Dronesphere Colloquium
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1 Spadina Cresent
Registration will be required for this event. Reserve your ticket on the registration page.
No city has yet confronted a large scale domestic integration of either autonomous or remotely piloted aerial vehicles. Although, various district-scale experiments testing the occupation of urban airspace are underway. During the latter half of 2018, rural delivery has begun in remote communities in Ontario, and has a longer history in rural contexts outside of Canada. However, the city presents a set of different spatial, social, legal, regulatory, and technical challenges. This event, through a series of panels and presentations, will address the place of aerial robotics in the city. It will feature presentations by scholars from design practice, art, architectural history, surveillance studies and engineering. The drone’s “place” within the city will be triangulated through speculative proposals, historical analysis, and a critical engagement with their use in the present.
Speakers Include:
Ciara Bracken-Roche (UOttawa)
Sean Burkholder (UPenn)
John Harwood (UT)
Immony Men (OCAD U)
Fiona McDermott (Trinity College)
Hillary Mushkin (CalTech)
Giovanni de Niederhäusern (Carlo Ratti and Associati)
Public Studio (UT)
Ala Roushan (OCAD U)
Sam Siewert (ERAU)
Scott Sørli (UWaterloo)
Mason White (UT)
Keynote: Liam Young (Sci Arc)
Join speculative architect Liam Young and acclaimed electronic producer for the live expanded cinema performance, I Spy with my Machine Eye, a filmic tour told from the perspective of a drone drifting across the planet. Based around Young’s short film ‘In the Robot Skies’, the first fiction film shot entirely using preprogrammed drones and accompanied by acclaimed electronic producer Forest Swords’ original soundscape he narrates a near-future love story set against the fears and wonders of an impending drone age.
Special Thanks to the FADO Performance Art Center and the Italian Cultural Institute for co-presenting Liam Young’s performance lecture “I Spy With My Machine Eye”, and the “Projective Urban Air Mobility” panel, respectively.
Full Schedule:
11:00 | Blurring the Boundary Between Land and Sky
John Harwood (U of T)
11:45 | Projective Urban Air Mobility: Acting at Scales
As an emerging term, ‘Urban Air Mobility’, describes the movement of passengers and cargo within cities using remotely piloted or autonomous aerial vehicles. However, this definition fails to represent a broader aerial ecology reflective of different uses for drones. Through project-based presentations, this panel forefronts designers’ whose proposals and prototypes can expand our understanding and imaginations of drones beyond commercial delivery. This early-stage research will highlight the relationship between:
- drones in the re-articulation of highways;
- drones as communication infrastructure; and
- drones as mediators of human-site relationships in participatory design processes.
Giovanni de Niederhäusern (Carlo Ratti and Associates)
”ANAS Smart Highway: Retooling 20th century infrastructure”
Fiona McDermott (CONNECT / Trinity College, Dublin)
”The Moving Network: UAVs as Future Urban Telecommunication Infrastructures”
Immony Men (OCAD U)
”Out of Site: The aerial view in participatory design”
Co-presented with Istituto Italiano di cultura Toronto
1:00 | Break
2:00 | Staging the Apparatus
This pair of presentations focuses on Hillary Mushkin and Public Studio’s engagement, as artists, with drones as military apparatuses. Mushkin, through a series of site visits to the U.S. Army’s Fort Huachuca, in the southern Arizona—a prominent drone pilot training facility—draws relationships between humans, visual interfaces, communication infrastructure and drones towards highlighting the place of the human in these complex assemblages. While Public Studio, turning the lens outward with their film, “Drone Wedding,” explore expanding surveillance regimes and the subjects caught by them.
