From the real-time city to read/write urbanism: on the architecture of contemporary urban topographies.
Keynote lecture by Mark Shepard
Nov 5th 2009 20:00 hrs
NAi Auditorium
Euro 3-5
Cities today are complex hybrids of both physical and informational space. Brought into being through common everyday techno-social practices, these hybrids rely on a wide range of networked media, information and communications systems that continually make and remake the spatial conditions of urban life. Take for example the pervasiveness of mobile phones capable of not just synchronic voice communications but also asynchronic data transactions – text messaging, web browsing, photo sharing, to name just a few. These mobile computing devices have introduced new ways by which we connect with each other and interact with and within our shared urban environment.
This lecture will present a survey of recent work in urban computing, ambient informatics and locative media, and examine its implications for architecture and urbanism. How is our experience of the city and the choices we make there transformed by these new spatial practices? How do they reconfigure traditional urban relationships between privacy and publicity within urban public space? To what extent can we deploy them toward a form of open and participatory space-making within these new and emerging urban topographies? How do we – as architects and urban planners – begin to think about our role in shaping the immaterial architecture of software infrastructures and influencing their performance or enactment of new urban organizations and spatial experiences that are diverse, sustainable and dynamic?
The Mobile City’s Martijn de Waal and Michiel de Lange will introduce the lecture and discuss its themes with Mark Shepard. Moderator is Jaap Jan Berg.
About Mark Shepard
Mark Shepard is an architect, artist and academic. He has founded the Media Architecture educational program at the Univeristy of Buffalo, and organized the exhibit ‘Sentient Cities‘ with the Architectural League in NYC . He is also one of the editors of the The Situated Technologies Pamphlet Series.