Within current schemes for green cities, which span from urban wildlife initiatives to city agriculture and green transport networks, citizen sensing and smart cities projects are emerging that attempt to realize improved sustainability through greater urban connectivity. As another layer of infrastructure that enhances the efficiency and timing of cities, digital connectivity presents the possibility...
The project website for Citizen Sense, a practice-based research project funded by the European Research Council and on which I am Principal Investigator, is now online. The site outlines the project research areas, including Wild Sensing, Pollution Sensing, and Urban Sensing, and details initial work into making sensor kits and piloting an “Air Walk” in...
This edited collection explores the material politics of plastics. From food punnets to credit cards, plastic facilitates every part of our daily lives. It has become central to processes of contemporary socio-material living. Universalised and abstracted, it is often treated as the passive object of political deliberations, or a problematic material demanding human management. But...
As part of transmediale 2013 BWPWAP, I participated in a panel on the newly published text, Depletion Design: A Glossary of Network Ecologies, edited by Carolin Wiedemann & Soenke Zehle. Fellow contributors Marie-Luise Angerer and David M. Berry discussed aspects of depletion and exhaustion during the panel. My contribution covered the topics of “Natural History”...
Plastics are material substances often condemned for their inability to biodegrade in the environment. New forms of plastics have been developed with capacities for biodegradability, a material strategy that is meant to remedy the (visible) problem of plastics accumulation. This paper discusses the distinct types of work undertaken by humans and more-than-humans in the material...
Discussing an urban walking event, “Moss-Eye View,” held in the City of London as part of This Is Not A Gateway (TINAG, October 2010), this paper considers the ways in which cities may be understood from the view of more-than-human processes and incorporations. The walk explores how new insights emerge into ways of “becoming urban”...
Numerous creative strategies now exist for materializing energy in order to reduce energy use. In a parallel way, social science research at turns engages with the materialities of energy as a strategy or formation that influences participation in energy use. This paper asks how specific materialities of energy are articulated across these social science and...
I presented recent work on citizen sensing and environmental computing as part of the “Sense of Planet: The Arts and Ecology at Earth Magnitude” symposium, an event organized by Jill Bennett and Douglas Kahn at the National Institute for Experimental Arts (NIEA), University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia (25 August 2012). The presentation drew...
“Citizen Science and the Politics of Sensing,” was a presentation I delivered as an invited keynote speaker for “The Citizen Scientist on the Move: Digital Play, Politics and Epistemology,” a co-hosted event held at the University of Utrecht and Waag Society Amsterdam, Netherlands (25-27 June). In this presentation, I focused on creative practice engagements with sensing...
The 2012 version of Pixelache took place as “Camp Pixelache” from 11-12 May at Arbis in Helsinki. The main theme for the unconference was “Do It With Others” (D.I.W.O), and addresses practices of co-production and collaboration. Some of the speakers for this event include Marc Garrett of Furtherfield, Owen Kelly, and Pedro Soler. The Finnish...
Digital devices and all that they plug into are energy intensive. An increasing amount of energy (and resulting carbon emissions) is required to power everything from Google searches, spam, and text messages, which involve a vast range of resources including data centers, digital devices and fiber optic cabling to connect and transmit information. Varying estimates...
The trophic ecologies of cities play a distinct role in how urban matter—and particularly urban waste matter—biodegrades. Insects are key participants in eating, breaking down and “recycling” refuse, and at the same time waste sites provide unique ecologies for insects. While first sketching a picture of the some of the distinct insect ecologies that may...
