Technologie, lidstvo a (pop)kultura – nové téma na akademický rok 2024/2025 exkluzivně v Centru pro studium populární kultury.
To se po loňském úspěšném hostování v kavárně Na Boršově vrací právě tam a nezapomíná ani na audio – náš odcast Popkultovka odvysílá druhou sezónu.
Série přednášek vzniká za vzniká za přispění programu Strategie AV21 „Identity ve světě válek a krizí“. Následující předkášku přednese Bartosz Hamarowski působící v projektu SmartUp (https://smartup-chanse.eu/). Další informace zde.
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Anotace
What kind of future is being built into the walls of the smart home? In this lecture, I examine how the idea of the smartness has taken shape in our cultural imagination: not just as a technological development, but as a story we’ve been telling—often without questioning its plot.Although “smartness” may sound like a digital-age innovation, the fantasy of the automated home stretches back nearly a century. I begin with a brief look at the origins of this dream—world’s fair pavilions, postwar promotional films, modernist housing prototypes, and lifestyle advertisements—that presented the home as a site of sleek efficiency and technological promise. These early smart home imaginaries, though framed as liberating, carried a rhetoric of convenience and innovation that masked specific assumptions about gendered labor, normative family life, and middle-class aspiration. Posed as forward-looking, such futurescapes ultimately mirrored the cultural and political structures from which they emerged.
With this historical backdrop in place, I turn to the core of the lecture: an exploration of how the smart home is narrated across contemporary (pop) culture. Drawing on the extensive mapping of “culturescapes of smartness” developed within the SMARTUP project, I explore how smart homes function as recurring narrative devices across film, television, literature, and video games. Rather than treating these imaginaries as passive reflections of technological development, I approach them as speculative interventions—active cultural agents that help define what kinds of futures seem possible, probable, or desirable.
The lecture ends by engaging with the visual economies of smart home advertising. Through analysis of recent audiovisual promotional materials, I ask: what kinds of bodies are invited into these futures? Whose presence is centered, whose is peripheral, and what visions of race, gender, ability, or class are embedded in these glossy, high-tech narratives? Far from being incidental, these representations shape our sense of who the smart future is for—and whose ways of living are systematically excluded from its frame.
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The ideas shared in this lecture stem from ongoing research supported by the National Science Centre (Poland), within the CHANSE scheme [grant no. 2021/03/Y/HS6/00250].
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Bartosz Hamarowski is a PhD student at Nicolaus Kopernicus University in Torun, Poland.
