General public talk at Scientifica

On 02.09.2017 at 16:00 I will give a talk  at Scientifica.

Making sharing economies more sustainable

Sharing economy platforms like Uber and Airbnb demonstrate our unprecedented ability to participate in a bottom-up exchange of everything from vehicles and tools to accommodation and energy – all via their smartphones. We discuss how people can actively encourage more sustainable (self-)regulation in these sharing economies. “Crowd-sourcing” computational resources – distributing them across users’ devices rather than centralising them on corporate servers – would allow these platforms to regulate supply and demand while still allowing users to maintain their privacy and autonomy as they see fit. In turn, fairer sharing economies inaugurate both new techno-scientific infrastructures and new social formations that act as prominent platforms for art and computational creativity. We present two real-world case studies—bike sharing in smart cities and energy sharing in smart grids—as well as an audiovisual performance where real-world data drive sophisticated sound-synthesis processes, thus aesthetically conveying material aspects of sharing economies.

There will also be a performance by the media artist Marinos Koutsomichalis based on earlier inter-disciplinary work on data aesthetics and computational intelligence.

More information are available here.