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URBAN AGE ELECTRIC CITY CONFERENCE

December 10th, 2012

URBAN AGE  ELECTRIC CITY  CONFERENCE

A worldwide investigation into the future of cities

LONDON 6-7 DECEMBER 2012.

I went along to this….

Maybe it was the venue, the Electric Light station but too many speakers acknowledged the venue as a landmark  site and rooted themselves in anecdotal reflection while failing to jump into speculative imaginings of a smart, connected, intelligent city which is what I was hoping for.

The conference started at a tangent when  it was side tracked / hi jacked  by the political with the PM David Cameron and Mayor Boris Johnson announcing a new initiative showing to a crowded room of designers and architects how a 50 million pound building that would be sited on a roundabout would be the centre of a new technological age.

From Craig Calhoun onwards the word infrastructure was the default position or reference point and maybe quite rightly. As an observation even cities without any notable infrastructure seem to have and behave like cities. Cities are systems. Rem Koolhaas observed and documented this lucidly several years back in his film about Lagos.

The smart city will be a system that is designed or at least implemented and to evaluate  this  two things were missing:-  real world examples and speculative  approaches with answers. The conference needed to find the new questions revolving around not only the climate based  issue and new migrations but also  this issue of the control space and the new virtual borders. Richard Sennet was wrong to suggest this technology (ref fibre optics etc) is too expensive for people to have in their own homes. I have two wireless sensor networks that I have developed and it hasn’t stopped me commenting and taking apart. Individual will drives political change.

Cities change rapidly because of events. These can be anything from acts of god, to events in other systems that cause change through initial unpredictable behaviour. Deyan Sudjic, Director, Design Museum referenced the shipping container. It caused mass changes in labour markets and intitated globalisation. Ten years after the container was invented thousands of dockers had lost their jobs. The process of a city butterfly effect has knock on consequences.

Saskia Sassen, brought in another anecdote about gentrification of poor urban areas which led to a revival of the space and local park because dog owners where forced to walk their dogs in the park thus reviving local and public space; thus demonstrating causal effect on the organic system of the city.

And as much as Richard Sennet argues for the horizontal against the vertical, I would speculate that lines don’t matter anymore in the smart city as everything can be reduced by closeness to in the virtual world to being next to one another. In the smart city everything is compressed. The network system can ignore both the horizontal and the vertical and just make the connection. One doesn’t need to travel up or along but through space.

Adam Greenfield remarked that the city is controlled from above. From Gods eye to the electronic eye the world has always been controlled from above except now we have all become Gods eye. Since we can acknowledge this the Electric City missed an opportunity to  offer new  perspectives on how the legal profession will deal with this very new multi point perspective that is now available to all. “Order might start from below” as Jane Jacobs noted  but control is now in the heavens. The new  technologies which I call the mother of big  brother  will oversee all battles that get played out in out future cites and will act on them as purposed. The question therefore is how do we re-purpose the technology?

A point which Wolfgang Pietsch, Munich Center for Technology in Society alluded to. He said increased experimentation leads to more control. IE social; forecasting and predictive modelling and visualisation might be part of the problem.

Carlo Ratti, Director, MIT Senseable City Lab  pointed to a few of his examples where sensing and actuators can allows something to ” start to speak ” and found that accidents in the machine can illustrate ways forward. However people always find a way, and generally it’s that of least resistance. Erik Spiekermann noted that like sheep we will take or own route forcing the design to change for us.

The focus also came back to politics on day two with Anthony Giddens, whose brilliant keynote hi jacked the whole agenda focusing the audience into a reality of risk based around the political will and agency of the climate change problem.

Which was illuminated by the quote of the conference from Tessa Jowell, Member of Parliament, UK; “trust it’s too high to aspire to”.

And in that one short statement she hi-lighted an inflexibility in the system. Trust is imperative in everything we do, it is something everyone should aspire to, and a politician who cannot aspire to be trusted cannot by default be trusted.  The generation that cannot aspire to be trusted needs to get out the way. No politics is better that un-trusted politics. All system will find a path, all dogs need to be walked, all cites change and evolve. Out future and the future of the smart city is based on trust, both in the technology that it can serve us all and the trust that if we work together and share knowledge it will be for a better city.

