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Exploring Urban Futures

SENSEable Cities Speaker Series

  •  Jun 01 - Jan 31 2011

The SENSEable Cities: Exploring Urban Futures is a collaboration between the MIT SENSEable City Lab and Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (GAFFTA) which kicked off in June 2010 and will extend through 2011. The collaboration is a comprehensive initiative that includes an exhibition, speaker series, and community-oriented programs that start in San Francisco and will travel the world.

The SENSEable Cities: Exploring Urban Futures Speaker Series will provide a forum for the multidisciplinary team of Urban Planners, Architects, Media Artists, Social Scientists and Designers to present research on how our cities are becoming real-time networks, which give us new insight into ourselves, our collective behavior, and our urban structures.

Trash Track which foreshadows the internet of things and smart dust, where everything that can be instrumented will be Instrumented. Dietmar Offenhuber will present how his team instrumented thousands of pieces of garbage in NY & Seattle with small location aware tags. The trash trasnmitted its location and journey, revealing seldom observed phenonoma of the of the reverse supply chain.

The Copenhagen Wheel. and how its part of a global Mayors movement to reduce our dependence on cars towards embracing intelligent hybrid bicycles that participate in networks. This project is part of a more general trend: that of inserting intelligence in our everyday objects and of creating a smart support infrastructure around ourselves for everyday life. MIT Grad Christine Outram will present how this went from idea, to a project that debuted at the Copenhagen Climate Conference, and its implication for people transportation and urban systems.

New York Talk Exchange. This work which was debuted in New York’s Museum of Modern Art is known as a beautiful visualization of AT&T data created by artist Aaron Koblin. Now come here the rest of the story: MIT’s Francisca Rojas will discuss her deep dive into the data behind this work: What AT&T cellular & IP in/out of New York tells us about people and their real time behavior, the story of global trade and business between New York’s neighborhoods and the rest of the world, and how cell data may know a lot about Census that the Census doesnt even know.

 

Fly Fire. Imagine thousands of independent tiny helicopter-like devices each smaller than your hand. Glowing with LEDs so they light up the night. Flying in a precise network controlled formation so they become a giant display in the sky: able to show art, designs or TV overhead in 3 Space. Assaf Biderman of MIT will tell how its being done and brings together the work of three MIT labs to make this possible. How will this be unleashed on the urban environment? Find our Monday night.

All of these projects combine explore whats possible as our cities become instrumented, smarter, part of an until-now unimaginable feedback loop. These evenings will afford us an opportunities to hear from the researches directly and the the story of their “censors uncensored” and the process MIT uses to imagine and experiment with urban futures.

The program is generously underwritten by IBM which is partnering with GAFFTA on a wide ranging examination of Smarter Cities and community engagement throughout 2010-2011.

Artists

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