::fibreculture:: Digital Media Research Seminar – Jennifer Gabrys, August 23

Ned Rossiter ned at nedrossiter.org
Wed Aug 8 12:41:02 CEST 2012


Digital Media Research Seminar – Jennifer Gabrys, August 23

Co-hosted by the School fo Humanities & Communication Arts and the Institute for Culture & Society, University of Western Sydney
http://www.uws.edu.au/hca
http://www.uws.edu.au/ics 

Date: Thursday 23 August 
Time: 2-4pm
Venue: EB2.21 Parramatta Campus, UWS, Cnr of James Ruse Drive and Victoria Road, Rydalmere.

All welcome.

Please RSVP by 21 August to Christy Nguy c.nguy at uws.edu.au 

Dr Jennifer Gabrys, Department of Design, Goldsmiths, University of London

Programming Environments: Politics and Practices of Urban Sensing
Urban sensing technologies are an increasing feature of urban design and media design. From ‘Senseable’ to ‘Sentient’ cities, as well as numerous projects that deploy mobile and embedded sensors to monitor everything from air pollution to traffic patterns, urban processes are now unfolding through wireless sensor technologies. This paper will focus on a particular aspect of urban sensing projects, namely those actual and speculative proposals that suggest wireless sensing technologies are a way to achieve more sustainable and efficient cities. Initiatives in this area propose on one level to make infrastructures more efficient. But on another level, citizens who monitor and make more efficient their everyday urban activities become central to urban sustainability projects. These monitoring practices in some ways may translate into ground-up contributions to urban environmental policy. But in what ways do these projects constitute a form of environmentality, or the distribution of governance within and through environments and environmental technologies? And what are the implications of these newer distributions of power for urban citizens and ways of life? 


Bio
Jennifer Gabrys is Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the MA Design and Environment at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research investigates environments, material processes and communication technologies through theoretical and practice-based work. Projects within this area include a recently published book, Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (University of Michigan Press, 2011), which examines the material processes of digital media through electronic waste; and a study currently underway on citizen sensing and environmental processes, titled Program Earth: Environment as Experiment in Sensing Technology.





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