WUOS, Wrocław Urban Operating System (2019)
The future of the modern city is a computational model — a vast array of vectors extracted from sensors and networked devices inside the city. This future resides in a technological grammar of data, services, protocols, applications and monitoring systems, that constitute a so called smart city.
The promises of smart cities and the implementation of smart city technologies differ significantly. In theory, smart cities are open information infrastructures, that help policy makers rethink and rebuild city services in accordance with citizens’ needs. In reality, it’s a mess: The implementation of smart technologies is the aggregation of data into black boxes, elusive and imbued with political agenda.
The Wrocław Urban Operating System takes an interest in the city as computational model. It compiles various digital representations of the city — audio recordings, photos, video and smart city narratives — and utilizes these in a live coding framework, built specifically for this work, to produce an ambient pop music that corresponds with the computational configuration and teletopia of a future Wrocław.
The work is supported by the Soundscape Research Studio at the Faculty of Cultural Studies of the University of Wrocław, Dźwiękowa mapa Wrocławia by Olga Kaniewska / Andrzej Koper and Invisible Map of Wrocław by Maciek Bączyk, who all generously permitted the use of their audio recordings.
The production of the work is supported by WRO Biennale, The Danish Cultural Institute, The Danish Arts Foundation and the municipality of Aarhus, Denmark. The work was made in collaboration with Tobias Stenberg (DK)