Anthony Giddens, hi-lighted the importance of the moment we are now in and stressed its significance. We live in an age of high risk but great opportunity.

Stanza dec 2012

 

 

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Stanza: Can we use new technologies to imagine a world where we are liberated and empowered…

May 3rd, 2012

An interview between Stanza and Rob van Kranenburg of the Internet Of Things

RvK: Stanza, you were among the first internet artists. What would you say is the most important philosophical step (if we can think in terms of ‘progress’, or ‘going somewhere’) that you have taken in this period? “In the last twenty years there has been a significant shift in audio visual artists’ practise from linear expressions, to interactive (user controlled) mediations, to generative (evolving) and then network-based (real time) systems. Online, this space  also expands the whole notion of the artist’s studio.  My focus is on the things that change, the flow, the data that describes our experience of the city as space. Data from all sides in systems that can be mediated by all, with varying visualizations communicated over the internet and represented onto different display systems.

The Art of Gathering Environmental Data. Stanza Artwork. Live sensor data. 2010. Test Set Up and Projection for one hour Nov 2012 FACT Liverpool

There are many theoretical aspects to my work, but primarily I am a practice-based artist……in other words I make stuff.

My work has covered experiments in these areas and traced a shift in practise from modernist approaches of asset gathering (linear construction) to arrangements of datasets in fixed lists or databases (interactivity) to new approaches of mining information across networks in real time.( generative and real time systems)……culling data off CCTV networks, making visualizations of cities from my wireless sensor networks.”

RvK: How do feel about the current actualizations of the ‘in between’ space that you felt, saw or heard coming some time ago?

“I believe there is a new social space that exists in between these independent networks. Future cities will be merged into real time connected up data cities.  A connection of networks of real time information flows. The results created will lead mashed up cities and real time performative city experiences.  This conclusion although led from my earlier trails using wireless sensors in a project called Sensity.

I am interested in how this shared data space can overlap creating a new space in between which only two nodes or spaces share. For example in one of my artistic experiments I have  merged collected data from various real time cities to visualise this new space, the space where the cities overlap and which allude to a new architectural and urban virtual space. Uses of such information might allow rich new interpretative visualisations about the way our world is built, used, and designed.

The resulting artworks represent the real time conditions of the city.  Works like “Sensity”, create real time interpretations of social spaces that inform the world (online), and hopefully create new meaningful experiences allowing critical reflection on the real time city and the social political undercurrent embedded in the search for the real time city.

This might also allow for a greater community of interpreters and beneficiaries to see, and to come to their own understandings arising from this data about our socially-networked environment.  (as the data in these projects is open via XML)

Underpinning these artworks and research, are a whole series of potential problems about observation, surveillance, and the ethics of the control space.  Imagine walking out the door, and knowing every single action, movement, sound, micro movement, pulse, and thread of information is being tracked, monitored, stored, analyzed, interpreted and logged.

The world we will live in seems to be a much bigger brother than the Orwellian vision, it’s the mother of big brother.

Can we use new technologies to imagine a world where we are liberated and empowered, where finally all of the technology becomes more than gimmick and starts to actually work for us or are these technologies going to control up, separate us, divide us, create more borders. Will the securitization of city space create digital borders that monitor our movement and charge us for our own micro movements inside the system?”

RvK: The data is the medium, you state. Can you explain this a little bit?

“Just  that… the data is the medium of the age….”

RVK: Can you find connections to the FB generation? Do you want to?

“It has a useful API as do all these new big sites; however there are restrictions entering the domains and boundaries of others especially when they  try to cross over and get monitised.”

RvK: The key  (or one of the keys) is  the granularity of input for these ‘smart’ systems. How do you see this?

