10:30 Registration and coffee.
11:00 Introduction.
11:15 Keynote Malcolm McCullough – “Urban Inscriptions”:
The citizens of the mobile city go from place to place, and would not want to be just anywhere. The most vibrant mobility occurs where physical contexts overlap, social situations intensify, and multiple histories accumulate. In urbanism (an unlike automobile-abiding exurbanism) density makes life better. Layers of information have long been part of urban density. Locative media are not so new, and their applications are not just in wayfinding. This talk considers a longer history of urban inscriptions, suggests new challenges in urban markup, and grounds these in their relations to architecture.
12:10 Project Presentations Locative and Mobile Media:
* Esther Polak (independent artist) – Amsterdam RealTime and locative media art.
* James Stewart (School of Art Culture and Environment, Edinburgh UK) – Branded Meeting Places, Ubiquitous technologies, and the design of places for meaningful human encounter.
* Dick de Ruijter (Hootchie Cootchie Media Collective Rotterdam) – Afrikaander Tapes: city walk in Rotterdam, Netherlands.
* Laurence Claeys & Marc Godon (Bell Labs-Alcatel-Lucent Antwerp) – “Let the Homo Ludens conquer the city”: the touch-paradigm in designing new technologies.
* Thomas Engel (The Saints Amsterdam) – NavBall, a locative multiplayer game.
13:00 Lunch.
13:30 Keynote Christian Nold – “‘Locative Media’ Autopsy”:
We are at a point when certain ‘Locative Media’ projects are receiving large academic and commercial funding and some University courses teach a history of media that goes from analogue to digital to virtual and now locative. At the same time it seems clear that Locative Media does not exists anymore as a community but has splintered into a number of different directions. This lecture will attempt a brief survey of what Locative Media once was and what it is today changing into. Certain positive qualities that emerged such as the strong focus on audience and the specificity of place appear to be kick-starting a new generation of practice.
14:25 Keynote Tim Cresswell – “Dromologies – Towards a Politics of Mobility”:
In this talk I propose a politics of mobility based on six facets of human mobility – motive force, velocity, rhythm, route, experience and friction. Each of these is implicated in the production of kinetic hierarchies in social and cultural life. These themes will be developed both historically and in the present day through discussions of, among other things, the medieval vagabond and Rfid technology.
15:20 Tea and Coffee.
15:45 Project Presentations Locative and Mobile Media:
* Jeroen van Schaick & Stefan van der Spek (Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Architecture – Department Urbanism) – Urbanism on Track: studying activity patterns in the Network City.
* Martin Rieser (media artist and theorist UK) – Starshed: mapping stories onto the city of Bristol, UK.
* Robin De Witte (I-city Hasselt and City Live) – a wireless city in Hasselt, Belgium.
* Anne Nigten (V2_Institute for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam) – Stalkshow: an interactive billboard in public space.
* Willem Velthoven (Mediamatic Amsterdam) – Social RFID.
* Ronald Lenz (Waag Society Amsterdam) – Location-based Learning in the Games Atelier.
16:35 Paneldiscussion “Designing for Mobile Media & Urban Spaces: Moving between Theory and Practice”.
When theorizing or designing Urban Spaces and Mobile and Locative Media, what are the most urgent challenges and opportunities? How are theorists and practitioners from different fields dealing with these issues?
In this session experts from different backgrounds will engage in a cross-disciplinary discussion and tackle the most important issues from both a theoretical and practical perspective. What can we learn from each other?
With Nicolas Nova (user experience & foresight researcher, Media and Design Lab, Swiss Institute of Technology, Lausanne), Rob van Kranenburg (Waag Society Amsterdam), Nanna Verhoeff (University of Utrecht), Marc Schuilenburg (Free University Amsterdam; Studio Popcorn), Joris van Hoytema (BBVH Architects, Baas op Zuid).
17:45 Drinks.
18:00 Dinner.
20:00 Keynote Stephen Graham – “Sentient Cities: Ambient Intelligence and the Politics of Urban Space”:
Increasing amounts of information processing capacity are embedded in the environment around us. They link the physical environment with an informational landscape, that is both a repository of data but also increasingly communicates and processes information.
This presentation suggests that we need to unpack the embedded politics of this process. It outlines three key emerging dynamics: environments that learn and possess anticipation and memory, the efficacy of technological mythologies, and the politics of visibility.
To illustrate this, three contrasting forms of sentient urban environments will be explored. The first addresses market-led visions of customised consumer worlds. The second explores military plans for profiling and targeting. Finally, the third looks at artistic endeavours to re-enchant and contest the urban informational landscape of urban sentience. Each, we suggest, shows a powerful dynamic of the environment tracking, predicting and recalling usage.
21:30 End of the program
One response to “February 28th: Main Conference”
[…] We have updated the program of the Mobile City Conference with the abstracts and titles of our 4 keynote speakers. You will find the full program here. […]