The findings and policy recommendations of the AHRC/BRAID project AI in the street have now been published by project partner Careful Industries and are available hereLink opens in a new window.

Anders Koed Madsen (Aalborg University)

A seminar hosted by the Centre for interdisciplinary Methodologies (University of Warwick)

• Tuesday May 9, 15:00-17:00,
• Room: OC1.07 (and online)

Digitalisation and computation presents us with a vague empirical world that unsettles established links between measurements and values. As more and more actors use digital media to produce data about aspects of the world they deem important, new possibilities for inscribing their lives emerge. The practical work with digital methods thus often involves the production of social visibilities that are misfits in the context of established data practices. In this talk Anders Koed Madsen will argue that this friction carries the distinct critical potential to design data experiments that (a) uses the act of operationalisation as an engine for creating intersubjective situations around the meaning of existing concepts and (b) takes advantage of algorithmic techniques to provoke a reassessment of some of the core assumptions that shape the way we normally frame empirical problems. Drawing on the work of Kant, Peirce, Dewey and C.I. Lewis, Anders propose to think of this critical potential as the possibility to practice what he terms ’experimental a priori’.

In the second part of the talk, Anders uses qualitative vignettes from two years of data experiments with GEHL architects to illustrate what this entails in practice. His collaboration with the architects was sparked by a shared concern that cities are becoming political filter bubbles and the experiment consisted in using traces from Facebook to design an interactive datascape that enabled the architects to explore this issue in new ways. This datascapeended up as a troubling cartography that reconfigured existing problematizations. Faced with the task of using traces from Facebook as an empirical source, the architects found themselves in a need to revisit inherited assumptions about the ontology of urban space and the way it can even be formulated as a problem of diversity. The decision to work with digital methods thus created a form of productive friction that stimulated new problem spaces. Anders will end his talk by outlining five design principles that can potentially steer data sprints towards such situations in the future.

Anders Koed Madsen is associate professor at Aalborg University in Copenhagen, head of experimental practice at TANTLab and co-founder of The Public Data Lab. Both are institutional homes for researchers crossing STS and computational humanities. During the last five years he has developed ‘Soft City Sensing’ as a distinct framework for mapping and conceptualizing the social infrastructure of urban publics through the digital traces they leave of their urban life. This work draws on his distinct interdisciplinary background in pragmatist philosophy, computational humanities, internet studies and organizational analysis. Anders serves at editorial boards of - and have published extensively in - leading journals within computational humanities and urban cartography. He has authored books on valuation and cultural studies and is currently co-editing an international handbook of computational humanities. Anders directs the executive education in 'data-driven organizational development' and frequently gives presentations, also public ones, on topics relating to computational humanities, smart cities and digital citizen engagement.

The two papers that Anders will talk across can be found here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1o7BJuqizp1OoO5ng4tPacgo-HWl-zUE7?usp=sharing

If you are not affiliated with the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies but would like to attend this seminar online, please email Kanisha Mathiarasan at Kanishka.Mathiarasan@warwick.ac.uk by Friday May 4 2023, and she will email you the seminar link.

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.