“Yes, small unit blocks, simplified then re built , re-cored re-formed into an understanding that can re-communicate the complexity of the larger system. Strip the city down and re- configure it as a real-time visualization and plug it into other cities.”

The art of gathering data Sesnors in the city

The art of gathering data. Sensors in the city

RvK: Your work is filled with wonder? Do you feel that this wonder is facilitated somehow in what is now termed Internet of Things?

“I have tried to encompass this “wonder” about real time connectivity and networked space  in my  latest three works, they are about the “internet of things”, but equally  they  are about real  time experiences of the environment and the spaces that change around us.”

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Issues In Science And Technology, Spring 2012.

April 13th, 2012

For those of you who know me well, you might find this quite funny. I was recently asked to for twelve images for a US based magazine who said they wanted to do a feature on Stanza. I thought why not, so I prepared the images 300 dpi for the editor as requested and sent them off. A couple of weeks later with a 44 dollar stamp they sent me four copies, very kind. (Most journalists don’t event bother)

Stanza Sensity

Stanza Sensity

Anyway its always nice to see your artworks in print over breakfast and they did look nice. Twelve images of “Sensity”, the live city data art project in the magazine Issues In Science And Technology, Spring 2012. However on first glance I couldn’t believe it they had used my images it seemingly to illustrate a text that wasn’t about me or by me. Off I steamed…. this editor needs an email.

Anyway before I  shot myself in the foot, I thought I better give it a read. The article is  on “Internet Freedom and Human Rights”,  just my thing, I wonder who wrote it……err Dear Hillary Rodman Clinton thanks for using my artworks in your essay…. …

I got another coffee together and gave it a proper read, it’s not bad actually.  “the more people online contributing ideas,  the more valuable the network becomes to all the other users”………

“If we are not careful, governments could upend the current Interent governance in a quest to increase their own control….”…The last point rather timely since the UK are about do just that.

Stanza Sensors On Google Maps

Stanza Sensors On Google Maps

(http://www.stanza.co.uk/sensity/index.html)

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Genomixer gets a spring clean.

February 22nd, 2012

Genomixer ….a database of dna code. A completely new online experience.

A series of online artworks inspired by the human genome sequence and developed from dna profile which are sequenced from the artists blood. The online artworks are investigations into genetic codes mapped and re assembled online. The artwork series enables a cross reference all the code on the genome sequence allowing you to intermix or breed your own variable of me; you can look at the new mix of chromosomes in real time; on line.

To make these works my dna was sampled to make metaphases, g-banding and full profiles of chromosomes. Samples of my dna currently resides in my freezer ready for cloning. Works are enabled by dna code extracted from my blood. The sounds and images of code make audio visual self portrait versions.

stanza dna metaphase painting 2002

stanza dna metaphase painting 2002

It seems likely with the advent of self dna tests the emergence of this type of DNA test will be prolific. This data can be recorded into the genomixer database and saved. That is, each independent user will have there own personal online audio visual experience based on there unique genetic code and becuase they have the option to save it this means they can also see and listen to other users results. In other words this is a giant open source audio visual labyrinth and database. The system uses a generative audio system that can play interactive non linear audio over the net. The sounds are mapped to the genetic codes. Genomixer is a complete audio visual online generative system. Code representing code generated by code made from blood.

Genomixer ….a database of dna code.

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Sonicity Installation at 25th Stuttgarter Filmwinter

February 12th, 2012

Sonicity Installation is exhbited in Germnay  for Stuttgarter Filmwinter Sound Installation, Great Britain 2011. “Sonicity” is a responsive installation, a sonification of the real space and environment. The sounds you hear are the sounds of the changing environment, i.e. the changes of noise, light, temperature of the space is turned into a real time sound stream using dozens of wireless sensors presented as an installation on 170 speakers. This artwork focuses on the real time space and the experience of the gallery visitor as they interact with the space, using data gathered from these new technologies. My system monitors the space (the building) and the environment (the city) and captures live real time data (light, temperature, noise, humidity, position) to create an ambient sonification, an acoustic responsive environment, literally the sound of the micro incidents of change that occur over time. This artwork explores new ways of thinking about interaction within public space and how this affects the socialization of space. The project uses environmental monitoring technologies and security based technologies, to question audience experiences of the event and space and gather data inside the space. The project also focuses on the micro-incidents of change, the vibrations and sounds of the gallery using wireless sensor based technologies.

