Open podium event: presentations of the Sentient City workshop. NAi. Rotterdam. 6.11.09.
by Elena Tiis

After a one-day workshop aiming to develop “approaches toward urban computing and locative media applications, systems and infrastructures for near-future urban life in Rotterdam”, the results were presented at the Open Podium event of the Architecture Biennale.

By way of an introduction, IABR curator Jennifer Sigler notes that the exhibition has a blind spot. In its concentration on physical urban space it elides the effects of digital networks. This is why the Biennale comprises also a week-long (4th – 8th November) program on the theme of Connectivity.
Curated by the Mobile City bloggers Martijn de Waal and Michiel de Lange in collaboration with Mark Shepard of the Sentient City Survival Kit, the workshop investigated the importance of “the digital” for urban space. Shepard, in his lecture the previous day, had used Jane Jacobs’ idea of the sidewalk ballet and transposed it to the notion of the ‘informational ballet,’ a kind of invisible layer of urban space which architecture should have a chance at influencing.

In introducing the project sketches, Michiel de Lange describes the Mobile City as a knowledge network, aiming to bring together professionals from various sectors. The first part of the presentations showcased the results of the workshop, which was about critical design interventions and explore what “digital” means for the city. In the second part, Shepard’s Sentient City Kit was presented.

The projects of the day comprised:

1. “Nuggit”, which is something you have to offer – a skill, staff or a situation. It’s a kind of service without currency exchange. One becomes a nuggeteer by offering a nuggit, which is whatever one is offering in time and space, for a moment, or for a certain duration or on the spot. Walking someone’s dog for twenty minutes while waiting for the bus might be a nuggit. This is done by opening Nuggits on one’s smartphone and signaling one’s willingness to offer something.

2. “Goede Reis” team took the OV-chipkaart system (a public transport card with RFID, which was recently introduced in the Netherlands) as their starting point. The goals of the project were to raise awareness of the data collected by these cards, to improve social interaction and increase serendipity. The medium or location for these interventions are the turnstiles/ticket control machines in public transportation. The idea of the project is twofold: First, after you swipe your card, the machine says something about you so that the person entering behind can get a conversation going. The cardreader displays inferred information based on the travel information of the person, for instance “she’s late today!” Secondly, it aims to bridge the boundaries between the social, cultural and spatial aspects of the city by an LBT (location based task). This is one’s “score” for city exploration; the card tracks the areas of the city that are familiar and unfamiliar for the person and recommend exploring unknown areas and allocates points on that basis. Traveling to the south of the city although normally residing in the north is to significantly increase one’s score.

3. “Landmarks” team was concerned with making the “after” of events more visible to the point of actually making it mandatory for biennales and festivals. The timeline for a landmark would be as follows: initial event idea →going to the local government to get the event permit; in conjunction with this, one must agree to produce a landmark for it → the event produces an augmented reality landmark, a living monument capturing the experience in pictures, memories, text and sound which stays on as a reminder after the festival in question has finished.

4. “What clicks on the street” is about taking the Dutch “probleembuurt” (Dutch government terminology for a ‘problematic neighbourhood’) and reconsidering a “problem” as a space of negotiation. It is a way of getting at the qualitative information behind street noise and movement for the purpose of mediating what is considered a problem by different people. The point is to find unexpected ways of addressing intrusion; there should be a kind of “leakage” of personal information about the situation, producing an intimate message about the origin of the sound or situation in question. This would take the form of unexpected notes published on shop receipts, soundfiles via Bluetooth or “junkmail”.

In the case of all these project sketch presentations, there seems to be a palpable concern with bridging what one might term the modern metropolitan remove, or the anonymous façade of interactions in the city. All project an actual interest in spying upon the details of a stranger and a fascination to inscribing memories onto physical urban space. Indeed, “Landmarks” goes as far as to stipulate that this might be something mandatory in the case of festivals. The more disquieting, intrusive and even coercive edge of technologies that track and control is thus repurposed as something that can have benevolent uses.

The second part of the event opens the Sentient City exhibit with the presentation of Shepard’s survival toolkit. The toolkit is about imagining tactile objects in response to the transformation of urban culture. By taking a playful stance and imagining a type of “urban computing”, it wants to know what happens in an over-coded city as digital information on mobile devices comes in interface with urban space. By taking jabs at the future and as one example of critical design, the kit fabricates things which are relating and sensing.

Shepard’s four concept sketches for survival in the Sentient City are an exercise in the archaeology of society that does not yet exist. By reconstructing a future possibility, we can get to know in the present the kind of future that we could want. These items address the social, cultural and political implications of the Sentient City, in response to computing leaving desktops and information processing entering urban realm, modifying our behaviour.

