Sentient City Survival Kit - Mark Shepard

Mark Shepard’s Sentient City Survival Kit explores the social, cultural and political implications of ubiquitous computing in urban environments. It consists of a collection of artifacts, spaces and media designed to facilitate survival in the sentient city of the near future. As computing leaves the desktop and spills out onto the city’s sidewalks, streets and other public spaces, information processing becomes embedded in and distributed throughout the material fabric of everyday urban space. This project aims to raise awareness of the implications for privacy, autonomy, trust and serendipity in the highly observant, ever-more-efficient, over-coded city. The Serendipitor Walks are part of the Sentient City Survival Kit. Serendipitor is an alternative navigation app for the iPhone that helps the user find something through looking for something else. The app combines directions generated by a routing service with instructions for action and movement inspired by Fluxus, Vito Acconci, Yoko Ono and others. Enter an origin and a destination and the app will map a route between them.