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This week I visited Yuz Museum Shanghai for “Lying Sophia and Mocking Alexa”, an immersive exhibition exploring the human/machine relationships within the framework of Artificial Intelligence. The exhibition brings together artists and researchers examining the topic from a variety of perspectives including the impact of AI on global technopolitics and on geologies, the absurdity of quantifying human emotion, the dark labor involved in training human-like algorithms and the myth-like narratives about AI propagated by the media.

 

“Sophia” and “Alexa”, transformed into text and audio by the GPT-2 model AI software, are the two central characters in Lying Sophia and Mocking Alexa. With three dimensional dialogues taking place throughout the exhibition, they serve to interpret the subject of AI, which is paradoxical and implies manifold future potentials. Sophia, a robot that has been granted Saudi citizenship, is highly responsive and has a realistic human look. A life-like robot living among us, she can even conduct diplomacy and is seen as an “ambiguous scam” co-authored by media and technology companies. Alexa is a “servant” who takes the shape of a machine and resides in domestic corners. She has been reported to have “horrible laughter,” symbolizing the opacity, uncontrollability and dangerous potential of the AI “black-box” to slide into voyeurism and subversion. In the exhibition, Sophia and Alexa are contemporary metaphors for our evolving relationship to these new technologies. The former’s lies are the projection of poetic imagination –a bright, lyrical imagination. While the latter’s ridicule demonstrates cracks in the black-box algorithm, representing a murky existence fraught with technical criticism. The existence of Sophia and Alexa and the dialogue between them allow the audience to experience the exhibition as a voyeur, witnessing the fullness, imponderability and last hope of the psychological world.

As a bystander, the exhibition leads us to question: if artificial intelligence is no longer purely a concept of science fiction and if the development of basic science continues to expand the boundaries of our cognition, will what we are experiencing be the black hole event horizon that, as Vernor Vinge foresees, “breaks all prophecies” or serves as “the biggest mistake we have ever made” as indicated by Stephen Hawking? Today, AI is widely used in chips, processors, data collection and analysis, forming a new frontier in global technological competition. It is a topic that similarly points to infinite possible futures in the changing world of science and technology. However, outside of technology industries, it is still not easy to know directly what products and programs utilize AI as it becomes the easiest, but also the hardest story to tell in mass media.

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Among the exhibits, there are two closely related to the issue of infrastructure. One is called “Red Lines”, revealing another side of the internet, one that moves at the speed of weather, wind, and tide. Red Lines is a pioneering new project by Evan Roth which involves a network of mesmerizing video landscapes streamed free to your home or workplace. The network contains infrared videos of coastal landscapes that can be streamed to a smartphone, tablet, or computer by anywhere. Roth has traveled to coastal sites around the world where the cables that make the internet possible emerge from the sea. 

 

The other one is composed by a map about the anatomy of an AI system, as a way to begin seeing across a wider range of system extractions of AI. At this moment in the 21st century, we see a new form of extractivism that is well underway: one that reaches into the furthest corners of the biosphere and the deepest layers of human cognitive and affective being. The stack that is required to interact with an Amazon Echo goes well beyond the multi-layered “technical stack” of data modeling, hardware, servers and networks. The full stack reaches much further into capital, labor and nature, and demands of an enormous amount of each. These systems add up to become a new infrastructure. The scale required to build AI systems is too complex, too obscured by intellectual property law, and too mired in logistical complexity to fully comprehend in the moment. Yet you draw on it every time you issue a simple voice command to a small cylinder in your living room: “Alexa (or Siri), what time is it?”

