New technologies play an ever-increasing role in the social life and administration of cities in various forms and functions. Branded as "smart cities", modern urban spaces are now equipped with cctv cameras, GPS and mapping systems, computerized infrastructure management systems along with the ever-multiplying number of personal electronics and gadgets all operating on global digital communication networks.
With objectives ranging entertainment and administrative strategy to pure profit and public security, this network of networks tracks and traces anything that is processed digitally and continually creates a massive circulation of digital data that emanates from the operation of very many animate and inanimate things in the city. The city and its data are now heavily implicated in each other from aesthetic, technological, political, economic and sociological angles.
In light of this new state of things, amberConference proposes to begin by the beginning and ask the question: What is the new urban reality under the reign of data? and what is data in the context of the city? For a through rethinking of the pair datacity from the above angles, we invite researchers, thinkers and artists from relevant disciplines to submit presentations of no more than 4000 words by considering the following subject headings.
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Short Bio:
Kazys Varnelis is Director of the Network Architecture Lab at Columbia University and co-founder of the conceptual architecture group AUDC, which published Blue Monday in 2007 and exhibited widely in places such as High Desert Test Sites. He edited the Infrastructural City, Networked Publics and The Philip Johnson Tapes, all published in 2008. He has worked with the Center for Land Use Interpretation and is currently producing The New City Reader with Joseph Grima for the Last Newspaper exhibit at the New Museum. His present book project is Life After Networks: A Critical History of Network Culture.
Detailed Bio:
Kazys Varnelis is the Director of the Network Architecture Lab at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. In addition to directing the Netlab and conducting research, he is on the architecture faculty at Columbia where he teaches studios and seminars in history, theory, and research.
Varnelis is a co-founder of the conceptual architecture/media group AUDC, which published Blue Monday: Absurd Realities and Natural Histories in 2007 and has exhibited widely in places such as High Desert Test Sites. He is editor of the Infrastructural City. Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles, Networked Publics and The Philip Johnson Tapes: Interviews with Robert A. M. Stern, all published in 2008. He has worked with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, for which he produced the pamphlet Points of Interest in the Owens Valley. He is currently working with Joseph Grima on The New City Reader: A Newspaper of Public Space, part of the Last Newspaper exhibit at the New Museum in fall of 2010.
Kazys's teaching and research focuses on the impact of recent changes in telecommunications, economics, and demographics on architecture, the contemporary city, art, and culture. He is presently writing a book entitled Life After Networks: A Critical History of Network Culture.
Born in Chicago in 1967, he is the son of noted Lithuanian geometric abstractionist Kazys Varnelis [1917-] and grandson of Kazys Varnelis, the Samogitian folk artist [1867-1945]. When his family moved to the Berkshires, he encountered Fluxus, meeting George Maciunas and getting to know the movement through noted Fluxus collector Jean Brown who became close friends with his mother.
He received his Ph.D. in the history of architecture and urban development from Cornell University in 1994, where he completed his dissertation on the role of the spectacle in the production of form and persona in the architecture of the 1970s.
From 1996 to 2003 he taught at the Southern California Institute of Architecture where he was coordinator of the program in the History and Theory of Architecture and Cities. In 2004 he became a founding member of the faculty of the School of Architecture at the University of Limerick, Ireland where he continues to teach and is on the advisory board. He has also taught in the Environmental Design program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, the Public Art Studies program at the University of Southern California, the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Department of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.
In 2004, he was awarded a prestigious year-long appointment as senior researcher at the Annenberg Center for Communications at the University of Southern California where he examined the impact of telecommunications and digital technology on urbanism and architecture and directed a team of thirteen scholars looking at how new and maturing networking technologies are reconfiguring the ways by which we interact with content, media sources, other individuals and groups, and the world that surrounds us.
He has lectured internationally at schools such as Harvard, Yale, MIT, UCLA, TU-Delft, the IUAV and at venues such as the Digital Life Design Conference in Munich, the Architectural League, the Van Alen Institute, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, the Open Society Fund, and the Glass House.
He has published in journals such as A+U, Praxis, Log, Perspecta, Cabinet and is on the boards of numerous scholarly journals such as Thresholds, the Journal of Architectural Education, Urbanistika ir Architektūra, and Kulturos Barai.
As former President of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, he received the Educator of the Year Award from the Los Angeles Institute of the American Institute of Architects. He has served on the national board of DOCOMOMO-US since 2004.
CJ Lim
CJ Lim is the Professor of Architecture and Cultural Design at the Bartlett UCL, and the Pro-Provost of University College London. He is also the founding director of Studio 8 Architects in UK – an energetic multi-disciplinary and international award-winning practice in architecture, landscape and urban design.
His innovative designs and research focus on interpretations of cultural, social and environmental sustainability programmes - recent award winning eco-urban planning are for the Chinese and Korean Governments. His celebrated project "Virtually Venice" was an investigation of East-West cultures and identities – commissioned by the British Council UK for the Venice Architecture Biennale. CJ is listed in Debrett's People of Today and the International Who's Who for his architecture and academic contributions. The Guardian and the Independent newspapers, and Iakov Chernikhov Foundation Moscow have included CJ in their talent listings. The Royal Academy of Arts London awarded CJ the Grand Architecture Prize, the prestigious award with past winners including Lord Rogers, and Lord Foster. His 10th authored book "Smartcities + Eco-warriors" was published by Routledge in 2010.
