In a condition of growing superimposition between digital and physical, the threshold of the real is being pushed by a vast set of apps and platform that as a wired-wiring infrastructure manipulate cities and citizens in a constant exchange of data; in turn, this is progressively invading and exceeding the set of references we have to describe the urban condition. Users, now actors-producers of the human environment, will likely lose their physical agency and become producers of data, in what Federico Ruberto describes as the digital schizophrenia of the city of tomorrow. Through philosophical, artistic and cinematographic references the author paints varying scenarios, investigating what might be the limits for digital infrastructures and what tools we might employ in manipulating them.
For the 2019 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB), titled "Urban Interactions," (21 December 2019-8 March 2020) ArchDaily is working with the curators of the "Eyes of the City" section to stimulate a discussion on how new technologies might impact architecture and urban life. The contribution below is part of a series of scientific essays selected through the “Eyes of the City” call for papers, launched in preparation of the exhibitions: international scholars were asked to send their reflection in reaction to the statement by the curators Carlo Ratti Associati, Politecnico di Torino and SCUT, which you can read here.
[POST-DIGITAL CITIES] What is a “city”? Philosopher Achille Varzi gives a mereological account of cities as “not enduring objects; they are processes” [1].There is no dualism between the physical and ideal (analog and digital) essence of a city for Varzi, as there isn’t for us: the city is a process embedding different cities and times; an implicit and explicit trans-finite set. The “city”’s dense topology is endless “depth” augmented and accessible in different manners by way of apps.Fragments of its explicit “endlessness” are physically visible, but the endlessness we are interested in is the implicit one: it's the “City Everywhere” [2], the wired-wiring infrastructure differentially jamming multiple city-parts, the latent space that extracts and manipulates data [3]. The “city” as a cosmo-poli(tic)s is potentially endless, already so, though its potential is implicitly-explicitly fragmented in multifarious ways by private investments and black-boxed ownerships. The post-digital (machine-learnt) “city” is radically different from previous city-forms due to the transformation of the way we “see things”. Jonathan Crary in “Techniques Of The Observer” writes that “visual images no longer have any reference to the observer in a ‘real,’ optically perceived world” [4]. What Crary describes is the previous topology of the current hyper-digital paradigm. There is not anymore one object(ive)-city as the “city” is read and mapped by “eyes” wandering its latent-spaces, reading its digital fibrosity and synthesizing city’s forms. The reality of the city is in surplus, endlessly augmented. This has ontological-aesthetic-ethical implications: there is not one “nature”, or form, or identity, or “image of the city” since its nature is a matter of continuous virtual construction. The city’s essence is its layered spectrality, ubiquitously lived by consumers-producers in deep-immersions. Apps and platforms are 24/7 engaged in the making, connected through myriads of digital devices linking physical-to-digital actions, making the “city” and “us” at the same time. The proximal “city” will be true-depth: multitudes of agents with multi-sensorial augmenting devices will create series of hybrid immersions [5]. Experiential-reality will be hybrid: physical “events” causally, or non-causally, interacting with digital ones. The interpolations of agents and events will be carried on massively by digital machines. “Reality” will result from real-time digital/physical translations, feedback loops of queries by machine-learning protocols, silently re-adjusting themselves and re-parametrizing latent-spaces. Bodies-devices-sensors, the localized holy trinity, will be feeding-fed by algorithms, assessing-filtering-augmenting what constitutes the “world”. “SLAM” (simultaneous localization and mapping) will be feeding physical experiences with curated digital events. Experiences will be (as they are already) stored off-site as data-performed, kept in delocalized hubs with millions of others to be manipulated for future usage, analyzed and filtered by engineered algorithms “learning” by re-iteratively hovering data-banks, searching for correlations and twisting parameters: crafting new keys to reality, forging conditions for new mixed-realities to emerge. Reality will be multi-linear experiences: actions, augmenting-devices interfacing and machine-learning algorithms reading present physicalities and providing them optional-optimal digital couples, creating events in hybrid spaces, both digital and physical. It will only make sense to speak about the “city” and its physical/digital divide for a short time. The city as “events” will soon come into being qua causal-non-causal chains of physical-digital dyads. The multi-linearity and the non-fully causal unfolding of experiences will trigger the total radical transformation of (pre-modern, modern, and post-modern) city-narratives.