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The exhibition contains many other intriguing installations and masterpieces, such as “Ca-Ca”, which learns the way you invest before you die and will follow your life’s path and continue the way you left your mark on the world; “Alice & Bob”, an installation of continually evolving love letters that uses data from a quantum computer. Just as Bratton articulates, “as a different and more literal connotation of ‘distributed cognition’ takes form in this way, the already contested line between world-sensing and information-processing  gets blurrier.” Here is an imagery that the remote and ambiguous AI system will probably become an emerging media infrastructure in our future sentient cities. The logic can be applied to many other cases, such as software for modifying pictures. In China, Meitu has become a seemingly “infrastructure-like” app for supporting our production of everyday pictures that will be posted elsewhere on the internet. What we have to do is to contemplate the new definitions and layers of “infrastructure”, and our relationship to it. And “we should crave to learn what would ensue.”

The smart city is always proposed with an implied discourse of “the cities of future.” There is a common verbal trick underscoring the core object of building smart cities is to leverage technology to serve people and make the urban environment more alive and livable. However, just as Shannon Mattern has pointed out in “A City Is Not a Computer” that public concerns regarding this issue usually lie on the scales of “financial markets, transit patterns and news cycles” rather than on the climatic scale and the geological scale, it is hard to reach every aspect of a matter.

Therefore the free-market mode is not so suitable for city-making. Merely from the commercial perspective, young people are no doubt the target audience of smart cities. They embrace emerging things, have the capacity and willingness to consume “smartness” (which means convenience based on the internet in most cases), and can grasp new concepts and technologies very quickly. So smart cities can be interpreted as “smart young cities” in a sense. But this tendency does manifest the hegemony of technology in terms of social classification. The groups that cannot catch up the advancing urban intelligence will lose in this game of computation. No matter big data or high tech should be used to improve public life. There is no city intended for a particular social group or the majority only. No one is supposed to be the loser. If we forget about the people, we lose the sense of being smart. So a really smart city will be an inclusive city that built around diversified users without any barrier in everyday operation.

A best option is to collect different perspectives in the process of city planning. By means of engaging all parts of society to share their perceptions and demands, we can gain a bottom-up intelligence and effectively detect bugs resulted from a simple and arbitrary mindset. For instance, nowadays the subway signs and VI systems in many cities are designed super terrible. They are ambiguous and visually cluttered. Young urban dwellers may have tolerated and got used to them. While the elderly cannot tell the right way to go or the right train to take with such guidance. Solutions are not difficult to figure out; the mindset matters. So I hope in building smart cities, the state can make more efforts in this macro control to guarantee the right of certain vulnerable groups in terms of technology.

 

Here is a video of a conference on smart cities for healthy aging: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=325GC-_BuaA

In the essay “The Sentient City and What It May Portend”, Nigel Thrift has conceded that “there is no reason to think that a growing urban sentience will necessarily deliver greater equality or comfort or freedom.” (p.15) In my concern, the sentient city is a very fascinating promise, but if we put this notion in a context of human cultivation, and consider more about the gain and loss of citizens instead of the exciting technology of ubiquitous computing simply, we may find some very pitfalls to prevent.

From the perspective of the quality of daily life, we can imagine a variety of future interactions that will be evaluated positive or negative. For instance, few of us may object to traffic light control systems that respond to the ebbs and flows of city traffic, but what if living in a “too smart city” that employs city furniture as enforcers? What if a bench will eject a sitter who sits too long? What if a sign will display the latest legal codes and warn passersby against transgression (and in fact it has been enforced in Beijing recently)? And what if a trashcan will throw back the wrong kind of trash so that everyone has to strictly follow the garbage sorting rules?

On the one hand, this omniscient and omnipotent urban system may aggravate our moronity in terms of everyday decisions and activities. With the help of complete automatic apparatus at every second, our intelligence and perception will be probably in degradation. On the other hand, “the Internet of everything” and the consciousness from every part of a city may create a new version of “Big Brother paranoia” dystopic vision in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four. Surveillance will not only be realized through the media in a traditional sense, but embedded in everywhere of our life. Both the erosion of digital intelligence and the intrusion of state power deserve caution in the future sentient city.

