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Film short abstract

Uncoding the City comprises three Multimodal Anthropological Videographies. Based on multi-sited ethnography in the field of "smart cities," part one analyzes how hi-tech companies re-symbolize cities as future-oriented and digitally codable to increase their financial, symbolic, and data capitals.

Film synopsis

"Uncoding the City" is a research project based on three Multimodal Anthropological Videographies (MAV) that offers two main contributions to anthropological research: (1) Theoretically, it analyzes urban digitalization through a neo-Bourdieusian approach; (2) Methodologically, it provides an innovative approach to analyzing and presenting ethnographic observations by means of multimodal videography.

This research project is based on a multi-sited ethnography in the field of "smart cities," where digital means are supposedly designed to increase the efficiency and predictability of urban infrastructures, services, and planning. Part one of "Uncoding the City" focuses on how technology companies re-symbolize the urban sphere as a digitally codable sphere. It analyzes the storytelling and visual techniques that technology companies use to deepen their presence in the urban field, in order to increase their financial capital, data capital, and symbolic capital.

This videography shows how technology companies re-symbolize urban space as future-oriented and digitally codable through the following chain of speculations: since people have certain needs and since technology is the solution to these needs, the intervention of technology companies in the public sphere becomes unquestionable and inevitable. By juxtaposing marketing materials for smart city products with ethnographic accounts of everyday life in the city, part one of Uncoding the City uncovers and troubles these speculations.

Methodologically, MAV offers an innovative platform for analyzing ethnographic data through experimental editing. MAVs juxtapose two or more materials simultaneously on a single screen in creative, original ways that enable dialectical and even trialectical forms of analysis and display.