Workshop / Co-Curricular

Re-Thingifying the Smart City

With Jennifer Gabrys and Helen Pritchard

Fri, Feb 5, 2016

1–4 pm

Requirements: Please bring your own laptop. Furthermore you will be asked to send one brief paragraph describing your approach to sensor-based smart-city infrastructure to discuss during the workshop, along with an overview of documentation that you will present at the workshop, for example: videos, photographs, source code, ethnography, technical data sheets, sensors, or other material. Within your written statement, please also provide an additional brief paragraph indicating your initial working ideas for how existing sensor-based smart-city infrastructure could be repurposed, hacked, or used in a parasitical way. These "re-thingified" infrastructure documents will be included in the collective pamphlet, which will be put together during the workshop.
Register Here

Within the Internet of Things, environmental sensors are one type of digital instrument meant to enable citizens to act on environmental problems. The concept is that environmental problems can be understood and solved by collecting data through sensing devices. Yet how could citizens become productive—if twitchy—operators within a sensor-based version of data-led politics?

And despite our anxiety to act positively upon environmental concerns, how could citizens as sensors also potentially be instrumentalized through these practices? This workshop explores, through theoretical and hands-on approaches, how it might be possible to rework and re-thingify the anxieties to act (and make) not necessarily by producing new sensor data and devices, but by repurposing existing, leftover, and failed ones within contemporary urban environments.

transmediale Co-Curricular is carried out in cooperation with Allianz Kulturstiftung.