Hillary Mushkin (Cal Tech)
“The Disposition of Drones”Elle Flanders, Public Studio (U of T)
“Under the Last Sky: verticality, aerial viewing and the ethics of artistic practice”Scott Sørli (UWaterloo), Panel Chair
3:00 | Device, Sensor ,Systems: Assembling the Drone
As social, technical and political nodes, drones — autonomous or otherwise — are constellations of parts that constitute multi-scalar assemblages. The composition of: parts that produce lift, the legal apparatuses that bounds movement, the technical and algorithmic components enacting computer vision; perform in ensemble. Architecture and the allied design disciplines seem ill-equipped to address the range of questions arising from an expanded use of cities’ airspace on their own. Bringing together scholars from design, engineering, and the social sciences, this panel presents a cross-section of disciplinary interests relating to an aerial ecology including drones.
Sam Siewert (Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University)
“Drone Net Architecture”
Ciara Bracken-Roche (UOttawa)
“Dronescapes in Canada: Policing, protest, and public spaces”Ala Roushon (OCAD U)
“Spirits Ghosts Flying-Witches”
4:15 | Break
4:30 | I spy with my Machine Eye
Join Speculative architect Liam Young and acclaimed electronic producer for the live expanded cinema performance, ‘I Spy with my Machine Eye’, a filmic tour told from the perspective of a drone drifting across the planet. Based around Young's short film ‘In the Robot Skies’, the first fiction film shot entirely using preprogramed drones and accompanied by acclaimed electronic producer Forest Swords’ original soundscape he narrates a near-future love story set against the fears and wonders of an impending drone age.
Liam Young (Sci Arc)
Co-presented with FADO Performance Art Center
5:30 | Horizons
A closing discussion between colloquium presenters facilitated by Mason White (U of T)
Dronesphere Colloquium is organized by Simon Rabyniuk in conjunction with his Masters of Architecture thesis.
Anthony Acciavatti is a historian, cartographer and architect. He is the author of the award winning book, Ganges Water Machine: Designing New India’s Ancient River, the first environmental and urban history of the world’s most densely populated river basin. Currently at work on a book on connections between science and design in Asia and the Americas, Acciavatti teaches at Yale and Columbia universities. 
Marshall Brown is an Associate Professor of Architecture and Director of Princeton’s 
Gökçe Günel is Assistant Professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona. Her first book Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi (Duke University Press, 2019), focuses on the construction of renewable energy and clean technology infrastructures in the United Arab Emirates, more specifically concentrating on the Masdar City project. She finished her PhD in Anthropology at Cornell University in 2012. Following her doctoral work, she was a Cultures of Energy Mellon-Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow at Rice University and an ACLS New Faculty Fellow and Lecturer at Columbia University. Her articles have been published in Public Culture, Anthropological Quarterly, Engineering Studies, The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, Avery Review, Limn and PoLAR, among others. 
Dr. Orit Halpern is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University and a Strategic Hire in Interactive Design and Theory. Her work bridges the histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with design and art practice. She is also the director of the Speculative Life Research Cluster, a laboratory situated at the intersection of the environmental sciences, architecture and design, and computational media. You can find out more at:
John Harwood is an architectural historian working on the intersections between architecture, design, science, technology, and business. He is the author of The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945-1976 (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), which received the 2014 Alice Davis Hitchcock Award from the Society of Architectural Historians as "the most distinguished work of scholarship in the history of architecture published by a North American scholar." 
Shannon Mattern, Professor of Media Studies at The New School, writes and teaches courses about archives, libraries, and other media spaces; media infrastructures; spatial epistemologies; and mediated sensation and exhibition. She is the author of The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities; Deep Mapping the Media City; and Code and Clay, Data and Dirt, and she contributes a regular long-form column about urban data and mediated infrastructures to Places Journal. You can find her at 
Helen Ng is International Secretary for ISO TC268 working group on city indicators that published the first ever international standard on city indicators ISO 37120 - Indicators for Sustainable Cities. Helen's work with the Global Cities Institute at the University of Toronto's John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design is focused on working with cities to build standardized data for comparative analysis and learning, enabling cities to use data to identify urban issues, facilitate dialogues with citizens and work with partners to provide holistic solutions. 
