Human Entities: Culture in the age of semi-autonomous machines

Public talks - Lisbon: 13 April - 4 May, 2016
Organised by CADA in partnership with the Lisbon Architecture Triennale

By 2050, 75 per cent of humanity will be urban. Meanwhile our mobile phones, wearable sensors and the connected homes and cites that we inhabit are all collecting data on an oceanic scale. Networked computation is becoming ubiquitous and, as billions of things come online, the boundaries between humans and machines are fast becoming blurred. As new technologies increasingly work in relationship to others, not only does the data between them proliferate but its sheer scale and the complexity of our entanglement with our environment point to a radically new relationship with the world.

How do we imagine daily life shaped by an increasingly dense infosphere? How do we imagine sharing everyday life with semi-autonomous machines?

Inspired and spooked by such transformative times, CADA hopes to make some of the assumptions behind these technologies comprehensible and concrete.

Human Entities is a series of public talks focused on technological change and its impacts – the ways technology and culture shape and influence each other.

Jared Hawkey, Sofia Oliveira (CADA)

Session 1: Wednesday 13 April, 6.30pm
Adam Greenfield (US)
Another City Is Possible: Practices of the Minimum Viable Utopia

Session 2: Wednesday 27 April, 6.30pm
Alice Benessia (IT)
Do we really want and need to be smart? Can we?

Sara M. Watson (US)
Liquid Data: The Power of Seductive Metaphors

Session 3: Wednesday 4 May, 6.30pm
!Mediengruppe Bitnik (CH)
Artist talk: !Mediengruppe Bitnik

HUMAN ENTITIES is a cultural programme organised by CADA

Funded by:
Ministery of Culture, Direção Geral das Artes (Arts Council) Portugal

Partners and supporters:
Lisbon Architecture Triennale
Nova Lincs Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Stress.fm