Beneath the Surface of a Smart City
As the first Urban Ecologies artist-in-residence, Amanda Bennetts has spent the past six months working with collaborators within the Creative Ecologies Research Cluster to create a new film, Latency and Lacerations examining the tensions between seamless digital systems and the unpredictable realities of the human body. While the program did not require a finished artwork, it became the conceptual and theoretical launch pad for Latency and Lacerations.
Using modern technology, including cable locators, hydrophones, drones, and the visual programming tool, Touch Designer, Amanda’s work traversed the terrestrial path of the subsea fibre optic cable stretching from Maroochydore’s City Centre to the ocean to explore the notion of what constitutes a Smart City. The resulting work-in-progress (a sophisticated 10-minute video work) culminated the residency as it screened to a receptive audience of artists and academics on a cold winter’s evening at UniSC.
Amanda is an artist living with a progressive neurological disease and a rare muscular condition and her installation and new media works channel her lived experience, critically examining themes of care, illness, and disability. This new media project extends these themes to ask the questions: Who is a smart city for? Do large data sets enhance or negate our subjective experience of a city? Will data sterilise the design of our urban environments and remove the organic and adaptive growth of our cities?
Following the screening, Amanda’s artist talk with Leah Barclay went deeper into her inspirations and processes, heavily influenced by her time at Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria) and compounded upon discovery of the subsea cable and this residency opportunity upon her return to Australia. She credited the Refinery residency for allowing her space to think, read, explore, and develop ideas through experimentation and collaboration.
True to her deeply interdisciplinary practice, Amanda’s creative inquiry into the high-speed cable connecting the Sunshine Coast to the rest of the world, sparked a collaboration with Joseph Burgess and Fin Wegener on sound design for the film as they sought to capture what the data rushing through the cable sounds like. Collaborating with Tim Birch on drone videography and Courtney Scheu as movement coach provides the film with a stimulating visual tension as the body navigates living between the physical and digital realms.
Although the residency assisted in the experimentation and conceptualisation of her new film, Amanda views this project as part of a broader inquiry. Her interests in cities and their data systems have only just begun with plans to extend inquiry into inclusive design, health tech, and digital afterlives. With a new project in Salzburg, Austria on the horizon, Amanda Bennetts is committed to more work on the subsea cable and more generally, in tracing the unseen systems shaping our cities.
“Data has a vast, global, and largely invisible infrastructure. I am particularly interested in systems that govern healthcare, wellness and urban life. For example, its function in healthcare has shifted from passive record to active agent, shaping outcomes through predictive modelling and algorithmic classification. Here, my focus is not on the scale of the data, but on its anomalies, how it renders some bodies hyper-visible while erasing others as statistical deviations. In clinical contexts, care is increasingly mediated by models trained on historical patterns, transforming uncertainty into risk scores and reducing complex, embodied experiences into computational artefacts. My work interrogates the consequences of this shift: what forms of care are excluded when eligibility is tethered to data legibility? And what remains of the human when optimisation becomes the organising principle?”
Latency and Lacerations is a work illuminating the disconnection between data and our bodies, between cities and ourselves and reminds us that perhaps, our smart cities may still have a lot to learn.
Images courtesy of Amanda Bennetts.
R|Artist Residency: Urban Ecologies is presented by SCCA through The Refinery in partnership with the Creative Ecologies Research Cluster at UniSC. Supported by Major Partners: Queensland Government through Arts Queensland and Sunshine Coast Council through the Regional Arts Development Fund.
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