THIRD QUARTERLY REPORT

Makers of tomorrow’s smart cities?

Out in the street the mercury touches 39°C. In the videoconference suite, the Managing Director keeps cool through reports of ‘top wins’ and ‘flat growth’. His global team is charged with designing tomorrow’s urbanism. “The Smart City market is about $12bn, growing 12.4% annually to reach around $27bn by 2023. That’s the size of this opportunity.”

The proliferation of networked sensors and distributed processing – the ‘Internet of Things’ – makes possible a fully embedded information infrastructure, a ‘city operating system’. ‘Big Data’ from smartphones, buildings, transit networks, and vending machines is mined, traded, and used to predict future patterns. This ‘ambient information’ turns the ‘Smart’ or ‘Cognitive City’ into an agent, a narrative partner in collective life, with its own beliefs, judgments and preferences. Traffic flow and garbage management, crime prevention and epidemic control alike become amenable to algorithmic management. Questions arise – who are these makers of tomorrow’s urban fabric?

The film installation observes the 3Q report at Cisco Systems, as it leads the weaving together of data infrastructure and the built environment. Behind the quarterly sales figures and projections lie programs with immense transformative power over the new– programs whose long-term consequences deserve careful consideration.

Exhibitions
Solid Roof, Severe Weather. WUK Vienna Nov 2021
HalfWay, Vienna July 2019
Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens 2017

IMMERSIVE VIDEO / FX DEVELOPER Jack Wolf
BLACK MAGIC CAMERA OP Christian Haake
SOUND Mukul
PRODUCED by Manu Luksch and denkbar projektentwicklungs gmbh

ACCESS link (contact us for Pw):