The City as Interface

We warmly welcome you to a presentation and discussion of outcomes of a workshop led by Benjamin Gerdes, New York-based artist and 2018 Fulbright Specialist at TU Wien, and Christian Frieß, researcher at the Department of Visual Culture for the FWF-research project „Data Publics“, with master and PhD students of the Visual Culture module at the School of Architecture and Planning, TU Wien.

From small scale neighbourhood projects to collaborative city-making, from optimizing urban infrastructures to solving all kinds of social problems, platforms have stretched into almost all dimensions of the social and urban fabric in many places already. What is common to all those platforms is that huge amounts of data are aggregated and processed. Data, which is incessantly created and/or used, intentionally and/or unintentionally, by citizens interacting with both, the physical and the digital environment. However, platforms are not neutral mediators but infrastructures which embody ideologies and visions – be it technocratic utopias, social agendas or neoliberal politics – and they shape new public spheres: „Data Publics“.

Students investigated this „platform mentality“ through mapping projects during the winter semester and, while developing these visualizations, discussed how architecture facilitates new encounters between people, data, and space in these contemporary visions for the 21st century city. What orientation do related projects take up in relationship to the accumulation of data, capital, and/or state or economic power?