Stanza Sonicity Artwork

Stanza Sonicity Artwork

Soundinstallation, Großbritannien 2011

“Sonicity” ist eine reaktionsfähige Installation, ein Hörbarmachen von realem Raum und realem Umfeld. Die Klänge, die man hört, sind die einer sich verändernden Umwelt, das heißt Veränderungen von Geräuschen, Licht und Temperatur werden mithilfe dutzender kabelloser Sensoren in einen Echtzeit-Soundstream umgewandelt und als Installation aus 170 Lautsprechern präsentiert.

Die Arbeit konzentriert sich auf den Echtzeit-Raum und die Erlebnisse der Besucher wenn sie mit dem Raum interagieren. Dabei werden Daten, die durch diese neuen Technologien gesammelt wurden, verwendet. Mein System überwacht den Raum (das Gebäude) und die Umwelt (die Stadt) und erfasst live die Echtzeit-Daten (Licht, Temperatur, Geräusche, Luftfeuchtigkeit, Position) um die Umgebung in Form von Tönen abzubilden, eine auf Akustik reagierende Umgebung, buchstäblich der Sound der Mikro-Veränderungen, die sich im Lauf der Zeit ereignen. Das Kunstwerk untersucht neue Denkansätze über Interaktion im öffentlichen Raum und wie sich diese auf die Sozialisation des Raums auswirkt.

Das Projekt nutzt Umweltüberwachungstechnologie und Sicherheitstechnik, um die Besuchererlebnisse im Raum zu hinterfragen, wobei Daten im Raum gesammelt werden. Das Projekt beleuchtet auch die Mikro-Veränderungen, die Vibrationen und Geräusche der Ausstellungsräume mit drahtloser, sensorenbasierter Technik.

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Artists Talk. A history of digital audio visual art

January 22nd, 2012

Artists Talk Stanza: A history of digital audio visual art

Saturday 11th February 5.00 – 6.30pm in the Box

Stanza will be presenting the development of technology and its role within the arts over the last 15 years, introducing us to a number of his legendary and iconic artworks alongside the history and context of digital audio visual art. Stanza’s website Soundtoys.net  is a leading web based platform for the exhibition of exciting new works by audio visual artists and is available to view and interact with in the QUAD Gallery during V.01.

Stanza generative artwork 2005

Stanza generative artwork 2005

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LEA New Media Exhibition Re-Drawing Boundaries

June 12th, 2011

LEA New Media Exhibition. Re-Drawing Boundaries. Focus On: Stanza
Curator: Jeremy Hight
Senior Curators: Lanfranco Aceti and Christiane Paul

There is an interview here between Stanza and Jeremy Hight for this LEA New Media Exhibition.

Stanza_tate_master2

Do not reproduce this image without my consent….


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Surveillance art and privacy.

June 9th, 2011

Artworks by Stanza that in some way deal with surveillance and privacy.  Over the last ten years I have a made of  twenty artworks and large installations that survey my interest in privacy , control space, and surveillance. This also  overlap with my interest in cities, environmental monitoring and the building as display space. It seems to make a nice online exhibition. ( see below)

Main artworks using CCTV surveillance and notion of control space.

stanza_art_installation

Urban Generation; trying to imagine the world from everyone elses perspective, all at once 2002. Multiple CCTV cameras are accessed randomly in real time to make an urban tapestry. What you see is an evolving, generative artwork. These images are from taken London, and they happen as you see them, in real time. The installation versions of this work can be presented in art galleries using projectors or plasma displays. http://www.stanza.co.uk/urban_tapestry/index.html

