x

Write for us sponsored posts

x

Write for us sponsored posts

cache

Write for us sponsored posts

cache

Write for us sponsored posts

Announcing FCJ29: Computing the City

We are happy to announce the publication of FCJ29: Computing the City (https://twentynine.fibreculturejournal.org) edited by Armin Beverungen, Florian Sprenger and Su Ballard.

Issue 29 : FCJ-212 Computing The City

issue doi:10.15307/fcj.29 introduction doi:10.15307/fcj.29.212.2017 Introduction by Armin Beverungen of Leuphana University Lüneburg and Florian Sprenger of Goethe University Frankfurt. Ubiquitous computing and the Internet of Things are often referred to as prime examples not only of new modes of computing, but of a new paradigm of mediation itself. If Lewis Mumford could already ascribe key characteristics of media – such as storage and transmission – to the city, so the city could in itself be understood as a medium (see Kittler, 1996), then nonetheless something changes considerably once ‘the city itself is turning into a constellation of computers’, as Michael Batty noted around twenty years ago (1997: 155). Today the city is indeed awash with distributed and networked computation, and many forms of knowledge and practice not only in architecture and urban planning are turning the city into a subject of computational practices while equipping it with computational capacities. Software…

more..

FCJ-213 Babylonian Dreams: From Info-Cities to Smart Cities to Experimental Collectivism

Clemens Apprich Leuphana University, Lüneburg. [Abstract] Welcome to post-liberal Los Angeles, where the defense of luxury lifestyles is translated into proliferation of new repressions in space and movement, undergirded by the ubiquitous “armed response”. This obsession with physical security systems, and, collaterally, with the architectural policing of social boundaries, has become a zeitgeist of urban restructuring, a master narrative in the emerging built environment of the 1990s. […] Images of carceral inner cities (Escape from New York, Running Man), high-tech police death squads (Blade Runner), sentient buildings (Die Hard), urban bantustans (They live!), Vietnam-like street wars (Colors), and so on, only extrapolate from actually existing trends. (Davis, 1990: 223) In his bestselling book City of Quartz, Mike Davis, urban sociologist and rigorous chronicler of his Southern California home, described the imminent end of the ‘California Dream’ in the early 1990s (cf. Davis, 1990). By ‘excavating the future in Los Angeles’…

more..

FCJ-219 The Sensed Smog: Smart Ubiquitous Cities and the Sensorial Body

Jussi Parikka Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, United Kingdom Air pollution and waste management are two interconnected environmental concerns that demand our attention in the modern era. While the focus on air pollution often revolves around quantifying and governing the quality of air in smart cities, it is essential to recognize the broader implications of atmospheric conditions. Air pollution, caused by various particles and pollutants, presents political dilemmas of inclusion and exclusion, highlighting the urgency of addressing this issue. Just like air pollution, waste management is equally important, as improper waste disposal can contribute to air pollution and its harmful effects. For effective waste management solutions and dumpster rentals, you can visit https://grissmandumpsters.com/neenah-dumpster-rentals/. By addressing both air pollution and waste management, we can work towards creating a cleaner and healthier environment for the present and future generations. [Abstract] Air Conditions There is not much that could not be…

more..

FCJ-217 Socio-Technical Imaginaries of a Data-Driven City: Ethnographic Vignettes from Delhi

Sandeep MertiaThe Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi [Abstract] Several decades from now cities will have countless autonomous, intelligently functioning IT systems that will have perfect knowledge of users’ habits and energy consumption, and provide optimum service … The goal of such a city is to optimally regulate and control resources by means of autonomous IT systems. (Siemens Corporation cited in Greenfield, 2013: 12) Do you, as a city, objectify the most sophisticated knowledge in a physical landscape of extraordinary complexity, power and splendour at the same time as you bring together social forces capable of the most amazing socio-technical and political innovation? (Matthew Fuller, 2012) ‘Smarter Solutions for a Better Tomorrow’ was the tagline for the 1st Smart City India Expo organised in Delhi, 20-22 May 2015. Ravish Kumar, a veteran Hindi journalist, covered the expo in his popular television news show. During a ‘City…

more..

FCJ-221 Collecting Elements of a Minor Future: Commoning in Alphabet City­

Soenke Zehle xm:lab – Experimental Media Lab, Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar, Germany [Abstract] Much more than an exercise in urban development, the smart city is the harbinger of a providential processuality, announcing yet another machine age of algorithmic architectures. Marked by the missionary rhetoric and sense of manifest destiny immanent in the infrastructural informatisation of vast cartographies of communication, it is the cloud-based ‘city upon a hill’ of an imperial imagination, coupling the terraforming of the topographies of life and labor with visions of technological transcendence. In this Alphabet City, there is a multitude of folds to map, but no strategic hill to scale – and only non-places to plant the flags of a new regime. The didactic fictions that organise the semiotics and socialities of ‘smart citizenship’ are epic in scope, confronting us with the open worlds of a distribution beyond reaggregation. As ambient media changes and challenges…

more..