ABSTRACT
In contemporary urban planning discourse, the concept of the smart city has been introduced as a strategic device. Its aim is to make use of self-reflexive information and communication technologies in large-scale infrastructural networks in order to analyze urban performance and make cities competitive by allegedly allowing self-described “smart technologies” to make urban infrastructures efficient. Understanding the form of complexity as Baroque has the advantage that it begins to grasp both the potential for a distributed form of relating to the systematic aspects of urban life. Using the artwork as a way of reading the smart city against the grain may help us move beyond the smart city discourse as well as to tease out the complementarity of the Baroque and the Romantic constructions of complexity. Stanza’s Body is a portrait, implicitly of the artist, but it is also a portrait of a city, and it is precisely in this embeddedness of one within the other, facilitated by technology.
