Controlling Addresses and Addressing Control in the City

“Hey, you there!” - Controlling Addresses and Addressing Control in the City
Lecture and workshop by Simon Höher

The course is structured in three parts and works as a lab rather than a lecture: a place to collectively test and try out promising questions within a shared context, using methods of foraging and foresight in literature and urban space. As a result, participants should be able to discern different variants of control through power and addressability, and to translate this difference into urban action themselves.

Opening Lecture:
March 11, 11:00

Workshops:
March 12, 9:30
April 15, 9.30
April 16, 9.30

This is a hybrid event
zoom ID: 518 722 2864

Louis Althusser speaks of a police man who calls out this phrase on a street to a number of individuals – with some of them reacting to it, and others not. We’ll take this brief story as a starting point to examine the different sides and strategies of control, addressability, and neutrality in today’s connected city. More specifically, we are interested in tactics of governance and protest, of planning and probing, and of exploration and obfuscation in digital and analog urban space. We will discuss perspectives from urban design to linguistics to second-order cybernetics to try and understand how a city controls itself, and we will design interventions to put that understanding to a test on more practical terms, by means of artistic, speculative, and provocative interventions.

Simon Höher heads the Hybrid City Lab, an urban and public design studio in Berlin, and chairs ThingsCon, a European initiative to promote responsible connected technologies. In his work and research he explores systemic concepts of design, technology and society in a global context.