Baa Ram Ewe…to your clan be true. 2008 This artwork performance focuses on local environmental concerns using ad hoc wireless networked devices for environmental monitoring. In this case the dozen sheep collect and send data about the environment, and respond to the space as a collective as they move about. The sheep monitor the environment in real time, generate sound, and send data to a server (online or offline) where this data is interpreted  visualized and sonified in situ using custom made software. http://www.stanza.co.uk/sheep/index.html

Public  Domain 2010. This project investigates the real time gallery space and the experience of the gallery visitor as they interact with artworks and with each other. The artwork explores new ways of thinking about interaction within public space using data gathered from new technologies. The visitors are “performers” whose movements can be tracked.  The patterns, movement, and exchanges of data in the real space, can be measured and interpreted as an emergent social space and used to make new artworks.  http://www.stanza.co.uk/public_domain_outside/index.html

“Visitors to a Gallery- referential self, embedded”. 2008 The gallery surveillance system embeds the visitors to the gallery inside the artwork. CCTV in public spaces. This artwork uses the live CCTV system inside an art gallery or any public space to create a responsive mediated architecture. Custom made electronics and sonar sensors are placed to create an installation in the gallery space. Visitors to the main upper gallery control the CCTV feeds by their own movement in the space. The piece becomes a semi performative controlled system. The proximity to the main ultrasound sensors affects the aesthetic of the image. http://www.stanza.co.uk/cctv_web/index.html

Public Domain 2005. Is an artwork using live CCTV cameras given away to members of the public. The project places real time CCTV feeds online, creating a randomised narrative of the city landscape and its population. The images are grabbed and placed online and mixed in a unique and custom built software surveillance suite. This first version used ten cameras in Nottingham in 2005. http://www.stanza.co.uk/publicdomain/index.html

Sonicity. 2010. This artwork explores new ways of thinking about interaction within public space and how this affects the socialization of space. The project uses environmental monitoring technologies and security based technologies, to question audiences experiences of the event and space and gather data inside the space. The project also focuses on the micro-incidents of change, the vibrations and sounds of the gallery using wireless sensor based technologies. http://www.stanza.co.uk/sonicity/index.html

Capacities. 2010. This project leverages the real time gallery space and the experience of the gallery visitor, using data gathered using these new technologies. The objective is to explore new ways of thinking about interaction within public space and how this affects the socialization of space. The project uses environmental monitoring technologies and security based technologies, to question audiences experiences of the event and space and gather data inside the space. http://www.stanza.co.uk/capacities/index.html

Public Domain: III. 2010. Continuing the series of investigations into the uses of CCTV to extend space and invoke impressions of transparency with architectural space. Here to extend the architecture of the building and extend it into the city. The artwork includes the performative aspect of those being watched as can be displayed inside the work. http://www.stanza.co.uk/CCTV_publicdomain/index.html

Stanza Artwork Live CCTYV

Stanza Artwork Live CCTYV

DATA DATA DATA  II. 2010 Made from the data that is collected from the sensors (usually across the city) or inside a building or a gallery. I have two networks of sensors which collect this data, all this is then published online. This is an art project that gives information about the fabric of our cities. By embedding the sensors like this we can re-engage with the urban fabric.  http://www.stanza.co.uk/data/index.html

“We have nothing to hide only to lose”. 2010 A performative piece using CCTV systems. The CCTV follows the artist around the building in the depths of the night and the result is projected outside in the city. http://www.stanza.co.uk/CCTV_performance/index.html

Stars of CCTV.  2007

These are the Stars of CCTV.  These images represent a portrait of England since the start of the CCTV imaging revolution.This image represented the start of the CCTV revolution. Since then we have seen CCTV cameras placed all over the United Kingdom for our “safety”, without any real debate about the ethic and accountability of surveillance in public domain space.

