[spectre] 2.nd call for papers amberconference 2010 DATACITY

[Zeynep Gunduz]

amberConference invites papers around the theme “DATACITY”

deadline extended to: 29th of September 2010:
http://www.amberconference.org

This is an international call for amberConference which will be take  place in 
the frame of amber'10 Art and Technology Festival. The selected  papers will be 
presented at amberConference in 6th-7th of November 2010  in İstanbul and will 
be published in the Conference Book.

important dates:

·  Up to 500 word abstract to be submitted by 29th of September 2010 (((  for 
submission: http://submissions.amberplatform.org )))
·  Notification of acceptance 1st of October 2010
·  Registration deadline 10th of October 2010
·  Conference 6th and 7th of November 2010
·  Deadline for final revised paper submission 30th of December 2010
·  Proceeding book will be published in 2011
 

the theme: 
"Datacity"

For the first time in history the World’s urban population has  outnumbered its 
rural counterpart. Cities have become the predominant  habitat of humanity. The 
requirements of rapidly growing cities, coupled  with the contemporary 
technological possibilities bring about new urban  reality that is data. 
amber’10 takes up the relationship between city  and data as its festival theme.

It is no accident that the rise of statistics as a science coincided  with the 
rise of the modern city as a social form during the industrial  revolution. When 
statistical methods of data production and measurement  coupled with 
reproductive techniques such as photography and printing,  the modern city 
entered into imaginary circulation simultaneously with  its double, its image. 
From its beginnings, the modern city emerged both  as a reality and a 
representation that were interrelated in such a  manner that it became hard to 
tell one from the other.

In this historical process, contemporaneous with the Enlightenment and  
Industrial capitalism, the ability to understand the city became  conditional on 
processing and thinking through the data it produced.  Data has become a crucial 
factor in urban social relations and politics.

The capacity to produce and process all kinds of data has increased  
tremendously with the rise of new technologies in the last three  decades. 
Capitalist parliamentary democracy, as it exists today, demands  transparency, 
efficiency and absolute security as the conditions of its  mechanism and has at 
its service the wide possibilities offered by new  technologies to meet these 
demands. This coupling brought about the  strategic importance of data in 
today’s World. We know and define the  city through the images made up of its 
data. The collection, storage and  processing of the vast amount of data has 
become an everyday practice  that is both visible and invisible, threatening to 
some and absolutely  beneficial to others in a field ranging from law to ethics, 
human rights  to health.   


With the theme title Datacity, amber’10 proposes to define the modern  city as a 
data cluster in addition to however else the city form may be  defined today. We 
call on artists to interpret the life forms,  production and consumption 
patterns and politics of the Datacity from  the vantage point of arts and 
technology.

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.

·  The politics of data and contemporary Urban governmentality.
·  Politics of data circulation and use.
·  Contemporary security and surveillance discourse.
·  Legality and legitimacy of data collection and use.
·  Political economy of data generation.
·  Value of metadata in a data-driven society.
·  The notion of Smart cities and urban management.
·  Datazen: the consumer in a transurban dwelling pattern.
·  Urban mundane and serendipity in the digital age.
·  Urban artistic sensibilities in the digito-technological age.
·  City as a "space of flows": Networked urban topology as an art material.
·  Spatial experience and ambient information processes