Sentient City Survival Kit


Mark Shepard

Artist Bio

Sentient City Survival Kit is a set of artifacts for survival in the near-future sentient city. The project consists of a series of prototypes for electronic artifacts that subvert marketing and surveillance technologies encountered in everyday urban life: an umbrella studded with infrared LEDs that “blind” closed-circuit television cameras or a mobile GPS navigation device designed for serendipitous encounters. Visitors to exhibitions of Sentient City Survival Kit are able to test working prototypes; the website includes source code, a parts list and circuit diagram for each item in the kit, enabling urban citizens to make these items themselves.


Discipline
Hardware, Multimedia
Award Year
2009
Status

Completed

Mark Shepard

Mark Shepard

Brooklyn, NY

Shepard is an artist and architect. His work has been presented at museums, galleries and arts festivals internationally, including the Netherlands Architecture Institute; LABoral Center for Art + Industrial Creation; the Barcelona Design Museum; Art Center Nabi, Seoul, Korea; Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria; the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore; the Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art; The Queens Museum, New York; Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; Artist Space, New York; the Center for Architecture, New York; Transmediale, Berlin, Germany; Inter-society for electronic Art (ISEA) 2006, 2009, 2010; Futuresonic, Manchester, UK; Sonar Festival, Barcelona, Spain; the Electronic Language International Festival; FILE 2007, São Paolo, Brazil; and the Arte.Mov Festival for Mobile Media Art, Belo Horizonte and São Paolo, Brazil, among others. In 2006, Shepard co-organized Architecture and Situated Technologies, a three-day symposium bringing together researchers and practitioners from art, architecture, technology and sociology. In 2009, he curated Toward the Sentient City, an exhibition that critically explored the evolving relationship between ubiquitous computing, architecture and urban space. He is the editor of Sentient City: ubiquitous computing, architecture and the future of urban space, published by MIT Press and the Architectural League of New York in 2011. His awards include the George Foster Peabody Award in New Media, the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship in the Humanities, an honorary mention in the Prix Ars Electronica and grants from New York State Council on the Arts and the Experimental Television Center. He is an associate professor in the departments of Architecture and Media Study at the University at Buffalo, SUNY.