Tweeting the smart city: the affective enactments of the smart city on social media

    Thursday, October 26, 2017 - 13:00 to 14:30
    Rocque Lab – Rhetoric House, South Campus

    Prof Gillian Rose, University of Oxford, will explore some of the implications of digital media on urban spaces - all welcome

    Digital technologies of various kinds are now the means through which many cities are made visible and their spatialities negotiated. From casual snaps shared on Instagram to elaborate photo-realisticvisualisations, digital technologies for making, distributing and viewing cities are more and more pervasive.

    This talk will explore some of the implications of that digital mediation of urban spaces. What forms of urban life are being made visible in these digitally mediated cities, and how? Through what configurations of  temporality, spatiality and embodiment? And how should that picturing be theorised? 

    Drawing on recent work on the visualisation of so-called 'smart cities' on social media, the lecture will suggest the scale and pervasiveness of digital imagery now means that notions of 'representation' have to be rethought.  Cities and their inhabitants are increasingly mediated through a febrile cloud of streaming image files; as well as representing cities, this cloud also operationalises particular, affective ways of being urban.  The lecture will explore some of the implications of this shift for both theory and method as well as critique.

    Public welcome to attend.

    This event is part of Maynooth University Research Week 2017. In June 2017 Maynooth University celebrated the 20th anniversary of its founding as an independent university. Research Week 2017 is part of a year-long series of programmes and activities marking this milestone.