Society of Networked Things

Projektmodul
Lecturer(s): Mark Shepard, Visiting Professor from the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
Credits: 18 ECTS, 12 SWS
Date: Tuesdays, 9:15
Venue: Marienstraße 7b Seminarraum 103
First meeting: 21.10.2014

Description

By the year 2020 the number of network-enabled “things” is projected to reach 50 billion, or 7 for each person on the planet. As networked things become more commonplace, machine-to-machine (M2M) communications will outnumber those of human-to-machine (H2M) and human-to-human (H2H) communications over the Internet. This has profound implications for the nature and place of things in human habitats and our interactions with and through them in the course of our daily lives.

• What happens when humans become a minority on the Internet?
• What new qualities might this emerging society of networked things exhibit?
• How might we imagine alternative relations between people and things within such a society?

This studio will investigate the social, spatial and political implications of these questions through the creation of a collective installation composed of individual, network-enabled things. We will explore and problematize simple behaviors of responsive things (for example: plants that tweet when they need water, a light bulb that indicates a coming storm by changing color) and study how these behaviors gain complexity not only in their networked interactions with each other, but also though embodied interactions with people in space.

Admission requirements

Basic knowledge of (or co-registration in courses on)

• electronics,
• physical computing (Arduino YUN),
• programming (Processing),
• server-side programming (Node.js).

Registration procedure

Please send your application by email with the Subject Society of Networked Things to: shepard6 (ät) buffalo.edu

• Your full name
• Your study program and semester (Studienprogramm und Fachsemester)
• Student number (Matrikelnummer)
• Valid email address @uni-weimar.de Why?
• A paragraph describing:
  • why you want to take this course,
  • what technical skills and experience you have in this area, and
  • what other courses you plan on taking this semester

Grading

• Conceptual development and realization of a working prototype (70%),
• regular and active participation in studio critiques and discussions (15%),
• documentation of all work in digital formats (15%)

Eligible participants

Master students in Media Architecture, Media Art & Design

Schedule

Subject to change

21.10.2014	Introduction: meet & greet, course overview, introduce project
CONCEPT
28.10.2014	Presentation/discussion: Network Theory, Internet of Things (IoT)
04.11.2014	Presentation/discussion: Responsive Things, Sociable Objects
8-9.11.2014	Workshop: fingies (together w/ IFD Project)
11.11.2014	REVIEW: presentation of preliminary concepts
PROTOTYPE
18.11.2014	Workshop: Arduino Yun / Temboo. Accessing network resources via APIs
25.11.2014	Workshop: Workshop: Data wrangling: scraping, parsing, cleaning, manipulating data
02.12.2014	Workshop: Workshop: TBD
09.12.2014	Workshop: Workshop: TBD
16.12.2014	REVIEW: working prototype
INSTALLATION
06.01.2015	Presentation/discussion: Networked Performances
13.01.2015	Group work session
20.01.2015	Group work session
27.01.2015	FINAL REVIEW w/ invited critics
29-30.01.2015	Performance (together w/ IFD Project)
03.02.2015	Documentation

Literature

• Barabási, A.L. Linked: The New Science of Networks. Perseus Pub., 2002. ISBN 978-0452284395
• Benkler, Y. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. Yale University Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0300110562
• Bennett, J. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0822391623
• Burke, A., and T. Tierney. Network Practices. Princeton Architectural Press, 2007. ISBN 978-1616890759
• Castells, M. The Network Society: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. Edward Elgar Pub., 2004. ISBN 978-1843765059
• Easley, D, and J. Kleinberg. Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-1139490306
• Fuller, M. Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture. MIT Press, 2005. ISBN 978-0262062473
• Gershenfeld, N. A. (1999). When things start to think. New York: Henry Holt. ISBN 978-1466873520
• Kitchin, R. The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences. Sage, 2014. ISBN 978-1446287484
• Latour, B. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. ISBN 978-0674076754
• Latour, B. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. OUP Oxford, 2005. ISBN 978-0199256051
• Latour, B, and P. Weibel. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge, Mass. Karlsruhe, Germany: MIT Press; ZKM/Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, 2005. ISBN 978-0262122795
• Shepard, M. Sentient City: ubiquitous computing, architecture and the future of urban space. MIT Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0262515863
• Terranova, T. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. Pluto Press, 2004. ISBN 978-0745317496
• Varnelis, K. Networked Publics. University Press Group Limited, 2012. ISBN 978-0262517928

Links

BLOGS

• Networked Performance (Turbulence)
• We Make Money Not Art

EXHIBITIONS

• Talk to Me, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), July 24–November 7, 2011, New York, NY
• Toward the Sentient City, The Architectural League of New York, September 17–November 7, 2009, New York, NY

PROJECTS

• Alerting Infrastructure!, Jonah Brucker-Cohen (2003)
• Air Quality Egg, AQE Google Group (2012)
• Amphibious Architecture, Natalie Jeremijenko, David Benjamin, Soo-in Yang (2009)
• Botanicalls, Robert Faludi, Kate Hartman, Kati London, and Rebecca Bray (2006)
• Dead Drops, Aram Barthol (2010)
• dontflush.me, Lief Percifield (2010)
• Natural Fuse, Usman Haque (2009)
• Transparency Grenade, Julian Oliver (2012)
• Trash Track, MIT Senseable City Lab (2009)
• Tripwire, Tad Hirsch (2006)