The Knight’s Move: Mireille Hildebrandt

The new animisms of smart cityscapes

Friday 24 November 2017, 20:00-22:00 hrs
Location: Stroom, Hogewal 1-9, The Hague
Language spoken: English
Moderator: Patrick van der Hijden (Angl)
RSVP: reserveren@stroom.nl
Tickets: € 5,- (to be paid at the door)

This autumn, The Knight's Move has a diptych of lectures lined up: the physical city with Bradley L. Garrett, and the digital city with Mireille Hildebrandt.

Tonight Mireille Hildebrandt will give a lecture entitled The new animisms of smart cityscapes. In her book on Smart Technologies and the End(s) of Law she sketches the contours of a new landscape, animated by all kinds of machine agency. She calls the fusion of online and offline worlds 'the Onlife World', highlighting that the boundaries between on- and offline are becoming increasingly artificial: we have to make them to retain some of our personal space. Being human in a hyperconnected world was the subtitle of the 'Onlife Manifesto', that was written by a group of European philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists, lawyers and experts in artificial intelligence. In her lecture, Hildebrandt will employ the work of Julie Mehretu to discuss the impact of a transformed cityscape that confronts citizens with the effects of hyperconnectivity, big data and predictive analytics at the level of municipal policies. The question will be what kind of humans we may become when ‘living with algorithms' is the new normal, and how we can learn to shape our algorithmic environment in the 'Onlife World' without succumbing to idealistic or cynical portrayals of the upcoming smart cityscape.

Mireille Hildebrandt is Research Professor of ‘Interfacing Law and Technology' at Vrije Universiteit Brussels. She is also a professor of Smart Environments, Data Protection and the Rule of Law at Radboud University in Nijmegen. As a lawyer and a philosopher she investigates the implications of artificial intelligence for democracy and the Rule of Law. She teaches law to students of computer science and publishes profusely on issues of data protection and other fundamental rights in the era of data-driven intelligence.

Part 1 was on Wednesday 11 October 2017
Bradley L. Garrett about the rise of pseudo-public spaces or privately owned public spaces (POPS) >> read more


The Knight's Move
The Knight's Move is a series of lectures by eminent international speakers who stand out by their unusual, enlightening and inspirational visions concerning the city, urbanity, the public domain, and community. Just as the knight moves in an atypical and unusual way across the chessboard, The Knight's Move likewise wants to cut across all disciplines and thus stimulate rethinking the city. The engaging talks are followed by a dialogue with the audience.

The Knight's Move is an initiative by Stroom Den Haag and currently organized in collaboration with LAPS Amsterdam and made possible in part by the Haagse Bluf Fonds (via Prins Bernard Cultuurfonds) and The City of The Hague.

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The Knight’s Move: Mireille Hildebrandt
photo: design: Lennarts & de Bruijn