Mixing methods for the study of topical affairs - an Advanced Training Event convened by Noortje Marres

The Digital Culture Lab at Luneburg online video interviews inc Dr Noortje Marres (Warwick CIM)

at the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR)
Friday 17 June, 2016 – 10.00 – 17.00, Rotterdam

You are cordially invited to join the launch of the Center for Public Imagination (CPI) and to participate in the Smart Imaginaries and/in Urban Politics session organized by the CPI in collaboration with the IABR 2016 on Friday June 17, 2016, Rotterdam.

PLEASE JOIN US BY REGISTERING AT info@cpi.center - ENTRANCE IS FREE

In what is called the ‘smart city’ or the ‘sentient city’, urban politics is increasingly rooted in a network of sensors that monitor processes ranging from traffic flow to public aggression, and from waste disposal to air pollution. In smart city imaginaries, streets are monitored by sensors, some of them hovering over the city in drones; buildings will be connected through the Internet of Things, and urban services will be permanently calibrated on the basis of real-time monitoring data. The smart city is at once a business model, a policy toolbox and an infrastructure for citizen participation. It is part (science) fiction, part political reality, part corporate sales talk, and part techno-utopian desire. City governments, technology corporations and design companies converge in creating the actually existing smart city. But because the smartness of the city is projected into the future, it is key to zoom in on the imagination of smartness, the changing vocabularies of politics in the smart city, and the desires that animate it. Accordingly, this event seeks to highlight the smart imaginaries operative in urban politics. This event, which will be tied to the launch of the Dutch inter-university Center for Public Imagination, explores smart imaginaries by focusing on questions such as:

• What happens to urban politics when government becomes an operating system, urban progress becomes optimization, and policy becomes a series of pilots, experiments, tests and demos?

• Which sites become political in the sense that they instantiate ways of caring for public issues, and how can those sites be interfaced with?

• What does it mean that to be political is to interface?

• What desires and which imaginaries animate urban smartness, efficiency and optimization?

In the morning, lectures by several speakers offer possible answers to such questions. They will be input for discussion and dazzling explorations in working groups in the afternoon. The afternoon sessions are open and structured loosely by the issues and concerns raised in the morning. They allow for a lively investigative atmosphere. Their results will be presented at the end of the afternoon in a final plenary discussion.

Speakers include Karen Maex, rector magnificus of the University of Amsterdam; Willem Schinkel, Professor of Social Theory, Erasmus University Rotterdam; Noortje Marres, Centre for Interdisciplinairy Methodologies, University of Warwick; Huub Dijstelbloem, Professor of Philosophy of Science and Politics, University of Amsterdam; and Maarten Hajer, curator IABR 2016 and professor of Urban Futures, Utrecht University.

For more info see http://iabr.nl/en 

A contribution by Noortje Marres will feature in the upcoming exhibition Nervous Systems: Quantified Life and the Social Question:

https://hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/2016/nervoese_systeme/nervoese_systeme_start.php

The exhibition is curated by the Tactical Technology Collective for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin and will run from March 10 to May 9, 2016.

Marres' contribution is entitled "The Labour of Interpretation", and features three mundane objects with special capacities to support the interpretation of our changing and un-changing societies: a smart teapot, a fossil leaf and seeds, and the engine control board of a Volkswagen diesel car.

Noortje Marres will be a fellow in the Digital Cultures Research Lab at Leuphana University and participate in its symposium on non-knowledge this January http://tinyurl.com/zuk9c39

A contribution to the second issue of the OA journal Social Media + Society, curated by Tarleton Gillespie and Hector Postigo of Culture Digitally.

Available on the link page.