Defining Forms of Control in the Contemporary City
Date: Tuesday 11th August 2015, 18:30 to 20:00
Venue: RIBA, 66 Portland Place, London
As part of the Virtual Control exhibition hosted by RIBA, and produced by the UCL Urban Laboratory with artist Max Colson, this discussion will explore the real and imaginary forms of control in privatised public spaces.
Panelists will speak on the processes behind the introduction of security design in urban space, surveillance culture, and the role that digital technologies have on the establishment of new urban environments. Each speaker has 10 minutes to present, before a group discussion and questions from the audience.
The panel will include the artist and writer James Bridle, Nathan Moore (Birkbeck, University of London), and Clare Melhuish (UCL Urban Laboratory), and be chaired by Max Colson.
The talk will be followed with a gallery tour of the exhibition by Max and curator Sunil Shah.
Virtual Control – Security and the Urban Imagination is open daily in The Practice Space at RIBA until 21 September.
James Bridle is a writer, artist, publisher and technologist usually based in London, UK. His work covers the intersection of literature, culture and the network. He has written for WIRED, ICON, Domus, Cabinet, the Atlantic and many other publications, and writes a regular column for the Observer newspaper on publishing and technology. James speaks worldwide at events including SXSW (Austin) and TED (London).
Nathan Moore is a senior lecturer in Law at the Birkbeck School of Law. current research is on the concept of control and how control is exercised through techniques of surveillance and the construction of anti-social behaviour. He is currently co-authoring a book that addresses the conjunction of these themes.
Clare Melhuish is Research Associate in the Urban Laboratory at UCL, working on case study research in university-led urban regeneration in relation to the UCL East project. She is a writer and researcher at the intersection of architecture, urbanism and anthropology.
Max Colson is a British photographer and was artist-in-residence at the UCL Urban Laboratory between September 2014 and June 2015, funded by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust. His photography based practice is interested in repurposing techniques used to market and visualise controlled urban environments. His work also speculatively documents the covert nature of contemporary security design.
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