Speakers’ abstract

Urban Hallucinations: Living in Binary Coded Artistic Spaces

Throughout the history, cities have always been regarded as sites or centers of accumulation of political, economic, cultural, social, and material resources. Today, in the age of ubiquitous computing and networking, new media technologies have radically challenged the role of cities as centers by transforming them into multiple nodes in the networks of dynamic data and communication flows, or into “overexposed cities” (P. Virilio). In other words, cities have entered a new mode of existence as immaterial, non-geographic entities or “meta-cities” (W.Gibson) in which buildings are hardware and software is the way of life.

The presentation will outline how the convergence of digital and material spaces has affected the notions of architecture and urbanism and collapsed the boundaries between urban and rural, public and private, center and margin, near and far, here and there, and so on.

The focus will be on new media art practices and projects which stand at the forefront and are the avant-garde of the potential architectures of the future, i.e. on the ways these practices affect urban landscapes. Furthermore, the presentation will examine the possible applications of the core principles of new media art such as fluidity, processuality, interactivity, emergence, and hybridity in modern architectural practices. These will be discussed through the notions of “liquid” or “trans-architecture” (M. Novak), “relational architecture” (R. Lozano-Hemmer), and “living architecture” (R. Armstrong), to mention but a few. Unlike traditional architectural practices, these practices open up a space for renegotiations and newly emergent couplings between materiality and immateriality, reality and virtuality, as well as between nature and artifice.