New York: Toward the Sentient City – Open Archive

September 17 – November 7, 2009

Sentient City Hub Exhibition
The Urban Center
457 Madison Avenue
New York City

Website

Curatorial Statement by Curator Mark Shepard

“When it is raining in Oxford Street the architecture is no more important than the rain, in fact the weather has probably more to do with the pulsation of the Living City at that given moment.” – Peter Cook

One could argue that this provocation by Peter Cook, published in 1963 in the catalogue for the Living City exhibition at the Institute for Contemporary Art, London, remains remarkably relevant for anyone interested in the design and inhabitation of the contemporary city. In place of natural weather systems, however, today we find the dataclouds of 21st century urban space increasingly shaping our experience of this city and the choices we make there. To what degree are these informatic weather systems becoming as important, if not more so, than the formal organization of space and material?

Since the late 1980s, computer scientists and engineers have been researching ways of embedding computational ‘intelligence’ into the built environment. Looking beyond the paradigm of personal computing, which placed the computer in the foreground of our attention, research in ubiquitous computing projected a world where computers would disappear into the background, displaced to the periphery of our awareness. Enabled by tiny, inexpensive microprocessors and low-power wireless sensor networks, information processing was to become ambient. No longer solely “virtual,” human interaction with and through computers in this near-future world would be more socially integrated and spatially contingent as everyday objects and spaces became linked through networked computing… (more)