1. GPS Serendipitor (like a Tom Tom, but one which picks out a route which one hasn’t used before to get from A to B)
2. RFID Under(a)ware (underwear that has vibrators sewn into it which sense the presence of RFID tags)
3. Ad-hoc Dark Roast Travel Mug (a travel mug which sends subversive messages to one’s fellow passengers)
4. CCD-Me Not Umbrella (an umbrella which hides one from CCTV monitoring)

More: http://survival.sentientcity.net/

Report by Anne Helmond

The University of California in San Diego (UCSD) organized a two day event in order to pioneer the emerging field of Software Studies. The first day was a public event titled SoftWhere 2008 which consisted of over fifteen short presentation in Pecha Kucha style. The second day consisted of a closed strategic session that dealt with more formal questions on the shaping of a new field of studies and will be discussed in a follow-up blog post.

SoftWhere 2008
The title of the workshop ‘SoftWhere’ embodies the question of demarcating an area of study. Our current society is penetrated by and shaped by software and should thus be subject to appropriate critique. The ubiquity of software has led to a software culture and we are now living in a software society. What does it mean to live in such a software society instead of an industrial society? A world which is created by software is opaque and that is why we need to study software. We should question the streams behind, embedded in and woven through our society and look at what is happening behind the screens. SoftWhere? SoftEverywhere!

The Software Studies workshop was organized by UCSD and most of the participants were either from the University of California in San Diego or Irvine or Los Angeles. Participants were asked to prepare a short presentation preferably in Pecha Kucha style.

Jeremy Douglass, the first Software Studies Initiative postdoc, was strictly timing our presentations as each of us had either exactly seven minutes or if you followed the Pecha Kucha style of 20 seconds for 20 slides six minutes and fourty seconds. It turned out to be a great format to listen to almost twenty presentations in just one afternoon. Douglass was a great timekeeper, or rather his iPhone stopwatch that made an alarming sound after seven minutes forcing some speakers to cut their story short. In Jeremy’s own apologetic words: “It’s not me, it’s the software.”

The presentations showed the diverse perspectives on software and software culture. The diversity of approaches and topics in the research may serve as an intellectual map of the people present. They may also serve to determine a common ground in the extremely diverse approaches to software studies. Liz Losh from Virtualpolitik wrote an extensive post on the “speed dating” Pecha Kucha presentations.

Critical storage studies
The presentations showed the diverse approaches to studying software and they also served as a showcase of the current state of research into software. However, some presentations did not deal with studies of software itself but also with the questions surrounding the field of software studies. Matthew Kirschenbaum for example talked about preservation as software studies, or what he would jokingly refer to as critical storage studies. Critical X Studies is a term used by Bill Benzon who at first was skeptical about the new field of Critical Code Studies:

While I tend to be skeptical of any enterprise whose name takes the form “Critical X Studies,” where X is the domain under investigation, there’s certainly room to look at the cultural production of computer code and the styles of computer languages and programs.

What Kirschenbaum is referring to with critical storage studies is the fact that without preservation there is no field. If we want to establish and maintain a new field of Software Studies we should also look at the preservation of software. Emulators are only one way of thinking about storage and keeping software ‘alive’ because we are dealing with a hybrid cultural heritage. This is illustrated ‘the Preserving Virtual Worlds Project‘ that Kirschenbaum is currently working on.

Taxonomy of Software Studies
Critical Code Studies is just one of the many fields bordering or moving into the field of Software Studies. Mark Marino presented the pitfalls embodied within the metaphor of Critical X Studies as described by Liz Losh. However, these different fields that at some points overlap and form different layers of software form the grounds of Bogost’s taxonomy of Software Studies consisting of five levels:

1. Reception/operation
2. Interface
3. Form/function
4. Code
5. Platform

While this is not a definite taxonomy of the field it does present a useful way to think of how the existing overlapping fields operate. In this taxonomy Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost’s new book series Platform Studies is seen as complimentary to Software Studies. We are approaching different layers of software through both a philosophical and critical practice that may entail either the study of code or the other things (cultural studies). Part of software studies itself is turning it inside-out:

What are we looking at if we study software? Which layers do we need to address and which questions and fields have previously addressed similar issues? These questions were part of the second day of the Software Studies workshop which dealt with the typical What, Where, When and How questions and will be addressed in a next post.

This is the first post in a series on the Software Studies Workshop at UCSD and the Software Studies Panel at the HASTAC II Conference at UCI and UCLA. Please subscribe to our RSS feed to keep up with our updates.