Dr. Lucía García de Jalón Oyarzun

In their 2016 book Seeing like a city, Nigel Thrift and Ash Amin consider the city as a living entity with the capacity to make sense, to think, to affect and to be affected. To this end, the city generates images, sees and acquires knowledge about its own functioning. We will work on this idea from the perspective of Visual Studies (VS) and its potential applications to urban analysis. VS does not focus on visual appearance, but on the idea of visuality as a form of historical structure that articulates social, political, ecological or cultural frameworks to understand what is or is not observable at any given moment (Bal, 2003).

Consequently, VS allow us to understand historically the forms of technosensitivity that redefine not only the individual urban experience but also the diverse intelligences that the city produces beyond the smart city paradigm (Mattern, 2021). From there, we will consider how and from what technosensitive regimes different actors have viewed the city over the past decades and how these visualities have shaped a cyborg urban experience and evolution (Swyngedouw, 1996, 2006). How does Google see the city through its search algorithms and advertising auctions? How do the police see it through their surveillance and control devices? How do the urban dashboards born of Norbert Wiener's cybernetics see it? How do the stock exchanges and their techno-financial assemblages see it from the institution of fiat money? How does a game of PokemonGo see the city through its streets? In all these cases, we note the emergence of networked images, "relational object(s) with performative agency, (...) constituted on the material and social bases of informatics, and where infrastructures, codes, algorithms and bodies are the conduits" (Cox et al., 2021). (Cox et al., 2021). Methodologically, this project works in two parallel directions, first, producing a series of spatial techno-ethnographies of how the urban networked image shapes urban imaginaries and practices, and secondly, considering how we have historically made sense of the city not as a geometric entity but as a space of lived experience by applying machine learning to images in the BHMPI collection where space is represented not geometrically but as event-spaces characterized by gestures and material practices