The Mixed-Reality City
Graduate School of Design
Harvard University
Fall 2013

Thursday 3:00-6:00pm, Gund Hall Room 522
Website: https://mixedrealitycity.nuvustudio.com

Instructor: Yanni Alexander Loukissas <yanni@metalab.harvard.edu>
Office Hours: 2:30-4:30pm Gund Hall Room 414

Guest Instructor: Matthew Battles <matthew@metalab.harvard.edu>

Introduction
The contemporary city is constituted by multiple overlapping, intermixing realities articulated across built form and imagined space, individual experience and collective memory, embodied sensation and digital mediation. Often, these multiple realities are invisible or illegible, with certain narratives dominating particular environments. However, realities always leave traces, to be excavated and reconstructed. The Mixed-Reality City is an exploratory research seminar and workshop in which students pursue studies of urbanism-in-the-making through means and methods emerging in the digital arts and humanities, including: data narrative, digital ethnography, adversarial design, and critical technical practice. The course focuses in equal parts on unpacking discourses and developing interpretative digital artifacts.

This year, the course will examine the mixed-reality of natural and artificial environments, principally in the Northeastern United States. Projects will focus on historical and contemporary controversies over troubled natural or wild places and phenomena by exploring their associations and effects within cities. The class will pursue questions about the co-construction of the “natural” and the “artificial” as well as feral presences in cities: places and phenomena once domesticated, now returned to nature. Moreover, we will examine the relationship between natures and networks. What happens to technology in the wild? Can technology itself become feral?

We will read authors, such as Bruno Latour, Kevin Lynch, Michel DeCerteau, Leo Marx, Donna Haraway and William Cronon, who explain the mixed-reality of cities in their own ways. We will also engage the work of media artists and designers who make a practice out of intervening into controversies: Natalie Jeremijenko, Sara Wylie, Kelly Dobson, Leanne Allison, Jeremy Mendes, Phoebe Sengers, and Carl DiSalivo. The Mixed-Reality City is a highly participatory class. Students will be expected to actively contribute to discussions and project critiques. At the beginning of the term there will be a rapid series of exercises in writing, mapping, and precedent analysis. Towards the end of the term, students will focus on lengthy final projects to interpret and intervene in mixed wild and constructed places in cities.

The course is open to all graduate students at Harvard and associated institutions. While there are no prerequisites, students are expected to bring basic skills in digital media. The Mixed-Reality City is hosted by metaLAB (at) Harvard, a research unit of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, focused on experiments in the arts and humanities.

Basics
This course will be run in a seminar/workshop format, composed of a mixture of brief presentations and a considerable amount of discussion involving every student in the class. It is essential that you be prepared to participate at all times. Class typically meets once a week on Tuesdays, 3:00-6:00. Attendance is crucial at weekly meetings. If you must miss a class for any reason, please email well in advance. If you miss more than one class, it may significantly affect your grade in the course.

Exercises
The course will begin with two open-ended exercises to identify and map controversies over the nature and value of city wildscapes. This early focus on controversies is intended to surface the mixed-realities present in cities and, in particular, reveal how varied discourses construct conceptions of “the wild,” in different ways. The course is substantially informed by research in the field of Science, Technology, and Society, which has long studied controversies as a means of revealing the construction of scientific knowledge and technical expertise.

Weekly Readings/Watchings/Listenings/Discussions
The historical and theoretical portion of the course is guided by weekly readings. Film viewings and interactive experiences are recommended but not required. It is expected that each student substantively engage the required materials (at a minimum) and be prepared to discuss each work in class. The first weeks generally attempt to pair material relevant to the group’s exercises. For each week in which required reading is assigned, you should write and upload a reflection on one or more of the texts. Consider the following when composing your responses:

1. Reflect upon the reading itself.
Who is the author? Who is the author writing against? What domain are they writing in? Who is the intended audience? What evidence does the author use? How strong is the central argument of the reading? What concessions does the author make, if any? What does the author not consider? 

2. Situate the reading in the context of other texts.
These may be texts that we have looked at during the term or which you are personally familiar with. How does this reading reinforce, extend, or call into question the arguments raised by other authors or vice versa? What new insights or evidence supports the author’s argument?

All readings will be made available online or as PDFs over the course of the semester on the course website, unless otherwise noted in the syllabus. 

Precedent Studies
The subject matter of this course is constantly evolving, and as such, it is crucial that we also work together to track new developments, develop historical perspective and enhance each other’s learning. Towards this aim, each student will be required to write a brief case study (ca. 500 words) critically analyzing a contemporary or historical project of relevance to the course. Think of these as short essays to help us build a collection of shared references and inspirations for your final projects.

Final Project
The project can draw upon themes you or others have explored earlier in the semester, but it is not required. The project is intended to be collaborative with others in the class. You can choose to use existing tools or develop your own forms of technical (or nontechnical) mediation. Projects will be reviewed by critics in a juried presentation/critique.

Technology Expectations
This course is media and technology intensive. It is expected that all students have some familiarity and experience working with digital media. However, students will be encouraged to learn by doing, and to share skills with each other. The emphasis of this course, however, is not on learning technical skills per se, but rather on being able to make whatever use you can of the media technologies at hand for artistic practice.

