Abstract Cities | Matthew Fuller, Emily Rosamond, Ben Vickers

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This event is part of the series 'Spatial Practices and the Urban Commons'.

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This cluster of talks will look at how computational processes influence the way we navigate and live in the urban environment – including predictive algorithms, data structures, and other manifestations of power and control. The present will be revealed and the future re-designed.

Matthew Fuller is director and professor of the Centre for Cultural Studies, at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is involved in a number of projects in art, media and software. He is the author of Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (MIT Press), Software Studies (MIT Press), and with Andrew Goffey of Evil Media (MIT Press). For this event, Fuller will look at the way in which computation folds into urban space, and how data-structures merge with, redistribute, produce and arrange the city and the perceptual, political and aesthetic dimensions that go with it.

Emily Rosamond is a Canadian artist, writer and educator. She is a Lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Kent, and a member of the art collective School of The Event Horizon. She completed her PhD in Art in 2016 at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she held a Commonwealth Scholarship. Her doctoral work focused on character as a prominent speculative, representational logic of personhood in an era of predictive analytics. Often, such analytics (associated with big data) focus on determining individuals’ future actions by analysing their past behaviour, or statistically situating them within flows of transient norms in social networks.

Ben Vickers is the curator of digital at Serpentine Gallery. As a curator, writer, network analyst, technologist and luddite he is at the forefront of new developments of online art and culture. He is one of the initiators of the unMonastery, a community-based social innovation project in Matera, Italy, addressing the interlinked needs of empty space, unemployment and depleting social services by embedding committed, skilled individuals within localities that could benefit from their presence. His practice centres around how systems of distribution, both human and other, come to affect our personal perception of reality.

More information about the Urban Commons series at Tenderpixel: http://www.tenderpixel.com/urban-commons