Actionable Media in Smart Cities: How Artists and Scientists Are Augmenting Urban Environments

• In Event: Hi-Tech, Low-Tech, Self-Tech: Tactics for the Production and Consumptions of Playful Social Public Spaces - II

Abstract

Historically, the capacity to write upon the urban fabric has largely been restricted to commercial advertising and municipal messaging. Recent artistic and citizen science experiments with augmented reality and the Internet of things signal the prospects of a radically different future. An ever-widening array of built environments now double as platforms, archives, and forums for multimedia expression, scientific communication, and cultural criticism. The same technologies that power conventional smart city applications (e.g., sensors, actuators, GPS) also lay the foundation for a greater degree of integration between digital art and local action, as well as between scientific findings and the scenes of everyday life. Ultimately, this new wave of digital cultural production -- which I term "actionable media" -- introduces a new site of analysis and practice for STS scholars. Appropriated from the military phrase “actionable intelligence,” the term actionable media describes projects that bond networked multimedia with local action in a manner that cultivates citizenship (not consumerism), social practices (not proscribed usages), and critical reflection (not trivial diversion). This presentation examines actionable media practices that effectively map the unseen actor-networks of labor and waste that precede and follow everyday acts of consumption. In particular, it considers the use of RFID tags by MIT's Senseable Cities Lab to generate real-time data visualizations of recycling in the US, as well as artist John Craig Freeman's use of mobile augmented reality to critique Apple's production cycle in front of Apple Stores around the Bay Area.

Author

• John Tinnell, University of Colorado