Sentience and Place
Sentient Relationships: Excerpt from presentation. Image by Douglas Brock.
Contributors: Doug Brock; Stanislav Roudavski.
Presented at the Urban Assemblage: The City as Architecture, Media, AI and Big Data event by Architecture, Media, Politics, Society (APMS) held at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, United Kingdom from 28 to 30 June 2021.
Tags: #sentience #artificial-intelligence #interspecies #place
Our research group often uses "design experiments", which is an established method in a number of fields. This is similar to but also different from an artwork. The main purpose here is to contribute to theory or practice. These experiments can be physical prototypes or speculative designs presented in a variety of media, however, in all cases they are primarily meaningful and transmit knowledge as designs.
In this case, the theme is the ethics of sentience in future urban environments. Within this theme, we work on various sub-projects and arguments. We have published one conference paper, are working on a journal article, and on a book. We have also put together a speculative design experiment that is the object of this submission. It is distinct from the other outputs and presents the material that cannot be shown in other ways.
Technological acceleration affects all city dwellers, human and nonhuman. This situation calls for further research into capabilities for just resilience in the context of inclusive, more-than-human communities. We review this challenge through the lens of sentience. Existing discourse on sentience in humanities, engineering, and biological sciences is extensive but disjointed. This disunity results in the exclusion and disregard of sentient agents, existing and emerging. In response, this project considers the roles sentience in future cities. It hypothesises that an understanding of sentience as a more-than-human, relational, and distributed phenomenon can promote interspecies justice.
To test this hypothesis, we begin with an outline of biological sentience in humans, animals, and other lifeforms. We then compare biological sentience with forms technological sentience in robots and intelligent devices. The last steps of our analysis explore how these forms of sentience can combine in the context of smart cities and discuss implications for human and nonhuman stakeholders. Using project examples, we compare existing conditions, within emerging trends, and long-term forecasts. The outcomes of this review emphasise the importance of ecocentric foundation for further research into nonhuman lives and interspecies communities.
Design materials and the theoretical contributions of this project have been selected for presentation at the Urban Assemblage: The City as Architecture, Media, AI and Big Data event by Architecture, Media, Politics, Society (APMS), University of Hertfordshire, Intellect Press and Parade. 28-30 June 2021. This work contributes to the ongoing work funded by the ARC Discovery Project grant on Place and Parameticism (DP170104010). The work has implications for the design of smart technologies at multiple sites. Based on the outcomes of the project, we have been invited to collaborate with the University of Hertfordshire on healing/therapeutic environments.
Video
Forms of Sentience and Future Places: Recording of presentation. Video by the authors.
Publications
Brock, Douglas, and Stanislav Roudavski. "Sentience and Place: Towards More-than-Human Cultures." In Why Sentience? Proceedings of the 26th International Symposium on Electronic Arts (ISEA 2020), edited by Christine Ross and Chris Salter, 83–0. Montreal: Printemps Numérique/ISEA, 2020. https://doi.org/10/ghg57d.