http://www.stanza.co.uk/stars_of_cctv/index.html

YOU ARE MY SUBJECTS. 2005. This online networked artwork uses live real time data from a camera in NYC . What you are seeing on the screen is happening in New York as you see it in real time.  Someone is always watching you in a world of total surveillance culture. This artwork deals with the aesthetics of CCTV and the voyeuristic notion of who controls the data and who has access to the data. Millions of hours of CCTV are watched in private in closed off networks. “You Are My Subjects”, turns CCTV images into artworks. http://www.stanza.co.uk/i_spy/index.htm

The World Is Watching, The World is Waiting. 2005 This artwork is networked, its real time, and its taking images in the present and representing them to you online as a media visualisation of the whole world. The software system uses over five hundred cameras are take the information and arranges the present time in a continuous flow.http://www.stanza.co.uk/watching_world/index.html

Stanza: CCTV Media Visualisation 2005. Large print On Canvas.

Stanza: CCTV Media Visualisation 2005. Large print On Canvas.

Timescapes 2004 -5.

Artworks from live media visualisations. Most of these are now large original artworks on canvas available for sale and exhibition. These images or mediascape are made from my software system that gathers images live from any webcam in the world. At your descretion it cuts them up them up to make time shift mediated artworks.

http://www.stanza.co.uk/timescapes_web/Public_Domain_Event_Space/index.html

http://www.stanza.co.uk/timescraper/index.html

‘america is bleeding’ – 2005 The computer manipulates the real time experiences and life of NYC as it unfolds. The city and its population are all actors in this real time play. Keywords: Visualisation, data, mediascape, net art, real time, CCTV, http://www.stanza.co.uk/new_york_stories/index.html

Urban Rhythms. Searching for the soul of the city. 2004 A networked real time experience of a city. The artwork collects cctv feeds from around city in real time. These real time images are fed into a software system where a series of specialized channels rework these images. The channels are always on, and always changing, a constant view of world cities changing and evolving around the clock. http://www.stanza.co.uk/spain_cctv/index.html

“Global…Never the same again always different….forever.”2004. A 3d web sculpture being transformed in real time with live data from around the world. This is being updated from webcams around the globe in real time. ‘Never the same again always different….Forever’, uses CCTV and web cams which offer readily available sources of continuous visual data from our environment and world cities. This work turns the notion of surveillance upside down, since in this work we are all watching everybody and opens up a question about the legality of the imagery. http://www.stanza.co.uk/global/index.htm

‘Blue Skies’, 2005 Uses CCTV cameras on the roof of the Watershed Media Centre in Bristol England. This is an online surveillance system using three cameras to monitor the sky above. Blue skies acts as a metaphor using new networked technologies that are generally used to observe people in society that might be engaged in criminal activity. http://www.stanza.co.uk/blue_skies/index.html

“The World Turned Upside Down”: 2007 This artwork was online from 24.9.2007 until the leaves fell in my garden on 12.12.2007.After that only documentation will exist, which is below.  This artwork is available as an installation for exhibitions.  http://www.stanza.co.uk/cam/trees_web/index.html

Seeing Through Walls. 2007. This installation using CCTV to open up the space to  play tricks and to  see through walls Commission idea for the Olympics 2012. This installation uses CCTV to open up the space to play tricks and to see through walls. http://www.stanza.co.uk/fake/index.html

“Monument” 2007. Robotic sculpture and CCTV systems to replace Eros in Picadilly London.The CCTV captured get replayed onto all the giant screens all over London. The robotic arms move and the CCTV cameras come down and say hello. They capture your image and relay the image to banks of screens across the city and online. http://www.stanza.co.uk/monumnent/index.html

DATA DATA DATA by Stanza 2008. This artwork is networked, its real time, and its takes data from a wireless sensor network that is placed in the real space. The old world of modernism was a world of fluids and gases atoms and molecules. This world is now a world of numbers. As we move about our interactivity affects the environment and this change is captured by a wireless sensor network. Real time artwork.  Technical note this can work in a gallery ( online over the internet) to represent the space (gallery or city) as numbers. http://www.stanza.co.uk/datacity/index.html