Anyway, between concept and execution, there is always a gap. Since we haven’t seen any formed sentient city model yet, everything is still in suspense. Only in practice can we see how a real sentient city could be, and how it will function, adapt, survive, and transform. What we should bear in mind is that it involves serious issues regarding technical ethics and spatial politics. Therefore, the design details matter a lot in showing who the sentient city really serves for.

“This is Dragonfly. Dragonfly has 28,000 eyes, blinking 40,000 times per second.” 

– A robotic AI voice-over (Dragonfly Eyes, 2017)

Dragonfly Eyes is an experimental feature film directed by Xu Bing, one of China’s most esteemed contemporary artists. In the film, Xu uses fragments of reality and recycles a found visual language to tell a fictional story. Without a cameraperson or an “actor”– rather, it was created solely by downloading more than 10,000 hours of publicly accessible video surveillance footage, many from Chinese live-streaming sites. Then the footage were compiled, edited, and dubbed into a relatively coherent storyline with a narrative of stranger sociality. The 81-minutes film is believed to be the first one to combine the technologies of over 245 million global surveillance cameras and cloud computing, turning out to become a technological spectacle itself. 

The name “Dragonfly Eyes” is a metaphor of the saturated surveilling cameras, just like a compound eye with a cavalier perspective. It is well known that surveillance capacities can be massively augmented by information technology, which resonates with the point that infrastructures can act as force amplifiers for the human bodies. For China’s case, Skynet tracks more than twenty million surveillance cameras; it can identify a person in seconds and is used to provide real-time security updates; Sharpe Eyes, a nationwide system, connects private and commercial cameras to a centralized database. The public surveillance cameras, along other high-tech digital tools to record, track, monitor, and influence the behavior of 1.4 billion individuals, such as GPS monitoring, advanced facial recognition software, and artificial intelligence, constitute an extensive surveillance media infrastructure in the post-socialist China, a reality of our new virtual information transparence. 

Stripped of its unconventional form of artistic representation, Dragonfly Eyes is a classic romance story about self-identification in essence. To be more specific, the story illustrates a kind of visible absence, and anonymity under the panoptic power. In the first half, we follow the composite “protagonist,” Qing Ting (which means exactly “dragonfly” in Mandarin), as she leaves the Buddhist monastery where she’s been grown up from a child to take up a series of low-paying jobs in the city as a “grassroot”. She first finds work at a dairy farm, where she is spotted by Ke Fan, the “male savior”, on the closed-circuit system that monitors its employees. After she’s fired from the dairy farm, Qing Ting takes a job at a dry-cleaning business and, later, at a restaurant. Then the turning point of her life comes: one day on the way home from work, she passes by a plastic surgery clinic and gets offered a special discount. Having been suffering from adversity and instilled with the common idea that physical beauty is crucial especially for women in today’s society, Qing Ting takes a chance to get the plastic surgery as an attempt to gain social mobility.

Screen Stills of Dragonfly Eyes

Paradoxically, we don’t really know what Qing Ting looks like in the first place, not to mention who she has become after she changes her face. Therefore, the second act of the film is narrated by Ke Fan, who holds the same uncertainty of Qing Ting’s whereabouts as he has been in jail for several years. The story veers toward absurdist parable. After investigation, Ke Fan is convinced that surgery has turned Qing Ting into Xiao Xiao, a popular online host. Because of her ridicule of another celebrity’s looks in a live broadcast, Xiao Xiao becomes the target of a toxic online hate campaign that pushes her offline and, it seems, to suicide. Here Xu reveals the absurd reversal of public emotion that feels sorry for the scandalized girl’s falling with a presumption of her death, which as well is often the case in real life. 

Then the story comes back to the point of surveillance when the police are looking for as a missing person. The fact is that they cannot even identify Xiao Xiao for there are so many similar “plastic faces”. “That Xiao Xiao is turning up everywhere,” one police officer says. “If we can’t tell them apart, what chance do surveillance cameras have?” Confronted with the new reality that appearance is no more fixed, the camera-eye shows its very limit for reliance on visibility. It is this epidemic of virality that finally overwhelms the state’s surveillance apparatus and fundamentally challenges the notion of “epidermalization.” 

