With predictions that around the world population concentration will shift to cities, the urban space has attracted considerable interest among researchers, architects, artists, and more. Urban spaces are increasingly ‘smart,’ where application of digital technologies convert cities into (supposedly) self-learning systems, such as automated traffic control. While proponents highlight smartness approaches and digitalization as a resource-efficient way to live in and govern the city, it is not always evident whose interests are served, or what issues may arise in the long run. Yet cities are not the only ‘smart’ spaces, and this points to two more recent trends: a shift in attention to the rural, and a growing smartification of those spaces beyond the urban. Researchers turn to smart forests, smart oceans, or smart agriculture as sites of techno-social-environmental change. When corporations are busy collecting environmental data, what implications does this have for contemporary and future developments?

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This symposium takes up these imbrications and diffusions, and seeks to put into dialogue scholars and artists to explore the social, political, cultural and environmental implications of the smartification of the city, the rural, and beyond. What can be learned from such cross-examinations both about the ‘smartified’ fields, and smartness itself? Through what other (smart?) media, art and interactive formats may we engage with these issues? The ‘Smartification of Everything’ is a hybrid event with an in-person and virtual component that consists of a symposium, an exhibition, and interactive events.

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The Smartification of Everything will bring together academic research and the arts to create a space for critically exchanging on the smartification across the urban, rural and beyond, while exploring its social, political, cultural and environmental impacts.

 

SoE is a hybrid event, combining a symposium and the art exhibition smART that will take place March 7-11, 2022 at the University of Ottawa and virtually. The symposium at the Faculty of Social Sciences Building will run for two days (March 10-11), featuring two keynote speeches, by Shannon Mattern (New School) and Carl DiSalvo (Georgia Tech), and a series of eight exciting panels.

 

Please visit our website for more information, or register here.