Soul 2004 -06. Soul is an artwork created to represent the ‘soul’ of the city that captures live data and visualizes the results as a piece of sculpture in a constantly evolving data sculpture. It is presented on a unique display technology, this is a 3 meter globe. Soul is a site specific work placed in urban space.The results of the installation are also viewable to a global audience as an online networked generative experience. Real time images are fed into a software system where a series of specialized channels rework these images to create unique visuals. The channels are always on, and always changing, a constant view evolving around the clock. The data is never the same, it is always changing. http://www.stanza.co.uk/soul_globe/index.html

“This England: A Green and Pleasant Land”, 2005. These pastoral landscapes and seascapes are real time paintings. Instead of CCTV watching our movement in urban space these cameras point out to the landscape or towards the sea. Typically this subject matter was the focus of the ‘Old Masters’. The digital landscape is fused with an ever changing present. http://www.stanza.co.uk/thisengland/index.html

Alpha to Omega 2006. Gathering images live from any webcam in the world that happens to be pointed or focused at the weather. The images are updating from around the globe in real time. http://www.stanza.co.uk/weather_another/index.html

Syncronicity 2008. This work developed out of my research fellowship at goldsmiths college.This is a live visualisation of a hand drawn city. Dozens of hand drawings are being walk on by small robots. The real space made as a visualisation. A special camera system, makes these digital images in the gallery space. Prototype was tested in Plymouth arts centre 2008. http://www.stanza.co.uk/syncronicity/index.html

FREEZONE 2005 Is a unique global company offering short holidays.  All bio chips, ID cards, GPS, will be neutralized at the door for the duration of the stay. Obviously “they” will know you are in Feezone, but what you do is up to you. FREEZONE The global “mother of big brother” will create a giant sensor net. The virtual world of databases will be connected via our electronic gadgetry. The giant sensor net of embedded chips, CCTV, bio tech and the internet will all be available to all via Earth pro version 10.2.  http://www.stanza.co.uk/ideasrus/freezone.html

Publicity. 2004 Publicity is an artwork about the Surveillance of public domain space utilzing the CCTV systems in place and manipulating the CCTV feeds. A series of codes manipulates the CCTV of the building and created a new relationship with public domain space. This artworks questions who owns the data and who is watching us in these spaces. Most buildings have CCTV and they use it to observe the people inside the space, ie the public. http://www.stanza.co.uk/publicity/index.html

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Stanza making things that occupy space.

November 30th, 2010

Much if not most of his work over the last twenty five years has been concerned with the city and with real-time technologies of surveillance and information and has often involved using and even making electronic devices.  In 2009 he did a residency at Lanternhouse in Cumbria,  near to the Lake District,  in which he applied some of the same techniques as he has used in relation to city life to more rural contexts. Yet this bucolic interlude was an exception to the normal location of his artistic practice.

Yet I would like to claim that Stanza presents an exemplary form of art as craft, in the sense that he takes the materials of our current technologised culture and materially engages with their possibilities in order to reflect upon what it means to be living in that culture. What is particularly interesting about Stanza’s work is that he understands how to use in creative and novel ways a whole range of tools and technologies, which, along with his prodigious rate of production, means that his output is a kind of map of shifting technological realities and possibilities. He groups many of his artworks over the last twenty five years under the rubric The Emergent City Projects.

stanza_music-_performance

Image: Stanza Music Performance with touchscreens: 2004

Stanza artwork above 2004

In the mid-1980s he was making music videos about ‘cities, networks and urban situations’ using ‘VJ decks and experimental TV techniques’.  In 1989 he started a series of monochrome paintings of cityscapes, based on his own photographs, entitled Control… In 1997 he started Central City…….

In a situation where the virtual realm becomes more and more the place where we, in the so-called developed world at least, work and socialise, the material, lived environment of the city becomes a locus of greater authenticity, much as the rural landscape did during the period of industrialisation. Yet, much as representations of the countryside in the 19th century were often made with much more awareness of the social and ecological issues than we now imagine,

Stanza’s work does not romanticise the city. He portrays it as a complex, informational space, networked by different complex systems, some visible and some invisible. He also makes the work in the most direct sense; he is a maker, a craftsperson, who knows how to program, how to use live video feed, and how to build robots, and sensing devices.