The weird strategy of resistance presented in the film reminds me of the five lessons in invisibility Hito Steyerl offers in her short video work How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational MOV File (2013). Advanced face-lifting technology may be another means of “seeping out” to envision in such an age of over-visibility. By changing appearance and resembling each other in reference of a standard model, body becomes a replicable iconic symbol. In other word, images use our body as a visual medium in the simulacra process. It is a reiteration of the current prevailing phenomenon, that new technologies of vision have introduced a certain abstraction in our visual experience, as we no longer are able to control the relation existing between an image and its model. Thus individuality is erased for identification under the visual surveillance system. 

Screenshot of How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational MOV File

From a policing point of view, no matter the digital camera eyes are “panoptic” or not, the illusion of omniscience is almost as effective as the real thing for its imperceptible and uncertain characteristics: You don’t need to watch everyone if you can get everyone to behave as though they are being watched. However, actually Chinese citizens’ relationship to surveillance is not totally passive and repressed by the central state. Xu contended in an interview with WSJ: “Our understanding of surveillance for the most part is control, management, and supervision… But now it’s expanded from the government to everyone.” The government’s digital infrastructure is merged with social media, residential cameras, and commercial surveillance systems to create and disseminate surveillance data as a social collusion, a consensually-based control, and a normalized discipline. 

For citizens, on the one hand, they embrace the technological prosthesis and entertain to surrender our privacy in order to tap into social networks, consumer convenience, and a sense of security; on the other hand, they are burdened with fears and anxieties about electronic surveillance. The expository habits not only make us vulnerable to punishment but also shape new pleasures, identities, and desires. In terms of the citizen-generated data, “prosumers” consume surveillance data they produce and produce new content while consuming those data in and through the digital mediascape. Therefore, the infrastructures of electronic surveillance does have panoptic potentiality, but it is less like a dichotomy of centralized or decentralized power, than a complicated in-between status. 

Robert Neuwirth’s Ted presentation on “The hidden world of shadow cities” reminds me of an interesting documentary film made by CAMP – Al Jaar Qabla Al Daar (Your Neighbour before the House). It is a series of video probes into the landscape of East Jerusalem. The video for this documentary was filmed by eight Palestinian families living in various neighborhoods in the city of Jerusalem, a place where the usual sense of “neighborhood” is broken by occupation and conflict. It was filmed over a month in September 2009, with a PTZ CCTV camera that the residents installed on or close to their own homes. The voice-over is that of people speaking over the video live as they watched and controlled the camera from inside their homes. Sometimes the voice looks for an image, at other times image provokes voice, or they separate into distant landscapes and innermost thoughts. The footage, previously seen as a video installation, was edited into a feature-length documentary in 2011.

These images show that before and after instrumental surveillance, there is inquisitiveness, jest, memory, desire and doubt that pervades the project of watching, surveillance, and the neighborhood of “informality”. When the Israeli government demolished the Moroccan Quarter in 1967, it was the fifth and smallest of old Jerusalem’s neighborhoods. Private property was converted into public space: the former Moroccan Quarter is now a large open plaza leading up to the Western Wall, in use as an open-air synagogue. In these specific times and places, camera movements and live commentary become ways in which Palestinian residents evaluate what can be seen, and speak about the nature of their distance from others. Through the camera they observe nearby archeological digs, their homes, and the wall.

At first glance, the idea of a neighborhood appears as the most obvious contradiction to the series of displacements, deferrals, and distortions existing on the surface of this highly volatile, contested and segmented city. The neighborhood is that part of the otherwise anonymous cityscape, where one is recognized, or where the subject is hailed. Neighbors can encounter each other without technical mediation; they meet and greet face to face, everything is within walking distance. Such a more or less homogenous local environment is ruled by specific circumstances that are characterized precisely by the fact that they are not globally valid, that are not exchangeable or even communicable. It is grounded in the production of a self that claims the right to the given territory: to be exactly and exclusively here, often as a result of ownership or property.