Jesse Shapins has been a leading designer and entrepreneur at the intersection of media, technology and community-based placemaking for over a decade. Currently, Jesse is Director of Public Realm & 307 at Sidewalk Labs, where he leads vision, strategy, design and prototyping for the future of public space. In 2004, before smartphones, Jesse invented Yellow Arrow, one of the first platforms to globally connect physical locations, digital media, and communities. Before joining Sidewalk, Jesse was Director of Product at BuzzFeed — named by Fast Company as the most innovative company in 2016 — where he worked closely with journalists, entertainers and tech teams to push the boundaries of content and technology. 
Michael Sorkin is the principal and founder of Michael Sorkin Studio. His practice and work spans design, criticism and pedagogy. In 2005, Sorkin founded Terreform, and is currently its president. He is editor-in-chief of its imprint, UR (Urban Research), which was launched in 2015. He is on the board of several civic and professional organizations such as Urban Design Forum (Vice President) and the Architectural League of New York (Director). He is also a member of the International Committee of Architectural Critics. 
David J. Smiley is an architect and an architectural and urban historian, and his research and teaching focuses on the intersections of architectural practice, urban design and modernization. He has written about a variety of urban and suburban issues, examining large-scale urban interventions, pedestrianization, the re-use of shopping malls and the single-family house and multi-family housing. His book, Pedestrian Modern: Architecture and Shopping, 1925-1956 (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), is a study of the ways architects interpreted shopping centers as Modernist architectural and urban projects rather than, or alongside, their role as sites of consumption. His current research examines the spatial, technical and programmatic management of populations as demonstrated in the "New Town" of the mid-20th century and the "Smart City" of the early 21st century. He is the Assistant Director of the Urban Design Program at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. 
Richard Sommer is an architect and urbanist with over twenty years of experience as a practitioner, educator, and theorist, and is currently the Dean of the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, Canada. His design practice, research, and writing take the complex physical geography, culture, technology, politics, and historiography of the contemporary city as a starting point for creating a synthetic, cosmopolitan architecture. 
Sara Stevens is an architectural and urban historian. She is an Assistant Professor of architectural and urban design history and Chair of Urban Design in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Her research focuses on real estate developers of the twentieth century, exploring the cultural economy of architectural practice, finance, and expertise in Canada and the United States. Her book, Developing Expertise: Architecture and Real Estate in Metropolitan America (Yale University Press, 2016), studies real estate development in twentieth century American cities, and how developers, investors, and architects worked together to remake suburbs and downtowns. 
Sarah E. Williams is the Homer A. Burnell (1928) Career Development Chair of Technology and Urban Planning at MIT, where she directs the Civic Data Design Lab. Her research uses data analytics, sensors, and interactive design strategies to communicate and change urban policies. Williams has been recognized as a Top 25 Thinker at the Intersection of Planning and Technology by Planetizen and a Game Changer by Metropolis Magazine. Her design work has been widely exhibited, including at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, NY and the La Biennale di Venezia. Her current exhibition, “The Road Ahead: Reimagining Mobility,” is on view at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City through March 2019. Williams earned a BA from Clark University in History and Geography, studied Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, and a Masters in City Planning from MIT. 
Wolf-Meyer's work focuses on how medicine, science and media in the U.S. make sense of major modern-era shifts in the expert practices of science, medicine and popular representations of health. His first book, "The Slumbering Masses," offers insights into the complex lived realities of disorderly sleepers, the long history of sleep science and the global impacts of the exportation of American ideas of sleep. He is in the beginning stages of a project entitled "The Colony Within on the history and contemporary medicalization of digestion and excretion in the U.S.," which aims to weave together diverse historical threads, such as the 19th century colonial management of indigenous populations, Kellogg's studies of the colon, contemporary management of the personal microbiome and fecal microbial transplants.
Spellberg’s research is focused on dream-sharing, and the relationship between isolation and the imagination. Spellberg’s recent writing on this subject include “
