CITY DATA FUTURE Exhibition October 20-31, 2014
VENUE Galerija Drugo more Korzo 28/1 Rijeka, Croatia
OPEN Mon-Fri 10-13, 16-20 Sat 10-13

Keynote Speaker Ivica Mitrović OPENING SPEECH 21st October 2014 12 PM

What It Might Be Like To Live In a Future City Saturated with Data?

 

Cyber, hybrid, intelligent, plug-in, mediated, smart cities are our near future cities, saturated with data, big data, with cloud, internet of things… Or, at least, this is what we imagine them to be. Speculations are endless.

Will internet technology improve our daily lives? What will happen if technology becomes dominant over people? What kind of data will be collected through this technology? For whom? How to stay anonymous in a future city?

We will open up these and many other issues first through a new media exhibition CITY DATA FUTURE that traveled from Venice to Rijeka and is a part of the UrbanIxD Coordination Action project, running from 2013 – 2014, for the European Commission under the Future and Emerging Technologies programme. You are welcome to join us on October 20th at 8 pm for the exhibition opening and to meet the artists.

The next day, on October 21st, Ivica Mitrović (University of Split), one of the Urban IxD project coordinators, will hold an opening speech on smart cities and interactions in hybrid urban space. The lecture starts on Tuesday at 12 PM. All are invited.

Ivica Mitrović: Interactions in Hybrid Urban Space
INTERACTION DESIGN presentation

Future cities are breeding a hybrid environment that blends physical space with the digital sphere of big data. The UrbanIxD project takes the view that cities in the future will contain a tangled mesh of interconnected, heterogeneous technological systems. Technology will continue to evolve, and the data reading and writing capabilities of cities will only increase, but mess and complexity will still be the background context.

Interaction Design inspects this sort of urban space and it focuses on human activities, experiences and behaviour in relation to such hybrid environment. Hybrid City adds up possibilities, capacities and knowledge for collecting and generating more and more data. Interaction Design deals with that data and tries to make it more transparent, usable and – useful to the citizens. The dominance of technology over citizens may, on the other hand, cause problems with privacy, ownership, control etc.

Ivica Mitrović is the assistant professor at the department of Visual Communications Design at the Arts Academy in Split, where he teaches Interaction Design and Interactive Media Design. He holds a Ph.D at the University of Split and he also specialized at several other international institutions. Since 2001 he has been working on promoting and introducing the Interaction Design in Croatia and region. The activities concerning the promotion of the interaction design include a series of workshops and they resulted in the organization of the International Symposium at the Arts Academy in Split in 2009. At the end of last year his book Designing New Media, Design and the New Media – Croatian Context (1995 – 2010) was published. He is currently coordinating the UrbanIxD project for the University of Split. Ivica is also the vice president of the Croatian Design Society.

Welcome to the Hybrid City of all our futures…
CITY DATA FUTURE Exhibition

The City | Data | Future | exhibition speculates about the possible futures that city inhabitants might experience. The exhibition described here is built on work created during the activities of UrbanIxD project, particularly the Summer School of 2013 held in Croatia.

It brings together work created by artists, designers, technologists, social scientists, urbanists, architects, researchers and filmmakers. All of the contributors are motivated by a desire to explore how we experience urban living and what that might be like in the near-future.

A series of visions depict what it might be like to live in a near future city saturated with data. Each piece questions what this might mean for our changing relationship with the city and its citizens.

What might it mean to live in a city where everything is measured, and crowdsourced opinion holds sway? How might this affect our own judgment in the face of such quantification and what does this mean for the creation and consumption of personal data?

Will the city of the future protect us or will it monitor us? Will it provide shelter so that we can decide with whom we share our most intimate thoughts? As we reflect on the value we place on data, what new rituals might emerge around our need to share?

The exhibition is showing nine works. Five works were initiated at the UrbanIxD summer school, held last year in Split: Aurora, the Aura City; Aural Fixation; Future Cloud is Buried; Ministry of Misinformation (MoMi); and Coordination of Urban Busy Areas (CUBA). Two works have been curated for the City | Data | Future exhibition: Chupan Chupai, by Factory Fifteen, produced by Liam Young; and Blackspot by Tobias Revell, taken from The Monopoly of Legitimate Use trilogy. Eutropia design fiction and BetaCity have been directly commissioned for the UrbanIxD exhibition from the Arts Academy in Split and Edinburgh Napier University.

Watch the short video documetation of the City | Data | Future exhibition in Venice, above.

 

Flickr Gallery (CITY DATA FUTURE in Split, Croatia)
http://dvk.com.hr/interakcije/2014/07/12/city-data-future-urbanixd-izlozba-split/

City Data Future/ Urban IxD
http://www.citydatafuture.eu