Experimental Context
This course and the work that you will create is an experiment. It is important to keep in mind that all of us will be inventing elements as we go, and this process of discovery and development is part of the excitement. Consequently, it’s also important to understand certain things will fail, break and not turn out as planned, and to embrace these hiccups as part of working in a collaborative, laboratory environment.

Academic Integrity
The GSD seeks to maintain a learning and working environment characterized by academic integrity and fair access to educational resources. The GSD expects all students to honor these principles. Actions that violate these principles include the following, and may be the basis for disciplinary action: a. Cheating on examinations, either by copying the work of other students or through the use of unauthorized aids: b. Fraudulent presentation of the work of others (either written or visual) as one's own work (plagiarism) c. Simultaneous or repeated submission without permission of substantially the same work (either written or visual) to more than one course: d. Alteration or misrepresentation of academic records.

Evaluation
Participation in class: 40%
Final project: 30%
Warm-up exercises: 15%
Precedent studies: 15%

The Hackathon is an opportunity to bring together members of the Harvard community to spend a day collaboratively experimenting with the technological and spatial affordances of Gund522. The hackathon will provide a crash-course on Greenhouse, a platform for building multi-use, multi-display interfaces with gestural and spatial interactions. Participants will work in interdisciplinary teams to explore new uses of and tools for the room. Members of metaLAB, GSD faculty and staff, and engineers from Oblong will be available throughout the day for support and feedback.

Spatial input devices will be provided, including Microsoft Kinect, Leap Motion controllers, and wands. Greenhouse can also use mobile devices as sources for gestural input.

Although designers and coders are welcome, no previous skills are required. For those who do have some programming background, the Greenhouse SDK is available online with full documentation and sample programs. Greenhouse is available for Mac OSX and Linux.

More here: http://research.gsd.harvard.edu/gund522/about/hackathon/ 
Feel free to email mezz@gsd.harvard.edu with any questions.

In Class Reading for Thursday, Sept. 19th

This is the second experiment in mapping the mixed-reality city.

As before, we will draw upon recent controversies. This time the controversies concern “feral” technologies. Such controversies are sites where realities meet over disputed rights, unresolved questions, and conflicting values. These controversies are manifest through material traces such as newspaper articles.

First, choose a feral technology controversy traceable through one of the articles included. If you have another controversy in mind and you can find a relevant news article, please send an inquiry to yanni@metalab.harvard.edu.

Second, create a list of human and non-human actors identifiable in the article. An actor is any entity defined by the article that performs work within the controversy, including people, plants, non-human animals, buildings, technologies and institutions. Set a limit on the number of actors you define and articulate a rationale for that limit; this experiment is intended to be illustrative rather than exhaustive.

Third, select one actor that troubles you and create a dossier on that actor. The actor might be invisible, in flux, a cyborg (see Haraway), or simply a reified concept (see Marx). Collect material on the actor, including alternate articles, visual media, quantitative data and other representations. Experiment with ways of presenting this material visually in ways that shed light on the original controversy. Include these experiments in your dossier along with the original material.

Create a new project on the website to host your dossier and a short description of your process (~300 words). Be prepared to present and discuss your findings in class.

For more on actors, traces, and associations see: Latour, Bruno. 2008. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Due: Thursday, October 24

Choose a single non-human actor (ex. an insect, a weed, a drone, a mapping technology) defined in the context of a contemporary controversy of your choice. You may make use of controversies defined in newspaper articles from previous experiments, but you are not required to.

A couple of things about your actor:

1. Your actor should be either a type of urban wildlife or a feral technology.
2. Your actor should be socially troubled in some way (ex. invisible, in flux, ill-defined, contested, a cyborg, or simply a reified concept).
3. The identity of your actor should be grounded in at least one newspaper source.
4. Your actor should exist in Boston or in some future version of the city.

Then, invent a means of visualizing the presence of your actor in the city of Boston. Make use of data, materials, media and traces of your actor found in secondary sources (i.e. online) or collected first hand. This does not require a complete representation of the city, only a demonstration of limited scope. In other words, choose a section of the city to focus on.

In order to help you develop this visualization, revisit a reading we did earlier in the term: The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch. Lynch created a new mode of representation for the city: a visual language of nodes, paths, edges, districts and landmarks in order to represent the image of the city produced by its inhabitants. In this experiment, you will be gathering information about the image of the city according to non-human actors (urban wildlife or feral technologies) based on how they see, sense, migrate, or navigate. Consider how you might redefine one or more of Lynch’s elements in order to represent a new mixed-reality.

Create a new project on the website to host your visualization and a short description of your process (~300 words). Be prepared to present and discuss your findings on Mezz (come prepared with jpegs).

Required Readings

* Leo Marx. 2010. “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept.” Technology and Culture 51 (3): 561–577. (PDF)
* Kurgan, Laura. 2013. Close up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics. (PDF)
* Haraway, Donna. 1991. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. (link)
*Battles, Matthew 2011. "Distributed Ghosts in the Machine." Atlantic Technology Channel.

Recommended Readings

* Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology
* Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden
* Williams, Rosalind. Notes on the Underground
* Feenberg, Andrew. Questioning Technology
* Latour, Bruno. Aramis, or the Love of Technology
* Battles, Matthew. The Call of the Feral

Please follow the previous guidelines for reading and writing your reflection as a comment on this discussion thread.