Titel pagina - De Balie

Thursday March 18

Global views on the crisis of mobility
10.00 – 12.00 CET (GMT+1)

A live-connected panorama of the worldwide mobility crisis: Global responses from a local perspective, drawing on first-hand impressions from some of the global hotbeds of mobility-out-of-control, around the globe. What does hyper-mobility mean for the local context and the everyday life-experience of people living in congested urban zones?
Responses from among others Dhaka, Nairobi, Delhi, Mexico City, Sao Paolo, London.
Filtered, edited and commented by urban researchers and activists.
Program host: Eric Kluitenberg, De Balie, Amsterdam.


Witnessed Presence
Research presentation and discussion, hosted by Caroline Nevejan
13.00 – 15.00 CET (GMT+1)

Caroline Nevejan is an independent researcher and designer focusing on the implications of technology on society, who has been involved with interdisciplinary projects for over 20 years. She works with internationally with professionals, academics and artists on Witnessed Presence. Witnessed Presence deals with question such as: How do human beings bear witness to one another? Can manmade systems and infrastructure bear witness to us? How can we be witness and bear witness to each other when so often presence is mediated by technology?

Nevejan will present the extensive research she has been developing on witnessed presence and system engineering since the Fall of 2008, together with members of the Intelligent Interactive Distributed Systems group at Delft University of Technology and invited guests.
www.nevejan.org


Hyper-mobility and the urban condition
16.00 – 18.00 CET (GMT+1)

Hyper-mobility poses a myriad of challenges for urban planners: How is urban planning responding to conditions of hyper-mobility? Are networking technologies playing a role in policies and actions? Can technology offer solutions in the urban zones most affected by the mobility catastrophe?
This program will compare industry-lead initiatives with alternative views, artistic and civic initiatives and down to earth research on actual effects of various policy measures on urban mobility.
Projects presented will include:
- Connected Urban Development
“Connected Urban Development (CUD) demonstrates how to reduce carbon emissions by introducing fundamental improvements in the efficiency of the urban infrastructure through information and communications technology (ICT). Connected Urban Development was born from Cisco’s commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative to participate in helping reduce carbon emissions. The founding CUD cities are: San Francisco, Amsterdam, and Seoul. In 2008 four new cities have joined the program – Birmingham, Hamburg, Lisbon, and Madrid – beginning a new phase for CUD and opening new avenues for collaboration in promoting smart urban environments globally.”
www.connectedurbandevelopment.org
- In the air
Presented by Nerea Calvillo & Medialab Prado, Madrid
“In the air is a visualisation project which aims to make visible the microscopic and invisible agents of Madrid’s air (gases, particles, pollen, diseases, etc), to see how they perform, react and interact with the rest of the city. The project proposes a platform for individual and collective awareness and decision making, where the interpretation of results can be used for real time navigation through the city, opportunistic selection of locations according to their air conditions and a base for political action.“
www.intheair.es


City & country branding debate
Discussion hosts: Merijn Oudenampsen & Ana Méndez
21.00 – 23.00 CET (GMT+1)

City and regional branding strategies contribute disproportionally to increased travel and mobility, both for touristic purposes as well as for professional travel and conference-mania (the thing that the ElectroSmog festival-format is a practical critique of). The strategy of promoting cities, or as in the case of a country such as New Zealand after the Lord of the Rings trilogy an entire country, in international systems of circulation to attract visitors of various kinds makes a lot of sense from a short term economic point of view. The reasons for doing it for individual cities and countries are obvious. From an ecological point of view, however, the branding strategy is highly questionable.
In a broader sense the critique of city branding addresses the question of whether it is a good idea to profile a cities as products (in an international market) instead of living environments for its inhabitants?
Is an ecologically more responsible approach possible?
Are cities and regions economically viable at all without effective branding and promotion strategies?

Branding strategies are the object of extensive critical research, mostly from the area of urban sociology. This research tries to figure out how such large scale urban and regional  profiling and product-packaging strategies are affecting actual living environments, local economic structures, property relations around land and real-estate, local tax provisions, social housing, traffic flows, and other conditions that have an immediate impact on the daily living environments of their residents.

Contributions by:
Daniel van der Velden,
Beka Economopoulos, Not An Alternative, New York
Ana Méndez, Observatorio Metropolitano, Madrid
Damoclash, Amsterdam
Invited responses from the ADA network, New Zealand
and more…


TeleTrust
Participatory performance by Karen Lancel & Hermen Maat
Daily: 9.00 – 11.00 & 20.00 – 22.00 hrs CET (GMT+1)

Artists Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat are conducting a series of networked performances in public spaces involving a wearable ‘data-veil’ that covers the entire body. The veil is touch sensitive and by touching her or himself the wearer triggers stories he/she can listen to inside the veil, while the audience around can follow the same story on public screens and via the web. All stories are interviews conducted around the public performances with the TeleTrust veil and centre on issues of trust in public space and the question of veiled presence in public space:
“Do I need to see your eyes in order to trust you?”
How is trust established under veiled conditions?
The project can also be seen as a metaphor for the hidden presence of people in digital networks, where ‘the design of trust’ (Nevejan) remains a highly problematic issue.

More about TeleTrust

The performance will be staged simultaneously in Banff, Canada, Dunedin, New Zealand and Amsterdam, The Netherlands – covering a time-zone stretch of 20 hours.