This panel discussion will take place Thursday, September 11, from 2:30 PM to 3:45 PM as part of the Thursday Presentation Series. Tickets can be purchased here.

Project Description:

Recent interest in mapping environmental conditions, particularly those of cities, has led to a veritable explosion in the number of information visualization projects that attempt to raise awareness of, and affect change within, the contemporary urban condition.

Or at least so they claim.

As techniques for sensing and monitoring urban ecosystems become more open, accessible, distributed and participatory, new questions arise concerning how these images and interfaces actually perform. Are these new maps even legible, and if so, to whom? What constitutes their authority and what kinds of agency do they impart? Can they be understood apart from the politics embedded within the institutional scripts governing how the data upon which they are based is collected?

But we can go further still. As low-cost, low-power wireless sensor networks become more commonly available, higher order interactions between collecting, sharing and interpreting real-time aggregations of environmental data become possible, interactions that string together networks of both human and non-human actors in new and compelling ways.

This panel brings together Natalie Jeremijenko (xClinic) with David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang (The Living) to discuss new interaction partners for environmental governance and different approaches to working with (and within) urban ecosystems assembled by both human and non-human social networks.

Organized and moderated by Mark Shepard

Living City, The Living - David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang

Green Light, xClinic - Natalie Jeremijenko

Bios:

Natalie Jeremijenko (xClinic)

Natalie Jeremijenko is an Associate Professor of Art at NYU, with affiliated faculty appointments in Computer Science and Environmental Studies. Jeremijenko directs the xDesign Environmental Health Clinic, developing and prescribing locally optimized and often playful strategies to effect remediation of environmental systems, producing measurable, mediagenic evidence and structuring diverse participation to improve environmental performance.

Jeremijenko’s previous work—exploring socio-technical change—have been exhibited by several museums and galleries, including MASSMoCA, the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, and the Reina Sofia, Madrid. A 1999 Rockefeller Fellow, she was named one of the 40 most influential designers by I.D. Magazine; and one of the inaugural top 100 young innovators by MIT Technology Review. Jeremijenko’s work has been included two Whitney Biennials of American Art and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Triennial 2006-7. She was recently awarded the 2008-9 VAI-SSRC New York Prize and Fellowship in Sustainable Cities and the Social Sciences.

Her work is described as experimental design (hence xDesign) as it explores opportunities presented by new technologies for non-violent social change. Her research centers on structures of participation in the production of knowledge and information, and the political and social possibilities (and limitations) of information and emerging technologies — mostly through public experiments. In this vein, her work spans a range of media from statistical indices (such as the Despondency Index, which linked the Dow Jones to the suicide rate at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge) to biological substrates (such as the installations of cloned trees in pairs in various urban micro-climates) to robotics (such as the development of feral robotic dog packs to investigate environmental hazards).

David Benjamin + Soo-in Yang (The Living)

David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang created The Living in 2004. The practice emphasizes open-source research and design, seeking collaboration both within and outside the field of architecture, and viewing each project as part of larger threads of experimentation and construction. Work by The Living has been exhibited at the Chicago Museum of Science, the Innovation Lab in Copenhagen, Southern Exposure in San Francisco, and Eyebeam in New York; has received an Architect Magazine R+D Award in 2008, the New York Prize Fellowship from the Van Alen Institute in 2007, a Young Architects Forum award from The Architectural League in 2006, three separate finalist prizes from the Metropolis Magazine Next Generation Design competition; and has appeared in many publications, including Life Size (Columbia Books of Architecture, 2007), a non-monograph about the firm’s work, Interactive Architecture (Princeton Architectural Press, 2008), Transmaterial 2 (Princeton Architectural Press, 2008), Instability (Princeton Architectural Press, 2007), and Transmaterial (Princeton Architectural Press, 2006). Their most recent project, Living Light, won the City Gallery International Design Competition, and it will involve a permanent outdoor interactive pavilion in Seoul, Korea, scheduled to complete construction in November 2008.

Benjamin graduated from Harvard with a BA in Social Studies and played in the rock band Push Kings. Yang graduated from Yonsei University with a BE in Architectural Engineering and managed the construction of apartment complexes in Seoul. Benjamin and Yang both received Master of Architecture degrees from Columbia University. They currently teach at Pratt Institute and at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where they are co-directors of the Living Architecture Lab.