[iDC] Situated Technologies: Toward the Sentient City

[Mark Shepard]

Hallo iDC,

It's been almost two years since Trebor introduced the discussion  
leading up to the symposium on Situated Technologies convened in  
October 2006 at the Urban Center and Eyebeam in New York. Without  
doubt, your input played a critical role in framing the key questions  
we attempted to address at the symposium surrounding the social,  
cultural and political implications of ubiquitous/pervasive computing  
for the architecture of urban space. The Architectural League of New  
York's commitment to sustaining this discourse has resulted in a  
series of pamphlet-length publications, published via print-on-demand  
(POD) and available as a free PDF download from http://www.lulu.com.  
We look forward to releasing the second pamphlet by Usman Haque and  
Matthew Fuller in the (very) near future. This summer look for a  
double issue on Situated Advocacy, with contributions from Natalie  
Jeremijenko / Benjamin Bratton and Laura Forlano / Dharma Dailey.

In an attempt to test ideas generated through this discourse, the  
League now intends to commission five to seven teams to develop urban  
interventions–to be installed in and around New York City in spring  
2009–that imagine alternative trajectories for how various mobile,  
embedded, networked, and distributed forms of media, information and  
communication systems might inform the architecture of urban space  
and/or influence our behavior within it. Commissioned projects will  
receive support ranging from $5,000 to $25,000.

The RFQ is available here: http://www.situatedtechnologies.net. Your  
help in distributing this call is greatly appreciated!

Best,
Mark