Panel Statement

Panel: Machine Flaws in Generative Art

Intro

In Soft City, a personalized account of London life in the early 1970s writer Jonathan Raban stated that “the city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps, in statistics…and architecture.” [1] As global cities aspire to become “smart”, merging technology with urban infrastructure in the interest of increased efficiency and usability, Raban’s vision of the hard city has transformed into the hardware city, and the soft city has become software city — the local, intimate human dimension of urban life now increasingly mediated using digital technologies. These comprise the spatial narratives of the city layered over time and place. Cities embed technology into everyday life, aspiring towards a utopian vision of a computational, data-driven urban infrastructure that does not break down. But what if the hardware city glitches or stops working? What would an aesthetics of a flawed, forgotten and neglected media city look like? And what kinds of artistic expressions could be generated from this? This paper will explore how artists use digital media in and of urban space to create poetic frictions between the hardware and software city and challenge us to see what is overlooked. It offers a reading on the creative practices and expressions that emerge between hardware and software city by looking at the work of urban media artists Krzysztof Wodiczko and Refik Anadol.

• Dr. Kristy H.A. Kang is a practice-based researcher whose work explores narratives of place and geographies of cultural memory. She is Assistant Professor at the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her research interests combine urban and ethnic studies, mapping, animation and emerging media arts to visualize cultural histories of cities and communities. She is currently developing a project with the Urban Redevelopment Authority mapping the spatial narratives of Singapore’s ethnic communities. Her works have been exhibited internationally and received awards including the Jury Award for New Forms at the Sundance Online Film Festival. She was co-organizer of an international symposium on mediated public space “Emergent Visions: Adjacency and Urban Screens” (http://www.emergentvisions.org) and her article “Interfaces and Intentionalities: Adjacent Practices of Urban Media Art in Singapore” will be published in a forthcoming special issue on Urban Interfaces in Leonardo Electronic Almanac.

Full text (PDF) p. 713-716