However, what we can see in the video project is a neighborhood in a state of permanent crisis. Spatial proximity does not produce any sense of community, but does the opposite. The neighborhood is scattered and inaccessible. What was private space becomes public; what was private life becomes political. Al Jaar Qabla Al Daar sets out to reverse engineer the neighborhood as a machine for self-monitoring and surveillance.  Here the neighborhood can only be encountered through a technological device that produces closeness and remoteness, which would otherwise remain entirely abstract. The constant zooming in and zooming out of the camera constitutes a rather peculiar artificiality of the picture. This is a regime of visibility that promises to provide access to what would otherwise, and in the true sense of the word, be inaccessible, since one would not be allowed to go there, or know how to understand what is going on. The results are profane and deconsecrated icons that map lost properties as robbed and removed social relationships. It is noteworthy to think about the politics of informality and the ideology of space regarding this film.

To watch the documentary: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kg64jiH2QkE

Krishnendu Ray depicted some of the markets in Delhi selling street food that are deeply related to the liveliness of the city and the livelihood of the poor. Actually I have been to a very one when I was on a trip in Delhi, as a member of the Tsinghua India Immersion Program during my senior year (Here is a Vlog edited by me.)

In the market, you can try specialties like Jalebi, buy souvenirs like block-printed scarves, hear disco or hiphop music playing and watch people dancing. It’s neither too high-end or low-class. There was a joyful atmosphere, or in Ray’s notion, an atmosphere originated from the “rich, milling, sensuous public life”, for everyone to engage in. The buddies at Jindal Global University told us that they would go downtown for the market almost every weekend to buy food from different regions (especially those from their hometown) and get some entertainment with their friends. I was very impressed then as I hadn’t experienced such a fascinating weekly event in China with local cultural odor of urban life.

pc to Sophie Zhang

 

Now city planners and administrators in China have realized the importance of street vending in activating local economic vitality and leading the trend. Shanghai Night Festival was initiated at June 6, including Waitanyuan Night Carnival (for a few days) and BFC Fengjing Weekend Market (on Saturday and Sunday each week until Jan. 3, 2021). Both street markets are located in the busiest district of Shanghai, with gorgeous skyline of the bund and artistic architecture of Fosun Foundation. 

 

“Street food has the potential to change the flavor of the politics and poetics of good taste.” It is evident that the planners would like to position the weekend market as a stylish and high-end attraction targeting at the younger generation to cater to their specific consumption needs, such as experiencing, socializing, and showing their personalities and aesthetics.

BFC Fengjing Market are 300 meters in length, including more than 110 brands, stalls, and pop-up shops. The vendors are serving leisure food like kebab, sushi, snacks, bubble tea, and beer. Foreign food and beverage are especially popular, DIY cocktail, for example. There are also various trendy youth cultural elements embodied in the live shows and interactive activities. Here street vending is no more associated with impressions like “littery, chaotic”; instead, it has become a creative and entertaining junction.

Street foods do make beautiful pictures. If you search for “Waitan Fengjing” on the social platform Red (to share sophisticated pictures and lifestyles),  nearly 600 results will be shown. Images and information of such an event can travel well on SNS, proving that it is a successful business model with a gene of fashion.

 

The planners have enacted thorough and detailed logistic support process including dealing with trash. There are five locations for waste collection at the market with different allocation of classified dustbins according to different types of the stalls nearby. They have also set a dishwashing place to make sure the site is neat and ordered.

In a word, street vending in this era has been presenting a brand-new face. It is about the updated lifestyle of urban residents. But I’m not sure whether such a high-end version of street vending have much to do with the livelihood of the poor.