Contributor to the Deep City Conference
Title: 2020–21 International Latsis Symposium, Deep City: Climate Crisis, Democracy and the Digital
About: Big data, smart systems, machine learning – it is inevitable that these new technologies will change the way we study, build and manage our cities. At the same time resurgent interest in consensus and contributive action seems to oppose an exclusively data-driven urbanism. Is the opposition of machine intelligence and democracy inevitable, or are shared trajectories possible?
Politicians, social scientists, urbanists, and architects find their working methods and disciplinary knowledge challenged by insights derived from big data, machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). As both citizens and experts in the many respective fields, our mission must be to bring in our disciplinary knowledge and civic engagement to support the appropriate development and discussion of data-driven tools, to consider both their biases and potentials, and to promote broader social literacy and criticality. Ultimately, it is a question of both decanting the technical quality of these new instruments of design, management and decision making, as well as enhancing democratic control over them. How do we do this? Do our disciplines currently lack adequate strategies to understand, let alone critique or exploit the knowledge-products of machine learning, artificial intelligence and big data?
Due to the ongoing covid-19 crisis, the International DEEP CITY Latsis Symposium was rescheduled to March 2021 with an innovative conference concept where the digital and the physical will join to create a global dialogical field. Streaming from the Rolex Learning Center at the EPFL Campus in Lausanne, the Deep City will have parallel and common activities in partner sites Singapore (in collaboration with SUTD Singapore University of Technology and Design) and Hong Kong (in collaboration with The University of Hong Kong). To ground this field and foster meaningful exchange, an international Call for Proposals was launched in November 2020, asking for operational practices as well as speculative and theoretical questionings from all around the world.
When: March 24 – March 26 2021
Program
Organizers: Ecole polytechnique fédérale de LausanneIn collaboration with SUTD Singapore University of Technology and Design and HKU Hong Kong University
Contribution: Matthew Ledwidge (SMACT ’20) presented a project entitled “A Visual Vocabulary of Memory and Emotive Prediction” in a Project Showcase “New Material Agencies” and in the online exhibition “Deep City Wall”
Description of Ledwidge’s project: “The research trajectory follows evocative instances of historical reconstruction, and predictive, and often emotive technologies in representations of the built environment. Building on previous artistic research projects around similar concerns, the project consists of text and images intended to deconstruct anticipated or imagined emotional states generated by the built environment. Related research has focused on the intersection of contested spatial sites and politics, urban technologies and visualization techniques, and artistic and community parallel or counter-planning practices. The project presents artistic and theoretical explorations of the ways in which models of cities and the emotional experiences of their inhabitants can reorganize politics, and epistemic formations in relation to urban information technologies.”
Other Participants in the conference from MIT: Kwan Queenie Li (SMACT ’22) also presented. She had a paper presentation with Joel Austin Cunningham from MIT SMarchs titled “The Nature of Data”
Description: The Nature of Data is an investigative research project that observes how data is materialised within urban density. Acting as the primary case study for this investigation, Hong Kong is a microcosm of intense urbanism and is one of many cities facing an unprecedented influx of digital infrastructures that now compete for limited resources while having a significant impact on the environment. Fuelled by an explosion of data production and the emergence of edge computing, a distributional strategy that brings data processing closer to the location of its producers and users, the city has is conceiving new architectural typologies that challenge preconceived notions of digital and bodily distinction –“
Many existing buildings in Hong Kong, with high ceiling height, high floor loading and flexible floor layouts, can be converted into data centres. Depending on the amount of space needed, data centres can occupy part of or an entire industrial building.” – datacentre.gov.hk, 2019
Due to the city’s land shortage, many industrial facilities are located in close proximity to residential buildings, however, the city’s economic transformation is increasingly causing these architectures to neglect human occupation and meet the demands of a post-human programme. While a future duality of human and post-human urban environments can quite feasibly be conceived, here we consider convolution. When much needed spaces of residence and work are being dismissed to integrate an occupation of server racks, one considers that priorities might have gone astray.
Utilizing multimedia documentation and theoretical provocation, this project serves as a prompt for zoning and design strategies that respond to emerging questions: Have archaic territorial systems unintentionally transformed our homes to become an unfamiliar synthesis of human/post-human urbanity? Who or what do our cities now serve socially, economically, ecologically?
Deep City Wall Online Exhibition also included Kwan Queenie Li, with her project “Prophecy of Weeds”
Description: “ Weeds, the everyday, ritualistic greenery, exist universally beyond boundaries. Mediating through their relationships with urban architectures such as concrete cracks, paving slabs, drain systems, weeds signify a specific type of complicit intelligence anterior to anthropocentric planning, offering an alternative imagination from the mainstream spectacle, one that is hopefully always rendering and becoming. Relentless and dynamic, they resonate with the ceaseless drive nowadays to redefine the relationship between human and nonhuman thingness.
This project attempts to elaborate on weeds’ nomadic vitality into an alternative performativity that could counter-react a singular coding of future imagination into binary and programmable formula. Through toying with accumulative materials within multimedia outlets, the work foregrounds a synthetic kinship with more-than-human agencies for orchestrating future planning. It foretells that new and liberated views might be born through juggling between tangents, of the explosively amplified or the extremely confined.”