ESRC/SSN Seminar: Architectures, Spaces, Territories

ESRC / Surveillance Studies Network Seminar Series
The Everyday Life of Surveillance

Seminar 5: Architectures, Spaces, Territories
September 1st, 2009
@ Culture Lab, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.

9.00am registration for 9.30 am start. Finish by 4.30pm

Cost: free.

Please e-mail Kim McCartney if you want to come. Places are limited. First come, first served!

Outline:

The fifth seminar is the series will bring together both the ‘virtual’ (computers, telephones and the Internet) and the ‘material’ (buildings, neighbourhoods and cities). It will think about how these are increasingly merging and being subject to surveillance in the same or similar ways as computing is built into everything, including potentially, ourselves. The day will concentrate on the spatial and territorial aspects of surveillance in a world of global flows of people, things and information, and of pervasive computing technologies. This will bring together both virtual and material ordering in consideration of ideas of speed, post-territoriality, code, protocol and so on. It will cover forms of monitoring and control as ways of shaping the physical and virtual architecture and landscape (or flowscape) of private and public realms at multiple scales.

The seminar will consist of 3 dialogues between an exciting line-up of 6 invited speakers and of course, discussion, kindly hosted by Martyn Dade-Robertson, Lecturer in Architecture at the School of Architecture, Planning & Landscape, Newcastle University, UK.

Speakers:

Malcolm McCullough. Associate Professor in the Taubman College of Architecture and Planning, University of Michigan, USA. Malcolm is an architect and author of Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing and Environmental Knowing (2004, MIT Press).

Jaime Allen. Lecturer in Digital Media and Deputy Director of Culture Lab, Newcastle University, UK. Jaime is a new media artist and developer whose work can be seen at http://www.heavyside.net/

Martin Dodge. Lecturer in Human Geography in the School of Environment and Development, Manchester University, UK. Martin is the author of several books on the mapping of virtual spaces, including (with Rob Kitchen) The Atlas of Cyberspace (Addison-Wesley, 2001) and is now interested in mapping data shadows.

Nikki Green. Senior Lecturer in the Sociology of New Media and New Technologies in the Department of Sociology, University of Surrey, UK. Nikki is a sociologist of communications technologies, has worked on projects with BT and Intel, and is author (with Leslie Haddon) of Mobile Communications (Berg, 2008).

Marc Langheinrich. Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI) in Lugano, Switzerland. Marc is a former developer who was involved in the Disappearing Computer initiative and the EU's Safeguards in a World of Ambient Intelligence (SWAMI).

(*tbc) David Murakami Wood. Associate Professor of Surveillance Studies in the Department of Sociology, Queen's University, Canada (as of September 1st).

Please e-mail Kim McCartney if you want to come. Places are limited. First come, first served!