While the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts isn’t a new addition to SF multimedia and art coverage (or to this site), I’m regularly stunned by the work they unveil, and this weekend’s launch of the SENSEable Cities series featuring exhibits and conversations around urban futures is no surprise. GAFFTA, a nonprofit dedicated to building social consciousness through digital arts, will be hosting a locative media and art exhibit as part of the City Centered Festival starting this weekend at their 55 Taylor Street gallery. The exhibition is said to “bring together technologists, artists, community leaders, and companies to explore how the confluence of art and technology can build social consciousness.”
SENSEable Cities is a retrospective show presenting 15 projects that illustrate the opportunities of pervasive computing for urban life. In collaboration with the SENSEable City Laboratory, a new research initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the work will focus on the implications that sustainable urban mobility, methods for data fusion, data mining, and various approaches to real time visualization can have on transportation, health, law, and commerce.
“SENSEable Cities engages not only San Francisco neighborhoods but informs international understandings of mobility,” said Josette Melchor, GAFFTA executive director (and Women 2.0 In Conversation interviewee). “Digital art acts as a hook for exploring what real-time research says about every day living through projects that track where our garbage goes, transforms bikes with mapping technology for pollution and traffic data, and uses cell phones to increase the city’s energy savings.”
SENSEable Cities will be one of several exhibits comprising the City Centered Festival, an SF-wide festival celebrating urban communities. I’m currently excited about technology that allows us to capture city movements as real-time records, and GAFFTA’s exhibit will use wireless sensor technology to aggregate that data and create a catalog of uncensored research for public consumption and re-use.