AMRO20_ Beautiful Seams: Unraveling the Intelligence of Everything

Contributors:
Bastien Kerspern
Özgün Eylül İşcen
KairUs
Anuradha Reddy

Narratives of "smartness" are extending to all areas of life: cities, homes and things. These narratives are dominated by "the smartness mandate" promising that innovation and technology will provide solutions to various crises of our planet. Any economic, environmental or security threat, like the ongoing pandemic, becomes a possibility for smart growth and optimization for those wishing to profit from the 4th industrial revolution.

The persuasive aesthetics and rhetorics of "smartness" presents a vision of a future in which humans and machines merge seamlessly into an "intelligence of everything". The collective intelligence that "smartness" relies on draws upon data collected from populations. Hence, the ideal smart citizen turns into sensing nodes of our urban environments.

Our four panelists discuss alternatives to these dominant narratives of "smartness" by embracing the "beautiful seams" of the seamless ideal of today's ubiquitous computing. They bring forth examples of citizen, artist and design initiatives, which make us aware and enable us to understand what actually happens in the networked surrounding of our devices, homes and cities.