Smart city photo booths: Playful data

This paper shares one of the critical moments in an interdisciplinary collaboration between an urban geographer/planner and a visual artist in which we explore different ways of seeing, knowing, mapping, and imagining. Our work develops integrated and participatory spaces in which to generate stronger and more nuanced geographical and artistic insights into people’s embodied experiences and encounters with/of urban space. This essay shares the example of a playful data intervention conducted by students prompted to engage in the complexities and possibilities of digital landscapes. It looks at urban surveillance as a technological ecosystem, thinking particularly about traffic cameras, weather cameras, and other visual monitoring systems—digital infrastructures premised on gathering “data.” It also thinks about poetic and experiential alternatives to this way of conceptualizing space. The camera is probably the first step toward integrated urban technological living—from which we can extrapolate and research what other kinds of things are being implemented and how that might fit with the (un)availability of user experience. In response, we proposed a participatory project engaging the question of urban citizenship in which participants find themselves inside of this visual ecosystem and share pictures of themselves taken from publicly available surveillance cameras. We call it “smart city photo booths” and our hope is that it helps us rethink the relationship between data and lived experiences within digitally mediated society. It gets into the concept of “smart” data. We think about smartness as a form of research/espionage that perhaps requires citizen participation and collective human (counter) intelligence to the data-imperatives emerging in the discourses around smart cities.