Sensing and Sensibility: Politics and Technology in the Contemporary City

Sensing and Sensibility: Politics and Technology in the Contemporary City

On Thursday, April 23, 2015, MAS Context and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago are co-organizing a panel discussion titled “Sensing and Sensibility: Politics and Technology in the Contemporary City.” The event will feature Javier Arbona, Ingrid Burrington, Laura Forlano, and Douglas Pancoast, and it will be moderated by Iker Gil.

Javier Arbona works at the overlap between architecture, landscape, theory, and geography. He recently completed a PhD in Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. His doctoral research focused on the transformation of military areas into urban parks in the San Francisco Bay Area. He practiced design and construction in Los Angeles, a city where he became more curious of the links between everyday landscapes and the region’s politics.

Ingrid Burrington writes, makes maps, and tells jokes about power, politics, and the weird feelings people have about both. She’s currently a fellow at the Data and Society Research Institute and a member of Deep Lab. Her writing has previously appeared in Creative Time Reports, TechPresident, and San Francisco Art Quarterly. She lives on a small island off the coast of America.

Laura Forlano is a tenure-track assistant professor of design at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology. In 2012-2013, she was a visiting scholar in the comparative media studies program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research is on emergent forms of organizing and urbanism enabled by mobile, wireless and ubiquitous computing technologies with an emphasis on the socio-technical practices and spaces of innovation. She is co-editor with Marcus Foth, Christine Satchell and Martin Gibbs of From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen: Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous Computing, and Mobile Technology to Support Citizen Engagement, which was published by MIT Press in 2011.

Douglas Pancoast is a graduate of the University of Kansas School of Architecture and Urban Design (BArch 1991) and Cranbrook Academy of Art (MFA Arch 1995). He has worked for firms including Richard Meier and Partners; 1100 Architect; BlackBox Studio at Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (SOM); and agency.com. His work has been shown in the Chicago-based exhibitions Art in the Urban Garden; Mystique: Space, Technology, and Craft and Speculative Chicago; and in Scale at the Architectural League of New York and the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. His projects have been featured in Architectural Record, Architecture, A.P.+, and The Architectural Review, and in the book Young Architects: Scale.

This lecture is made possible by the William Bronson and Grayce Slovet Mitchell Lectureship.

This event is free and open to the public.

Sensing and Sensibility: Politics and Technology in the Contemporary City
Date: Thursday, April 23, 2015
Time: 4:30 – 6:30 pm
Location: Columbus Auditorium – 280 S. Columbus Dr., Room 203, Chicago, IL 60603

Mas studio news sensing and sensibility politics and technology in the contemporary city

Detail of the Mitchell Lecture Series Poster. © School of the Art Institute.