This would stifle collection of environmental info vital to common good. The challenge is how to get community gathered data to be taken seriously?

Lots of great questions were asked. If you have answers, get in touch!

• How to get community gathered data to be taken seriously?
• Who owns your GPS trace and photo?
• Are we prepared for openness?
• What is the shape of society after these technologies are embedded?
• How can you get lost?
• If you can’t get lost, how can you ever find yourself?
• What happens if you don’t have access? [Real life example: toilets along Highway 1 in Western Finland are unlocked by sending an SMS message to the number given by the Road Administration.]

In Brixton, Christian Nold’s helping develop Abundance, an urban agriculture project to create a resilient community and social cohesion in the face of climate change and other challenges.

Adam Greenfield spoke of reading The Great Good Place, a book about the informal and social third place after home and work, in Starbucks, the chain inspired by it. Everyone in the place was mediated, either plugged into headphones and a music device or staring into a laptop computer. He used to joke of the need for a chain of cafes called Faraday’s, after the Faraday cage, an enclosure painted to block all electrical signals. It’s not a joke anymore. How do you find a way off the network?

The current attitude towards these technologies is “isn’t it a shame that the rich have access and the poor don’t.” Pretty soon, the measure of grandeur and privilege will be to not have to expose yourself to these networks.

Eric explains how Fundrace.org made public information on people’s political donations along with their addresses easily available, causing neighbors to break out into fights. As problematic as any one data source may be, once you start mapping relations between multiple sources, things start to get troubling. For example, mash Fundrace up with capacitors that measure your treads as you walk and can distinguish individuals, and you can imagine doors may for some people and others won’t know they exist.

Where is the line on what’s acceptable? In South Korea and Japan, we see more acceptance and fewer articulated fears (but few good explanations). One pilot in the U.S. asked kids to wear nametags with RFID. PTA called an urgent meeting and physically removed it from the schools. These are not neutral technologies but “technosocial assemblages” that can’t be decoupled.

And what happens if it all goes away? Adam thinks about Marshall McLuhan’s idea from Understanding Media: Every technological invention or extension is also an amputation. The degree we get used to it is precisely the degree to which we lose our native capabilities.

We have some agency and some responsibility:

• Fight to create lostness.
• Design interventions that return serendipity to people.
• Raise media literacy and awareness of what’s at risk.
• Communicate to elected officials.

N.B. The next event in the series takes place in March, and it looks like a fantastic panel of artists working with biotechnology curated by the fabulous Régine Debatty.