Above all he knows how to use and to work with the technologies of real-time computing and visualisation that have become an increasingly important part of our technologised culture.

To a certain extent Stanza’s practice and that of others like him, embodies the idea of ‘immaterial labour’ and the ‘social worker’ as discussed by, among others, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt.

In the context of a capitalism increasingly dominated by information technology Hardt and Negri distinguish between two forms of the ‘immaterial labor of analytical and symbolic tasks’, on one hand ‘routine symbolic tasks’, and ‘creative and intelligent manipulation’ on the other (293). They claim that, inasmuch as such labour necessarily involves cooperation prior to its subsumption by capital, it seems to ‘provide the potential for a kind of spontaneous and elementary communism’ (294). Hardt and Negri have been widely criticised for the naivety of this statement. What might be claimed is that immaterial labour does offer a new model of craft production as opposed to the dehumanising mass production of industrial capitalism.It seems to me that the work of Stanza offers us a model of not just an artistic but also an ethical engagement with technology, at a time when such a thing is, I believe, increasingly needed. His work does not comment on, for example, surveillance technologies or sensing technologies, or other public manifestations, in a political or polemic manner. Rather it engages in what they might be for, how they might be used, in ways that explore their meaning and potential beyond the obvious kinds of use. As such he works against the cool aesthetic of much work made with such technologies.

By contrast with the reticent of such stuff, Stanza produces an abundance of vivid, complex, often baroque work that is unashamedly aesthetic in the sense of being concerned with the sensually beautiful. In this he is like Ruskin’s gothic builder, whose love of variety and for beauty for its own sake was, for Ruskin, evidence of his freedom, as compared to the ‘enslaved’ worker, endeavouring to produce regular perfection. The modern equivalent to such an enslaved worker might be an artist committed to a conceptual programme of work as much as it might be a computer programmer endeavouring to find the most economical and ‘elegant’ solution to a logical problem. That said Richard Sennett’s book on The Craftsman explicitly claims that programming can be a craft and offers the example of Linux programmers.

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Image: Detail from live CCTV software system by Stanza 2005.

Stanza artwork above 2005

The difference between Stanza and the Gothic craftsman discussed by Ruskin is that the latter works spatially, making things that occupy space and endure, unchanged over time.

Stanza works in time, in the sense that he manipulates real-time and time-based  technologies such as CCTV cameras.  He does not so much ‘sculpt time’ as Andrei Tarkovski described the process of film making, as ‘craft time’. In the context of a culture in which time has increasingly become a commodity, this crafting of time takes on a more pressing and even political dimension.

Charlie Gere

Head of Department

Institute for Cultural Research

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Posted in city, emergent city, ideas, surveillance, technology, tracking

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RESPONSIVE ARCHITECURE FACADE – DATACITIES

June 18th, 2010
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Stanza . Responsive architecture. 2010. AOF Facade Norway.

This proposal has won the Nova Folkets Hus facade international juried competition and is now in development. The facade becomes a live dynamic interface, an artwork that changes its behavior as a result of the changing condition in the environment. This works by sensing the city and the environment to make art. The results become representations of the real time spaces and environment of Trondheim.

Environmental data is collected across the urban and environment infrastructure to make the artwork; using custom made sensors in the building and around the city. (30 custom environmental sensors units measure, light, noise, sound, humidity, and temperature). This data is turned into a online real time visualization of the space. The sensors interpret the micro-data of the interactive city. The output from the sensors display the real time environmental and emotional state of the city online in real time and the information will be used on the façade and online interface to control it.

My environmental sensors are scattered all over the building and city; this means I am literally painting with live data.

Stanza Live City Data

Artwork sensors in the building and around the city. Stanza 2010.

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Posted in architecture, artworks, cctv, city, code, data, emergent city, ideas, installation, technology

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